The Freedoms I Never Knew

Joanna Matlak: From Oppression to Freedom

BY JESSIE MORGAN

The picture was buried in a box, found among her parents’ things. She never saw it before, but decided that one long look was enough. Digging into the past, she resolved, was more painful than she thought it would be.

It was a tram stop. Cars were going by, some of them older than others. Her mother, Zofia, posed in a flowing flowery dress, white blouse and sunglasses. Standing in front of her were two young children— Joanna Matlak, three or four years old, and her brother in a little hat.

Behind them stood a background she did not remember, nor did she want to believe. It brought a certain darkness to the photo, a shadow over her mother’s radiant smile. There at the tram stop was what remained of a multi-story building. The wall of the building was dotted with void windows, shattered from bullet holes.

It was the ruins of Warsaw.

Joanna Matlak leans back in her chair on the upper floor of Murray Library. Her short hair rests in silver waves on top of her head and her dark eyes are full of memory. Her hands are folded in her lap.“I do not want to call it Poland,” she said. “We were Polish…but this was a Soviet Colony.”

She lived in the People’s Republic.

This is the story of her family.

On September 1, 1939, Nazi forces under Adolf Hitler invaded the Polish border, the horrific action which immediately provoked a second World War. Hitler believed in the existence of a perfect German ‘Aryan’ race, believing that his people should dominate the entirety of Europe and beyond. He intertwined his radical nationalist policies with wild dreams of antisemitic expansion. One of the major expansionist policies of the Hitler regime was to create ‘Lebensraum,’ or living space, for the German people. He decided upon the most effective plan to achieve this policy — by force.

“Germany bulldozed Poland from the west and the Soviets bulldozed Poland from the east,” Matlak said.

Sixteen days after Nazi Germany invaded Poland, the Soviet Union — Germany’s then-ally — conquered the country from the other side. Poland, who fought hard for their freedom nearly 20 years earlier in the Polish-Bolshevik War, was once again divided and fully conquered.

Matlak remembers her father, Roman, telling her a story as she visited Poland one year, shortly before his death. He told of himself as a ten-year-old boy standing with his mother on a bright Sunday morning, holding her hand on their way to church. The day was September 17, and Polish officers were posted on every street corner. Just then, as a cry rang out that the Soviets were attacking the Polish border from the east, the young boy watched as one of the officers pulled a pistol out from his uniform, raised it to his head and took his own life.

This curse became his saving grace.

One month after the siege, Poland surrendered to Hitler’s Germany and Soviet Moscow.

It was around this time that Matlak’s grandfather, Stanislaw Matlak, fled Poland for Latvia, a country in the northeast that lay far from Nazi terror. In the city of Bialystok, Stanislaw worked for the city council, which made him an enemy to both Germany and the Soviet Union.

(1946 — Nice, France) Stanislaw Matlak, Joanna's grandfather.

Photograph courtesy of Joanna Matlak.

Around September 17, 1939, her grandfather was captured and sent to Gulag, a Soviet concentration camp. It was within the walls of Gulag when yet another curse fell upon Stanislaw, an illness. The difference? This curse became his saving grace.

“He was sick,” Matlak said. “He got a hernia and he went to the hospital, and it saved his life. There were about 22,000 prisoners who were executed by gunfire in April and May of 1941. Less than 200 were not shot, and he was one of them.”

After Stanislaw Matlak was released from the hospital, he joined other Poles gathering in the Soviet Union to form a Polish army against Germany. In the Battle of Monte Cassino and Tobruk, he fought in the Polish 2nd Corps in the British army. By this time, the Soviet Union had switched sides, no longer allying itself with Germany.

In Poland, roundups became the most effective way of seizing victims. Officers would swoop in unexpectedly, close off the streets and collect its citizens, often with no strategy. Sometimes, they had lists of names; other times, they would take whoever happened to be there. With no form of defense, the people of Poland became well aware that the Germans could seize them at any time, changing the course of their lives forever.

“There is a roundup!” the officers would shout. “Everyone over here…now!”

(1943) A prayer in the handwriting of Joanna's mother. "Modlitwa," at the top, means "Prayer 3." Part of the text reads "Mother of God interceed for us to Your Son..."

Photograph courtesy of Joanna Matlak.

The most frightening thing of all was that there were no boundaries to what could be done in the course of a roundup. Most Polish people would be put on trains and shipped to concentration camps like Auschwitz, Dachau and Chelmno, where they would be sentenced to arduous slave labor. But other cases, like the Wola Massacre on Górczewska Street in Warsaw, hundreds and thousands of civilians would be publicly executed on street corners.

“They would say, ‘Put your face to the wall!’ and line you up side by side,” Matlak said. The number of casualties was irrelevant to the Nazi officials. In most cases, the massacres took place just to reign terror, so Poles knew they could be killed at any time. Today, memorials dress the streets of Warsaw, commemorating those who were shot and killed on each corner.

Matlak’s father and uncle would scare their mother every time they left the house.

My grandmother...would kneel on the floor and pray for God to bring her sons back home.

