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- [Michelle] Welcome to The Moth Podcast.
I'm Michelle Jalowski.
The past can be a difficult place to visit.
There's joy there, yes, but there can also be a lot of pain.
In this episode, we're going to share a story that deals
with those painful parts of family history.
Jean Michelle Gregory told this
at a New York City main stage in 2005, and stick
around after the story for an update from her.
As a warning, this story contains
graphic descriptions of violence.
Here's Jean Michelle live at the main.
(audience applauds)
- [Jean Michelle] Crossing the border from Poland
into Ukraine was a revelation,
because once we crossed that line, boom,
the road beneath us turned into dirt.
The streetlights just disappeared.
And there we were, just bumping
across this dirt road in the pitch black night.
And after 14 hours of this, I was dropped off
at this bus station in western rural Ukraine.
And there's, like, concrete all over the ground.
And I'm standing there,
in this pre-modern, godforsaken place, wondering
why in the hell I chose to come to this place,
that my grandmother had always warned me,
never, ever go back.
I grew up in this big, multi-generational home,
and it was the four of us kids,
and two parents, and three grandparents.
But my grandmother and I, or Bakcha, as I called her,
we shared a very special bond.
Like, when she was writing letters,
it was me who would correct her English for her.
And it was me that she would tell stories to
about the old world, about this amazing, fantastic land,
you know, where girls skipped through meadows,
and there was wild sorrel growing in the fields.
You know, I mean, just these fantastic stories
I couldn't get enough of.
And I was also the only one that she taught to speak Polish.
And I loved that language.
I loved the feel of those words in my mouth.
And I loved the attention that I would get
from Bakcha, when I spoke it to her.
But I especially loved, I think,
the way that when I spoke that language,
I felt somehow like I was connecting
to that mysterious old world that she told me about,
that world where she said God was everywhere,
but the devil was, too.
So ever since I was a little girl,
she told me that I was going to write a book.
This book was going to be the book
about the experiences my family had been through in the war.
And I knew this, like I knew this, like, I don't even
remember a time when I didn't know that someday
I was going to have to write Bakcha's book.
And then, I was 20 years old, and I am in Poland.
I'm, it's my junior year of college,
and I'm an exchange student.
I'm having a very good time, drinking lots of vodka,
you know, dancing with every (speaks Polish) I can find.
And you know, just having a blast, really.
And I get this letter from my grandmother
and it's written in Polish.
And see, the thing is, that everybody in my family
sort of knew, you know, the broad strokes
of what had happened, that my, say, my grandparents were
from Eastern Poland, and then World War II had started,
and then they were taken to, by the Nazis,
to slave labor camps in Germany and, you know, yada yada.
Then they came to the States.
But in this letter, she really started to open up to me,
she started to tell me all these details,
these heartbreaking details,
that she had never told to anyone before.
You know, telling me about the death of her child,
and the terrible guilt that she had felt and, you know,
all these things that she had not told her friends,
she hadn't even told her children,
but she was telling it to me.
And I felt simultaneously honored,
and also odd, because I wasn't sure
that I was really, you know, me, the vodka-swilling,
dancing girl, that I was really worthy
of her confidante.
But at the same time, I knew
that it didn't actually matter whether I was worthy or not,
because I had been chosen, and that was my job.
So it was time to put the vodka away, and get to work.
So after I graduated from college,
that's exactly what I did.
And I was trying to write this book, and I had, you know,
like, six months worth of interview tapes with her.
And I had a whole stack of books,
all about the World War II, and, you know,
reams of research and notes and all of this.
And I'm trying to synthesize this together, and, you know,
tell her story and it's not going well.
It's going, you know, just terribly.
And the thing is, that I just, I cannot find her voice,
because I have never experienced anything like that.
I've never suffered like that, you know?
So after two years of this,
and you don't want to know how many drafts,
I decide that I'm going to go to Ukraine,
and I'm going to try to find the village
where she came from.
I'm going to trace her path through the whole war.
And maybe, hopefully, somewhere along the way,
I'm going to find the mouth to tell this story with.
So I've arranged to meet up
with this Ukrainian driver, once I got to Ukraine,
and he is going to take me to this village,
and I'd sent him the map in advance,
of exactly where we're going to go.
But once we get in the car, Sergey wants to
know where this map came from, because this is his job.
He's got all the maps there are out there,
and he's never seen a map like this one.
And I'm afraid to tell him the answer,
which is that, I actually just, kind of, made this map up.
