Paul WojdakBefore retiring in 2011, I worked as a professional geologist for forty years. A boyhood passion for stamp collecting led to an adult interest in history, foreign cultures and travelling the world. I live with my wife, Teresa, on Tyhee Lake in British Columbia, in a home we built together.
The inception of the Wojdak family, including my birth, was a consequence of a world war that killed millions and scattered survivors across the globe. The new Wojdak family, three of us, arrived in Canada in 1952. As a young boy I wanted to know our origins. My mother spoke readily about her life. She was Dutch, from Amsterdam, and had a brother and four sisters. She told stories of their happy life before the War filled with laughter, teasing and singing. She showed me photos of my grandparents and great-grandparents, my aunts and uncles, and enough cousins to fill a bus. My father was much different. Reluctant to speak, I had to pry out fragments of his unhappy life. He was Polish and an orphan from six or seven years of age. His mother and father died in train "accidents." He was raised on a farm but slept in the barn, deprived and unloved. He was in Japan, and in Milwaukee in America but it was unclear if that was before or after his parents died. I was puzzled, and there were no photos of anyone. Because I could not understand, I began to doubt he had been in America and Japan. Until one day when a chance encounter with a Japanese man prompted my father to spontaneously sing the Japanese anthem. I was astonished. I did not know how or why, but I knew my father truly had been in Japan. The mystery of my father's life remained unexplained for forty years. Long after his death, I found the answer assisted by kind people and the power of the internet. The story involves an earlier war that, likewise, killed millions and scattered survivors across the globe. |
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