Host: Michelle Jalowski

Michelle Jalowski: [00:00:03] Welcome to The Moth podcast. I'm Michelle Jalowski. The past can be a difficult place to visit. There's joy there, yes, but there can also be a lot of pain. In this episode, we're going to share a story that deals with those painful parts of family history. 

Jean-Michele Gregory told this at a New York City Mainstage in 2005. And stick around after the story for an update from her. As a warning, this story contains graphic descriptions of violence. Here's Jean-Michele, live at The Moth. 

[cheers and applause]

Jean-Michele: [00:00:34] Crossing the border from Poland into Ukraine was a revelation. Because once we crossed that line, boom, the road beneath us turned into dirt, the streetlights just disappeared. There we were, just bumping across this dirt road in the pitch-black night. After 14 hours of this, I was dropped off at this bus station in western rural Ukraine. There's concrete all over the ground, and I'm standing there in this premodern godforsaken place, wondering why in the hell I chose to come to this place that my grandmother had always warned me, “Never ever go back.” 

I grew up in this big multigenerational home. It was the four of us kids and two parents and three grandparents. But my grandmother and I, or Babcia as I called her, we shared a very special bond. Like, when she was writing letters, it was me who would correct her English for her. It was me that she would tell stories to about the old world, about this amazing, fantastic land, where girls skip through meadows and there was wild sorrel growing in the fields. Just these fantastic stories I couldn't get enough of. 

I was also the only one that she taught to speak Polish. I loved that language. I loved the feel of those words in my mouth and I loved the attention that I would get from Babcia when I spoke it to her. But I especially loved, I think, the way that when I spoke that language, I felt somehow, I was connecting to that mysterious old world that she told me about, that world where she said, “God was everywhere but the devil was too.” 

So, ever since I was a little girl, she told me that I was going to write a book. This book was going to be the book about the experiences my family had been through in the war. I knew this. I knew this, like, I don't even remember a time when I didn't know that someday I was going to have to write Babcia's book. And then, I was 20 years old and I am in Poland. It's my junior year of college. I'm an exchange student. I'm having a very good time, drinking lots of vodka, dancing with every [unintelligible [00:02:54] I can find. Just having a blast, really. I get this letter from my grandmother, and it's written in Polish. 

See, the thing is that everybody in my family knew the broad strokes of what had happened, that my grandparents were from Eastern Poland and then World War II had started, and then they were taken by the Nazis to slave labor camps in Germany and, yada, yada, and then they came to the States. But in this letter, she really started to open up to me. She started to tell me all these details, these heartbreaking details, that she had never told to anyone before. Telling me about the death of her child, and the terrible guilt that she had felt and all these things that she had not told her friends, she hadn't even told her children, but she was telling it to me. 

I felt simultaneously honored and also odd, because I wasn't sure that I was really me, the vodka swilling, dancing girl, [chuckles] that I was really worthy of her confidants. But at the same time, I knew that it didn't actually matter whether I was worthy or not, because I had been chosen and that was my job. So, it was time to put the vodka away and get to work. 

So, after I graduated from college, that's exactly what I did, I was trying to write this book. I had six months’ worth of interview tapes with her, and I had a whole stack of books all about the World War II and reams of research and notes and all this. I'm trying to synthesize this together, tell her story. It's not going well. It's going just terribly. The thing is that I cannot find her voice, because I have never experienced anything like that. I've never suffered like that. 

So, after two years of this, and you don't want to know how many drafts, I decide that I'm going to go to Ukraine and I'm going to try to find the village where she came from. I'm going to trace her path through the whole war. Maybe, hopefully, somewhere along the way, I'm going to find the mouth to tell this story with. So, I've arranged to meet up with this Ukrainian driver once I got to Ukraine, and he is going to take me to this village. And I'd sent him the map in advance of exactly where we're going to go. 