I mean, I'd taken a real map, you know,
the real maps, and then I'd taken all the stories
that my grandmother had told me,
and I just sort of, you know, stitched them together,
and decided that this was where things were,
and this is what we were going to find.
And suddenly, it just hits me,
how, just, ridiculous and preposterous that is.
So I can't tell him that.
So I tell him that my grandmother gave me the map,
but as we're getting closer to the village,
Sergey is stopping everybody we run into on the roads
and asking them if they've ever heard of Omelanka,
if they know how to get there,
do they have any family from Omelanka?
And nobody, nobody has heard of this village,
which doesn't surprise me at all,
but Sergey is getting very nervous,
because this map was so sketchy to begin with.
And I explained to him, Sergey, they're not going to,
no one here is going to have heard of Omelanka,
because it was a Polish settlement, because this region
of Ukraine that we're in, before the war,
was part of Poland.
And then, after the war, the borders shifted.
So it's okay, they haven't heard.
I just want to get as close as I can
to where it was and just see what's there.
We get to Steppe, and that means
that we're 16 kilometers away
from where I'm hoping Omelanka is.
And in Steppe, I want to try to find the cemetery,
because a lot of my family was buried there.
So we asked this woman that we run into,
if she can point us in the direction of the Polish Cemetery,
and this woman says, the Polish Cemetery,
this is Ukraine, not Poland, you know,
and I don't think she said it so much to be rude,
but I think she just thought we were really stupidly lost.
And the thing is, I knew, you know, 60 years had passed,
and I was prepared that the people of course, would be gone.
And I was prepared, you know,
that the buildings would be gone,
and even maybe that the cemeteries would be gone.
Although I had hoped that those would be there,
but I was not prepared, and I was actually, kind of,
shocked to discover that the history had been erased, too.
Next we get to Huta,
and now we are just four kilometers away.
And I'm very excited, but I'm also very nervous,
because this is actually where my map,
the real map, runs out.
And so, the people here can't tell us
how to get to Omelanka.
We're not going to be able to find it.
So we see this man on the side of the road,
and he's on crutches, and we stop and we ask him, you know
have you ever heard of this place Omelanka?
And the guy says, Omelanka? Yeah, sure.
This is fantastic, right?
And he takes one of his crutches,
and he's able to actually etch in the mud, a path,
the whole map for how to get there.
And so Sergey asks him, you know, how big is this village?
And, and he says, village, no, no, no,
it's not a village, it's a field.
And Sergey said, well,
why does it have a name if it's just a field?
And the guy says, I don't know,
we've just always called it that.
So we follow his directions,
and we're driving along, following his route.
And then the road beneath us just literally ends, I mean,
like, the road just ends,
and there's just field in front of us.
And this is clearly as far as we can go.
But Sergey looks at me and he says, hold on,
let's give it a try.
And then we are offroading through this crazy field,
and we're in this tiny little eastern European-built car,
you know, it's like, not meant to handle this.
And the car is tipping at these crazy 45 degree angles.
And we're wheeling through these puddles.
And, then Sergey,
who has been so calm and restrained this whole time,
he, I have never seen him alive like this.
He roars, the Omelanka Highway, we've found it, you know,
and we burst through these trees, and we land
on the other side, and there's this woman standing there,
and she's wearing a leather vest, and she's holding an ax,
and she is staring at us,
and we're looking at her, and we just, kind of, wave.
And this woman has maybe three teeth left,
but she shows them all to us, in this wide, generous smile.
So we get out of the car, and Sergey gives her a cigarette.
And we, they chit chat for a while,
while I just try to look friendly.
And then Sergey asks her about Omelanka.
And when he does that, her whole face shifts.
I mean, it's like, this cloud just comes over her face.
And, but she nods, and she says, yes,
she knows about Omelanka.
Her mother told her about it.
She said, it's only a field now.
But once there was a village, well,
a Polish settlement, really,
but then very bad things happened, and there's no one left.
But she tells us exactly where to go to find where it was.
And she tells us that, when we get there,
we should look into the trees, and see what's there.
So we follow her instructions,
and we go down this muddy path between these trees,
and eventually, it opens up into this field.
And we're there, we're in Omelanka,
and it is a beautiful autumn day.
I mean, bright blue sky, and vibrant green field.
And I'm just, like, walking up and down,
looking into these trees,
and trying to figure out what the heck she meant.
Look into the trees, you'll see something.
And then I think I know what she's talking about,
because there is an order to these trees.
There's a sharpness, and a cleanness to their edges,
very unnatural.