“They left home in the morning, and they were not coming back,” Matlak said. “And their mother, my grandmother, told me that for as old as time, she would kneel on the floor and pray for God to bring her sons back home.” And He did.

“My father and his older brother — they were rounded up just on the steps of the church, after the Holy Mass,” Matlak said. “They both went to church — they were altar boys. They didn’t know if they were ever coming back.” Half of the people of this roundup were transported to Germany for slave labor — the other half was sent home.

It was ultimately humanity, a connection to the human race which grants one access to basic human rights, that Hitler strove to strip from his victims. Once he took away their humanity, there were no boundaries as to what he could do to eliminate them. Polish citizens would be subject to harsh science and military experiments to gain scientific knowledge, such as the injection of viruses and observing how long it takes for a human to drown. Even more grim was the fact that there was no guilt involved in the process.

To the Nazi party, Poland was simply in the way. Hitler’s order was to “kill every Polish man, woman and child.” The Poles stood firm as a nation, keeping true to their culture, their history and their Roman Catholic faith.

BEFORE THE WAR Joanna's mother, Zofia, just before the war, around 15-16 years old. Her beloved dog, "Black" (translated from Polish), was shot by German soldiers when they came to her family's yard. Her dog ran and made it to her feet before dying there.

Photograph courtesy of Joanna Matlak.

Even though Germany surrendered in 1945, Stanislaw Matlak was afraid to return his family to Poland because of the communist regime. Finally, in 1949, he returned to find his little boys were now grown men.

Matlak’s father, Roman, did not attend school. Roman and many other Poles wanted to attend school, but Polish citizens could not attend public schools, nor were they permitted to speak in the Polish language. His mother taught in an underground school, knowing that she and her students would be killed or sent to Auschwitz if the authorities were to find out.

“Until the end of his life he didn’t have higher education, and he was so brilliant,” Matlak said.

WARSAW, POLAND Portrait of Joanna and her family in their one-bedroom apartment, taken by her father, Roman Matlak. He was a photographer, among many things.

Photograph courtesy of Joanna Matlak

In 1948, when Poland was occupied by the communist regime, her father applied to Warsaw University of Technology and passed his entry-level exams with the highest marks. He was called to the office to be accepted, but was told that first he had to become a member of the communist youth organization, ZMP (later called ‘Progressive Youth’).

“As a Catholic Christian, he believed in God, not in Marxism. So he said ‘no.’ He was not accepted to the University. This also meant that he will not be accepted to any other university,” Matlak said.

In 1981, there were anti-socialist strikes. These strikes had Roman rethinking his decision.

“I was in my junior year. We were sitting at a table — his workplace and my university were shut down,” Matlak said. “He said, ‘Maybe I regret that I didn’t sign that thing. Maybe you would have been better off if I had an education.’

We said, ‘Father, no…we are so proud of you!’

Joanna Matlak came to the United States in the early spring of 1989. She left behind a rich and happy childhood, filled with memories of spending vacations with her brother and parents while camping at a lake, swimming, hiking, picking mushrooms and blueberries and making campfires.

“We went to church every Sunday. My father would go to work, my mother did odd jobs so she could stay home with us. There was always dinner ready for us all. They were wonderful parents. When my brother was born, there were still political death sentences. So for me, my parents are heroes,” Matlak said.

SOUVENIRS Jars from each of Joanna's visits to Poland, where her mother would give her homemade preserves. Surrounding the jars are her mother's recipes.

Photograph courtesy of Joanna Matlak.

When Matlak was leaving Poland, she did not plan to emigrate.

“The situation in Poland was rather heated,” she said. “I thought that there would be another violent state of war, like in 1981. When I married my husband, Poland was not yet free, and my husband knew that he would be leaving forever.”

She was lucky to get a passport and receive a half-year United States visa. She became a permanent resident in 1995, and a U.S. citizen in 2000.

When Matlak came to the United States, she didn’t recognize the atmosphere of a free country. She was born and raised in Warsaw, and was never given the chance to know what it was like to be guaranteed the liberty to believe what she believed.

She vividly remembers her first day on the job at Messiah College. “Coming to work here was one of the most moving moments in my life,” she said.

When she first began as the library circulation supervisor in Murray Library, she remembers signing an acceptance form, where the Apostles’ Creed caught her eye in fine black letters.

“Under the totalitarian Communist dictatorship, you had to hide your faith for fear of negative consequences,” she said. “And here I was, signing the Apostles’ Creed without fear of reprisal. This represented the most precious thing I had been denied under the Communist dictatorship.”

And just like that, Matlak stepped from a world of control, secrets, anguish and hate, and came to know a freedom she never knew existed.

Today, Matlak is proud to be an American. She treasures the freedoms she has come to know in her daily life — the freedom to pray, to work and to speak out without fear. It is a kind of appreciation you can only experience after leaving behind a broken history.

Perhaps in the future, she will dig up that photo and look once more at the devastation that marked her family’s past. But for now, Joanna Matlak is enjoying the freedoms she never knew.