The man who rarely smiled

For more than 70 years, I had no idea of what my father looked like. My mother cut him out of every photograph she had, after she bundled me up as a four year-old in Timmins, Ontario, and ran off with his friend.

Two years ago I found his unmarked grave, in a cemetery in Northern Ontario. And this year I found his family, some scattered around Poland but some still living in the village where he was born. And, through a cousin, I found photographs.

One photograph in particular haunts me. It’s at the top of the page, with a circle around my father, Stanislaw Zebrowski.

It's a Christmas party. You can see the Christmas tree. But look at the faces. My father is not smiling. Nor are the other 28 men in the picture. They look exhausted, defeated, resigned, apprehensive. What sort of Christmas celebration is this?

The answer is on the back on the photograph. An official stamp indicates, in German, that the photo was approved for distribution by the administration at Stalag 10 B.

Stanislaw and the other men were spending Christmas, probably 1940 or 1941, in a Nazi prisoner of war camp. Stanislaw and his fellow Polish soldiers had been captured in one of the first battles on Polish soil in 1939. 

They were taken to Stalag 10 B, at that time a compound of tents surrounded by barbed wire near Sandbostel in north-western Germany. Their first task was to build a more permanent camp.

But Stanislaw didn’t stay there long. He was moved. He spent the rest of the war years in two other PoW camps, Stalag 4 A and Stalag 4 B, before being liberated and falling in love with my mother in a displaced persons camp.

After the war ended, my grandfather told Stanislaw 'Don't come home, Poland is occupied by Communists. It's not safe for you.’ So my father, my mother and I immigrated to Canada. Like my mother, Stanislaw never saw his parents again.

I look at another photo my cousin sent. It’s my father as a young soldier. He’s handsome, serious, young, probably 21. Again, he and his fellow soldiers are unsmiling, but this time I think it's a manifestation of what they thought was expected of them as potential officers in an elite light cavalry brigade: self-confident, dependable, ready for anything.

A third picture shows Stanislaw with a group of friends, some time just before 1939. It may be a final get-together before they went off to fight. Stanislaw is at the top right, in a pose that I now see was a trademark of his... three-quarter face, unsmiling, and with hooded eyes that suggest a man who observes closely but keeps his thoughts to himself.

I study the photos of my father, this man who has been a mystery and a source of pain to me for so long. My mother rarely spoke well of him after she left him for his Polish friend Frank. But she did say he was handsome. 'He looked like Richard Burton,' I remember her telling me.

Like the actor, Stanislaw played many roles: a survivor, a lover, a jilted lover, a villain. Most of all, he's a mystery to me. My mother had nothing but bad things to say about him; his family say nothing but good. 

And me, the little girl caught up in my parents' drama? I always felt abandoned. And the question I will never get an answer to is the one I have asked so many times over the years: 'Why did he not come looking for me after my mother left him?'

I am reconciled to never getting an answer. But through meeting his family, and seeing the pictures, I feel I know him better. Like my mother, he rarely smiled in his photos. Why should he and Mama? Both of them were scarred by a war that stole their youth, tested their endurance, and consigned them to a life exiled from home and family.