And there's a uniformity of height.
And that makes sense to me, because 60 years ago,
this village was burned to the ground, you know,
the whole thing, not just the houses and the barns,
but the orchards, everything,
burned completely to the ground.
It was set on fire by the Bandarovi,
this fringe group of Ukrainian nationalists, who believed
that if they helped Hitler of ridding the whole area
of everyone who wasn't Ukrainian,
then they would be given their long-sought country,
and they'd get a Ukraine for Ukrainians.
So I'm looking into these trees,
and then I'm looking at this field,
and I'm trying to imagine this village
that has been described to me so many times,
and I'm also trying to imagine what it must have been
like that night for my grandmother,
her last night there, when she was running out of her house,
and the house was set on fire, and she's barefoot,
and everyone else, all the houses were set on fire.
And she's running, and trying to get away
from the Bandarovi,
and she's running, and off in the distance in Huta
which I can see now, Huta, just four kilometers away.
That's where she would've seen the Polish church
burning to the ground, you know?
And this kind of stuff had been going on, you know,
through the region for months.
Like, my grandfather's family a little bit further north,
they were all rounded up,
and locked into the barn with their livestock.
And the whole thing was set on fire.
Terrible kinds of things, you know?
And the Ukrainians who tried to help,
or even sympathetic, you know, they were killed.
And then the Ukrainians and Poles, who intermarried,
and there were a lot of them who intermarried,
they had to watch, you know,
their children ripped in half in front of their eyes.
Just these terrible sort of medieval terror tactic
sort of stories, you know?
And so tonight, it just happened to be Omelanka's turn.
And so, everyone's running out of their houses,
and trying to get away,
and they're running into the forest to hide,
but that's where the SS is waiting for them.
And they're going to load them up onto trains.
And then, that's where my grandparents,
they were taken on the trains, and they were taken
to Dachau, and then from Dachau,
to a slave labor camp in Germany.
So Sergey says to me, I'm sorry, I'm sorry
that you came all this way, and there's nothing here.
And that's what my grandmother had said to me.
She said, why go back?
There's nothing there,
but there is something here, actually,
and there's this field and it's very lush, dark rich soil.
And there are these trees that are grown out of the embers,
and the ash of those burned down orchards of Omelanka.
And they're 60 years tall.
And I am here, you know, the granddaughter of that woman
who ran through that house.
And standing there, in that terrible, but God help me,
beautiful field that day, I felt not sadness,
and not happiness,
but just this feeling that I can only describe now,
as a kind of ecstatic serenity.
Nobody can speak someone else's story, you know?
I mean, like, even if you follow her path,
you haven't really walked in her footsteps.
If I was going to tell this story,
the only mouth that I needed to find was my own.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)
- [Michelle] That was Jean Michelle Gregory.
Jean Michelle is a writer, story director
and speech language pathologist who resides
in Tacoma, Washington with her wife, Hailey.
She finally found the mouth to tell her story with,
and is putting it in her memoir,
Tomorrow Doesn't Belong To Us.
If you want to see photos of Jean Michelle
with her grandmother, visit the moth.org/extras.
Considering that we just passed the one year anniversary
of Russia's invasion of Ukraine,
we asked Jean Michelle to share a short reflection
on how she feels about the story now.
Here's what she had to say:
In the almost 20 years
since I first told the story,
awareness of the massacres in the Volan region has grown.
I've been gratified to see renewed solidarity between Poles
and Ukrainians, in the face of Russia's latest invasion.
And I grieve for and stand with the people of Ukraine
in their fight for independence.
That's all for this episode.
From all of us here at The Moth,
we hope you have a story-worthy week.
- [Mark] Michelle Jalowski is a producer
and director at The Moth,
where she helps people craft and shape their stories
for stages all over the world.
This episode of The Moth Podcast was produced
by Sarah Austin Jenness, Sarah Jane Johnson,
and me, Mark Solinger.
The rest of the Moth's Leadership team
includes Sarah Haberman Katherine Burns,
Jennifer Hixson, Meg Bowles, Jennifer Birmingham,
Kate Tellers, Marina Klutse, Suzanne Rust,
Brandon Grant, Lee Anne Gullie,
Inga Ladowski, and Aldi Kaza.
All Moth stories are true as remembered by the storytellers.
For more about our podcast, information on pitching
your own story, and everything else,
go to our website, themoth.org.
The Moth podcast is presented by PRX,
the Public Radio Exchange,
helping make public radio more public, at prx.org.