First, there was the last-minute change of plans and two nights bunkered down at the old Q Station in Manly — not quite the start we had planned before flying out of Australia.
Two head colds, one middle ear infection, and the pair of us coughing all night like old seals had left us blurry-eyed and feeling fairly useless.
Not exactly the energetic beginning I had imagined for this long-planned journey to Poland. All the tightly packed Sydney family visits we had hoped to squeeze in before the international flight had to be delayed or cancelled. We bit the bullet, booked a last-minute room at the old Quarantine Station, and kept ourselves out of circulation while the lingering symptoms worked their way through, praying desperately for our batteries to recharge sufficiently to launch us into our adventure with enough throttle to get into a level orbit that could sustain us for the rest of the trip.
There was an unintended irony in choosing that place, of all places, while those stubborn symptoms refused to let go. Still, on a warm Sydney evening, we found ourselves sitting safely outdoors by Manly Harbour, dressed up just enough, fancy cocktails in hand, toasting our sixteenth year of marriage.
Blurry-eyed, but still full of enthusiasm.
Then came our first stop: Tokyo.
We expected to like it. We had chosen it partly as a practical diversion from our original flight path through Dubai, which no longer felt like the best option.
But Tokyo turned out to be much more than a convenient detour. We landed, dropped our bags at a rather odd but very functional hotel, and headed straight out into the streets that first evening.
It did not disappoint.
One night and one day were nowhere near enough. Tokyo barely gave us a wink and a nod before Warsaw and the wider trip were calling. So, sayonara Tokyo.
We will be back. We want more of you.
Now, as I write this, we are on day five of the journey and have just returned to our hotel room in Warsaw for a much-needed afternoon rest.
There are so many words and so many emotions crowding in, but also the persistent ringing of a stubborn middle ear infection doing its best to distract me and rob me of the inspiration I need to get the words out.
Still in Warsaw. Still close to the places that shaped my father, my grandmother, my grandfather, and the long, astonishing chain of events that led to me.
Tomorrow is our last full day here. Time is running out. It must be now.
So here I go.
Just write it as you feel it, someone said to me recently. Don’t overthink it, or it won’t be a true blog.
Who said that? Les? My newly discovered brother? ….Probably both.
They are right.
I did a writing course last year, and someone described early drafting as a kind of giant brain vomit. I loved that. It felt horrifyingly accurate. My brain does tend to vomit when I get excited and want to write or tell a story — a bit like The Exorcist, but with a big pot of brewing family history instead of pea soup. More like a hundred-year-old master stock, getting richer and tangier as the years go by.
The good thing about writing, rather than talking, is that you can cull and tidy afterwards. You can rescue the reader from the giant green thought bubbles of narrative and give them some chance of understanding what on earth you are trying to say. But too much culling and rescuing, I am learning, can dilute the master stock and lose some of the best flavours, so my mission is not to over-taste, but just to stir sufficiently and know when to walk away.
So, for my first big thought bubble, stirred softly.
On the day we arrived in Manly, and again earlier this week when we landed in Warsaw, one memory kept bouncing back at me. It took me back to 2019, and to the first time I met the youngest of my father’s three sons.
The irony was not lost on me.
After discovering me as a rather close match on Ancestry.com, and sorting through the various nuances of how we could possibly have ended up so closely related, his scientific brain had computed the clearly logical conclusion long before my own well..rather dreamy and occasionally tunnel-visioned Aquarian brain had quite caught up.
An actual meeting.
He was in Sydney for a medical conference at the old Q Station in Manly — the very place where Les and I had just hidden ourselves away before this trip.
Back in 2019, I had happily agreed to meet my newfound baby brother for dinner, the reality now well and truly dawning. At the time, we both believed we were witnessing something extraordinary: the first meeting between our father’s eldest child and his youngest child.
And it was extraordinary.
That first dinner formed a family tie that would go on to enrich both our lives. It helped bring together families that, strangely and beautifully, seemed to fit snugly almost from the start. As if we were all circles drifting separately in the sea for years, carried by different tides, waiting to touch, connect, and find the place we were meant to be.
It was not lost on either of us that night, either, that our shared Polish father had arrived in Australia in 1964, after travelling on from London, where his visa had not allowed him to stay. The first place he lived was Manly, where, coincidentally, we ended up too.
We talked and visualised what it must have been like for the young Polish man- our father – fleeing the oppressive rule of Stalin from his beloved, fallen Poland.
A man deeply conflicted by the pain of leaving his mother behind, yet knowing in his heart that this was what she wanted for him too. She, they- had survived too much, endured too much, and given too much for him not to keep moving forward.
His leaving must have been another heartbreak. But perhaps it was also an act of love between them. One more sacrifice made in the hope that he might finally live freely.
One year in London. Then onto Australia, and the next uncertain chapter of his life.
The years that would define him, and us, in ways he could never have imagined.
Because true stories are so often larger, stranger and more surprising than anything we could make up.
Before he found his forever life partner, before he changed careers, before physics and the southern sky claimed him, our father was still a traumatised child , had survised the brutality of a childhood after being deported to Siberia, in some of his single most defining years – inside a restless young man — the broken child was searching for a country to live in, a warm heart to hold him, and a calling that would eventually fit him like a glove.
Starving child. Student. Refugee. Awakened young man. Husband. Physicist.
Father.
Eventually, a PhD, and a year on Macquarie Island — that lonely, windswept outpost beyond the deep south of Australia — where he would search his soul, reflect, and allow both God and science to enter his heart.
There, the aurora found him.
As, many years later, it would find me.
Perhaps the lights he studied also helped illuminate the path ahead. Perhaps, in that place of isolation and wonder, he found some kind of peace and a way to carve out the life he was destined for.
For seven years after that first dinner in Manly, I believed I had gone from being a lonely only child to becoming the big sister of three brothers. Three sons of the remarkable man who had fathered us all. Three new family ties that seemed to arrive not as strangers, but as missing pieces.
And then, only a few short months before this journey to Warsaw, the story shifted again.
Because we now know that all those many years ago when our father sailed away from Poland, spent a year in London, then settled and moved away again from Sydney and then Melbourne, moving toward the next more permanent and settled outpost of his life, while still searching for his place in the world, there had been much more left in his path than we realised.
Not only a daughter in Sydney, but another child. A son born before me.
Another gift. A big brother. And, like me, also a child he would never meet or likely even know about for the rest of his natural life.
But life, I am learning, is rarely finished with us when we think the story has ended.
Through science, through love, through the sons he did raise with his beloved wife, and through the strange, persistent pull of connection, that missing son began to find his way to us too — drawn, perhaps, by a force not unlike the conjugate poles our father would later study and write about in his long and esteemed academic career as a professor and scientist.
And here in Warsaw, on every cobblestone corner of his beloved homeland — the country he once had to flee, and the city that shaped, broke and remade him — I have felt something of his guiding hand.
We both have.
As if Poland and Warsaw itself had become the conduit.
As if this magnificent city, once lost to him and now returned to us, had been waiting all along to tie the circle fully together. A bigger brighter circle , growing exactly as it is meant to.
Here in Warsaw, our hearts have been filled with knowledge. Genetic memories seem to have passed between us like bright sparks, like ions of energy — subtle, powerful and real. A mix of pain and light and warmth.
Each day we have visited places and wept and smiled and been mesmerised by the sadness, the bravery and the pride of these extraordinary people and what they have accomplished and overcome. And we feel proud of our heritage.
This is why we came and we rejoice to know this is just the beginning.
loumace2107's Blog 