But once we get in the car, Sergei wants to know where this map came from, because this is his job. He's got all the maps there are out there, and he's never seen a map like this one. I'm afraid to tell him the answer, which is that I actually just made this map up. I'd taken a real map, the real maps, and then I'd taken all the stories that my grandmother had told me, and I just stitched them together and decided that this was where things were and this is what we were going to find. And suddenly, it just hits me how just ridiculous and preposterous that is. So, I can't tell him that. So, I tell him that my grandmother gave me the map. 

But as we're getting closer to the village, Sergei is stopping everybody. We run into on the roads and asking them if they've ever heard of Omelanka, if they know how to get there, do they have any family from Omelanka And nobody, nobody has heard of this village, which doesn't surprise me at all. But Sergei is getting very nervous, because this map was so sketchy to begin with. I explained to him, “Sergei, no one here is going to have heard of Omelanka, because it was a Polish settlement, because this region of Ukraine that we're in before the war was part of Poland. And then, after the war, the borders shifted. So, it's okay. They haven't heard. I just want to get as close as I can to where it was and just see what's there.”

We get to Stepan, and that means that we're 16km away from where I'm hoping Omelanka is. And in Stepan, I want to try to find the cemetery, because a lot of my family was buried there. So, we asked this woman that we run into, if she can point us in the direction of the Polish cemetery. And this woman says, “The Polish cemetery? This is Ukraine, not Poland.” I don't think she said it so much to be rude, but I think she just thought we were really stupidly lost. [chuckles] The thing is, I knew 60 years had passed and I was prepared that the people, of course, would be gone and I was prepared that the buildings would be gone and even maybe that the cemeteries would be gone although I had hoped that those would be there. But I was not prepared. I was actually shocked to discover that the history had been erased, too. 

Next, we get to Huta. And now, we are just 4 kilometers away. And I'm very excited, but I'm also very nervous, because this is actually where my map, the real map, runs out. So, if the people here can't tell us how to get to Omelanka, we're not going to be able to find it. So, we see this man on the side of the road and he's on crutches. We stop and we ask him, have you ever heard of this place, Omelanka? And the guy says, “Omelanka? Yeah, sure.” This is fantastic, right? He takes one of his crutches and he's able to actually etch in the mud a path, the whole map for how to get there. 

And so, Sergei asks him, “How big is this village?” And he says, “Village? [chuckles] No, no, no, it's not a village. It's a field.” And Sergei said, “Well, why does it have a name if it's just a field?” And the guy says, “I don't know, we've just always called it that.” So, we follow his directions and we're driving along, following his route. And then, the road beneath us just literally ends. I mean, like the road just ends and there's just a field in front of us and this is clearly as far as we can go. But Sergei looks at me and he says, “Hold on, let's give it a try.” And then, we are off roading through this crazy field. 

We're in this tiny little Eastern European built car, it's not meant to handle this. The car is tipping at these crazy 45-degree angles and we're wheeling through these puddles. Sergei, who has been so calm and restrained this whole time, I have never seen him alive like this. He roars, “The Omelanka highway. We found it.” We burst through these trees, and we land on the other side, and there's this woman standing there, and she's wearing a leather vest and she's holding an axe. She is staring at us and we're looking at her and we just wave. 

This woman has maybe three teeth left, but she shows them all to us in this wide, generous smile. So, we get out of the car, and Sergei gives her a cigarette and they chit chat for a while I just try to look friendly. And then, Sergei asks her about Omelanka. When he does that, her whole face shifts. I mean, it's like this cloud just comes over her face. But she nods and she says, “Yes, she knows about Omelanka. Her mother told her about it.” She said, “It's only a field now, but once there was a village. Well, a Polish Settlement, really. But then, very bad things happened and there's no one left.” But she tells us exactly where to go to find where it was. She tells us that when we get there, we should look into the trees and see what's there. 

So, we follow her instructions, and we go down this muddy path between these trees. And eventually, it opens up into this field and we're there. We're in Omelanka. It is a beautiful autumn day. Bright blue sky and vibrant green field. I'm just like walking up and down, looking into these trees and trying to figure out what the heck she meant, “Look into the trees, you'll see something.” And then, I think, I think I know what she's talking about. Because there is an order to these trees. There's a sharpness and a cleanness to their edges. Very unnatural. There's a uniformity of height. That makes sense to me, because 60 years ago, this village was burned to the ground. The whole thing, not just the houses and the barns, but the orchards, everything burned completely to the ground. 

