We Don't Become Refugees by Choice: Mia Truskier, Survival, and Activism from Occupied Poland to California, 1920–2014

Abstract

This book is the biography of a remarkable woman, Maria Mia Truskier, who spent her childhood in Warsaw in a secular Jewish family rooted in Polish culture and studied architecture in Switzerland. At the age of nineteen, she was confronted with the outbreak of World War II in Poland. The Nazi occupation forced her to leave her homeland in early 1940. Denied asylum in Switzerland and elsewhere, she lived semi-clandestinely in Italy, from where she emigrated to the United States with her husband, son, and mother-in-law in 1949. After a few years in Nebraska, the family resettled in California, and Mia became an activist for other refugees, becoming known in the Bay Area as the “oldest refugee” of the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant. Until her death at age ninety-three, she worked to help those fleeing war, violence, and hardship, primarily from Central America and Haiti.Teresa Meade based this biographical book on over twenty hours of interviews recorded between 2010 and 2013, as well as two hours of video in which Mia discusses her art, and displays newspaper clippings, old photographs, and various memorabilia. The author also interviewed members of Mia's family, her friends, and her husband's relatives. The story begins with the sentence: “Mia (Tłusty) Truskier is the main narrator of this book” (p. xi). After the extended introduction in chapter 1, Meade lets Mia Truskier tell her story, and the author adds her comments in italics. This creates a kind of conversation, even though their styles are very different. Mia's story is a more or less adequate transcription of what she said in interviews (it is not indicated which parts of her oral statements were “smoothed” for better understanding of the text). The author's comments are written in a scholarly style, explaining the historical context, sometimes disagreeing with Mia or explaining how she might have constructed that part of the story. It works very well. The reader keeps the main attention on Mia's part, and Meade's comments help the reader to understand the whole story.For readers interested not only in biography but also in memory in general, and in the processes by which a life story can be constructed, this book provides a unique insight into the method of oral history and the challenges it presents. It shows what is present in memory, but also experiences that have been repressed, as well as gaps in memory and missing links for which there are no answers and only conjecture. The author frames her narrative with David Herman's concept of “Storyworld” and Marianne Hirsch's interpretive project called “Postmemory.” Both are useful for interpreting this biography.Meade writes candidly about the challenges she faced while working on this book. One of them was the observation that the way she presented Mia's Polish and Jewish identity was unbelievable for many of the people to whom she told her story. Many, convinced of pervasive Polish anti-Semitism, doubted that a Jew could have a happy and comfortable childhood and youth in interwar Poland. In an effort to revise this one-sided and hurtful view of Poland, the author traveled to Warsaw, visited the Warsaw Uprising Museum and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. She also studied the literature on the subject. She was able to see for herself that Warsaw in the interwar period was a cosmopolitan city with a large Polish-speaking, educated Jewish population integrated into the high culture of urban society. She also learned that “Poland today has a vibrant and growing number of historians, public intellectuals, and activists who oppose anti-Semitism and are engaged in looking honestly into the past. . . . The progress of this newer generation notwithstanding, Poland's current reactionary government is intent on rewriting the wartime narrative, claiming that only the invading Nazis were anti-Semitic, not the Christian Poles” (p. 20).In her biography of Mia Tuskier, Meade convincingly demonstrates that Jewish ancestry does not negate Polish patriotism. Mia's father and brother dutifully joined the Polish army to repel the German invaders in September 1939. They were shipped to a Soviet camp in Siberia, where the father died of typhus in 1942. Brother Tadeusz joined the Polish Corps under General Anders and settled in England after the war. Her mother, along with thousands of other “hidden Jews,” remained on the Aryan side in Warsaw, involved in the Polish underground resistance, distributing false identity papers to Jews and others seeking to escape the ghetto and the city. When the Soviet army captured Warsaw, she left Poland and joined the throngs of refugees, heading to her daughter in Rome.The contradictory identities Mia constructed for herself and those around her were, as she confesses on page 19, an unexpected discovery for Meade. Understanding this Polish American from a comfortable Jewish family turned out to be “much more complicated, nuanced, and even unsettling, than I had originally thought.” The fact that the author was able to capture this unique combination in the construction of Mia's identity and present it in a convincing way is a particular strength of this book. In this way, Mia's biography breaks the established pattern in American society of viewing Poles and Jews primarily through the rigid monoethnic framework of their national or religious affiliation.After describing Mia's world in Warsaw and her first year at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in chapter 2, the author turns her attention in chapter 3 to the flight from Poland and the difficulties in obtaining a visa in the years 1939–40. Chapter 4 describes the living conditions of Mia and her family in Italy during World War II. The next chapter deals with the same time but different places. Meade follows the paths of Mia's parents, brother, and friends in Warsaw and the Soviet Union. Letters from labor camps in Siberia are a very unique source used in this chapter, as well as how their contents were relayed to Mia in Italy. As mentioned above, Mia's mother was able to remain on the Aryan side in Warsaw. Although her fate was very difficult, the living conditions of the Jews who were forced to move to the Ghetto were much more dramatic. To provide a more complete picture of the fate of Jews in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, Meade interviewed extended members of Mia's family who remained in the Warsaw Ghetto and survived the Holocaust. She dedicated chapter 6 to them. As a result of these supplementary interviews, the reader is confronted with many additional biographies, and it can lead to some confusion regarding family relations. The family tree of Truskier at the beginning of the book helps readers keep track of these relations. Chapters 7 and 8 are dedicated to the postwar years in Italy and the circumstances of Mia, her husband, her son, and her mother-in-law's move to the United States in 1949. The last chapter describes Mia's life between 1968 and 2014, her social involvement in the Bay Area, and her family life.This book covers a very wide range of topics. The author paid more attention to the aspects with which she is familiar. Even though Meade made great efforts to study Polish history, some factual errors do appear. Ukrainians, not Jews, were the largest ethnic minority in interwar Poland (p. 161). Under the subtitle “Poland Under Occupation,” the author states: “Over the next five years, Jews and non-Jews defied the Nazis in active struggle.” (p. 130). Even though the division of Polish society into Jews and non-Jews at that time is a common practice in today's Jewish studies, one would expect the ethnic Poles, who were the vast majority, to be acknowledged. Considering the number of soldiers and resistance fighters who actively fought against the Nazi occupiers, the order in the quoted sentence should be reversed. The map on page 75 does not explain what the General Government was, suggesting that this part of Poland remained unoccupied. Some proper names are given incorrectly—for example, “Endek Party” is not the correct name of the party (p. 57); the city of Bialystok is not on the Bug River (p. 158); and the Sikorski-Mayski Pact allowed for the creation of Polish armed forces in the Soviet Union, but it did not “ensure the safe passage of Poles to what was then Persia” (p. 150).Meade has published an important book that tells the life story of a person whose multiple identities do not fit into a single national and religious framework, a biography of an unstoppable woman who impresses with her determination, talent, and willingness to help others. Finally, We Don't Become Refugees by Choice reminds us of the tragedy of human displacement and draws a connection between those who were forced to migrate because of World War II and today's refugees seeking asylum in Europe or the United States.