What Passed Me By

Lately I've been digging old files out of my closet. It's what many of us do at my age when in a cleaning and organizing frenzy. The important stuff of a lifetime needs separating from the trash. I'm finding letters and photos and Christmas cards from way, way back. Invitations to weddings and graduations. Yellowed news clippings. A sketch of me done by an artist friend back in 1961 when I still wore a veil. Sometimes I come across a long affectionate letter from a person I cannot recall at all. How do I not know this person? We had to have been close when the letter was written. I Google the name. Sometimes I find the person. Yesterday I contacted one of them by email. He wrote back; can you believe it?? Space and time are closing in...or opening up! I'm haunted by all that passed me by.

The summer of 1945 when I was four years old I saw a living skeleton. If I'd had the daring I would have run to hide behind a tree at Klimek's Lodge, but he terrified me into paralysis. His clothes hung on him like laundry on a stick. "It's cousin Anthony," I was told, but I was pretty sure that a cousin of my grandpa could not really be a cousin of mine. They'd both been named Anthony, though my grandfather used the German/Polish form of Anton. Their parents were brother and sister--Anthony's mother and Anton's father. They'd grown up together in Poland until their families emigrated to the United States in the mid-eighteen hundreds. Those details passed me by back in 1945 when I was probably led forward by my mother to be introduced and shake this cousin's bony hand.

Rev. Anthony Kolodziej, SVD

His picture, which didn't look a bit like him, occupied a place of honor in Grandma Klimek's living room in Baudette. In fact, there were two framed pictures, this one and one I no longer have in which he is wearing academic robes. This man was quite an intellectual who helped found seminaries in both Poland and in the Philippines where he went as a missionary in 1933. All this passed me by.

What didn't pass me by even then was that he'd been captured along with the young men who were his seminary students and spent from December, 1940, until February 23, 1945, as a prisoner of the Japanese Army. During the last two years of his imprisonment he was in what he called "the Starvation Camp Los Banos. At the end I had only 75 pounds left." I found this information in a letter written to my Aunt Eva Klimek Mapes in 1972.

So what would you do? Right. I Googled Los Banos. Liberation of Los Banos The description of the terrors there confirm an image that had haunted me since I was four. In the evenings, at the Lodge, cousin Anthony told stories of his time at the prison. These details took root in the memory of who I was as such a small child:

--Cousin Anthony was given a small bowl of rice, often wormy, each day and ordered to eat it in front of the other men who were given nothing. If he ate it, he would live. If he gave it to anyone else, he would be shot. Day after day Fr. Anthony give his bowl of rice away. Day after day he would be taken to the yard of execution, tied to a pole, and blindfolded. The guards pointed their rifles at him. He prepared himself for death. And day after day they released him. But he never knew if he would survive that ordeal. 

Even a child can grasp terror such as that. I think cousin Anthony's stories introduced me to a kind of waking nightmare that surpassed what could be called the normal terrors of a child's daily life, explicable terrors. Here is a terror inexplicable. I read Wikipedia on "The Liberation of Los Banos" and realize that he was there on February 23, 1945 when the paratroopers landed. I see the prisoners who'd become too fractured, too wounded, too reduced (I had only 75 pounds left) to rise to their feet and leave. And I know that such terror continues all around the world, still today. I want to fall to my knees and scream a broken high C! Why?

But I know why, don't I? Do I? 

Cousin Anthony went back to the Philippines; that's what the card he sent my grandfather tells us. He went back when summer was over and the beautiful Lake of the Woods and Klimek's Lodge had provided a peaceful space for healing. Grandma Klimek must have cooked her amazing comfort foods, and Grandpa took his cousin fishing in his launch. What must it have cost Anthony Kolodziej to return to the place where he must have, many times, nearly lost his faith? What would he remember? Did he wonder that? What would haunt him, and would it matter? Or was he by then so refined by the fire of suffering that his whole soul was pure gold? Had he reached the state in which life and death are an unending circle and it mattered little or not at all where he might be in that unending and universal spiral?

All that passed me by. The child was haunted by the worms crawling through the rice. She shuddered. She was haunted by the "Ready. Aim. Fire." Haunted by the breath that didn't cease. Haunted by eyes opening once again to the sunlight. Haunted by his bony hands.