It was set on fire by the Banderovite, this fringe group of Ukrainian nationalists, who believed that if they helped Hitler of ridding the whole area of everyone who wasn't Ukrainian, then they would be given their long-sought country and they'd get a Ukraine for Ukrainians. So, I'm looking into these trees, and then I'm looking at this field and I'm trying to imagine this village that has been described to me so many times. I'm also trying to imagine what it must have been like that night for my grandmother, her last night there, when she was running out of her house and the house was set on fire and she's barefoot and everyone else. All the houses were set on fire, and she's running and trying to get away from the Banderovite, and she's running off in the distance in Huta, which I can see now, Huta, just 4 kilometers away, that's where she would have seen the Polish church burning to the ground. 

This stuff had been going on through the region for months. My grandfather's family a little bit further north, they were all rounded up and locked into the barn with their livestock and the whole thing was set on fire. Terrible kinds of things. The Ukrainians who tried to help were even sympathetic, they were killed. And then, the Ukrainians and Poles who intermarried, and there were a lot of them who intermarried, they had to watch their children ripped in half in front of their eyes. Just these terrible medieval terror tactics stories. 

And so, tonight, it just happened to be Omelanka's turn. And so, everyone's running out of their houses and trying to get away. They're running into the forest to hide. Well, that's where the SS is waiting for them and they're going to load them up onto trains. And then, that's where my grandparents, they were taken onto trains and they were taken to Dachau and then from Dachau to a slave labor camp in Germany. So, Sergei says to me, “I'm sorry. I am sorry that you came all this way and there's nothing here.” That's what my grandmother had said to me. She said, “Why go back? There's nothing there.” 

But there is something here, actually. There's this field, this very lush, dark, rich soil, and there are these trees that are grown out of the embers and the ash of those burned down orchards of Omolenka. They're 60 years tall. And I'm here, the granddaughter of that woman who ran through that house. Standing there in that terrible, but God help me, beautiful field that day, I felt not sadness and not happiness, but just this feeling that I can only describe now as a kind of ecstatic serenity. Nobody can speak someone else's story. Even if you follow her path, you haven't really walked in her footsteps. If I was going to tell this story, the only mouth that I needed to find was my own. Thank you. 

[cheers and applause]

Michelle Jalowski: [00:14:42] That was Jean-Michele Gregory. Jean-Michele is a writer, story director and speech language pathologist who resides in Tacoma, Washington with her wife, Hayley. She finally found The Moth to tell her story with and is putting it in her memoir, Tomorrow Doesn't Belong to Us. If you want to see photos of Jean-Michele with her grandmother, visit themoth.org/extras. 

Considering that, we just passed the one-year anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. We asked Jean Michel to share a short reflection on how she feels about the story now. Here's what she had to say. “In the almost 20 years since I first told the story, awareness of the massacres in the Volyn region has grown. I've been gratified to see renewed solidarity between Poles and Ukrainians in the face of Russia's latest invasion. And I grieve for and stand with the people of Ukraine in their fight for independence.”

That's all for this episode. From all of us here at The Moth, we hope you have a story worthy week. 

Marc Sollinger: [00:15:37] Michelle Jalowski is a producer and director at The Moth, where she helps people craft and shape their stories for stages all over the world. 

This episode of The Moth podcast was produced by Sarah Austin Jenness, Sarah Jane Johnson and me, Marc Sollinger. The rest of The Moth’s leadership team include Sarah Haberman, Catherine Burns, Jenifer Hixson, Meg Bowles, Jennifer Birmingham, Kate Tellers, Marina Klutse, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Lee Ann Gullie, Inga Glodowski and Aldi Kaza. All Moth stories are true, as remembered by their storytellers.

For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org. The Moth podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.