My Mother's Secret by J. L. Witterick Page A

most beautiful?”
    I answer, “When she is loved.”
    She says, “That’s exactly right,” and so I know she is happy for Casmir and me.

Chapter 64
    D r. Wolenski never forgets my mother andsends her money every year.
    Bronek sends us endless parcels from the United States, and my daughter wonders how it is that we get presents from people all over the world.
    I tell her that her grandmother Franciszka, for whom she is named, is an angel that had so much love to give that it spread around the world. “All that love is just coming back,” I say.
    Love is the only thing that you get more of when you give it away.

Chapter 65
    M y mother is the most incredible woman that Iknow.
    She is softhearted yet strong willed.
    She is compassionate yet unwavering in principle.
    She is a loving mother, yet she risked my life to save others.
    She lost her son in the conflict between the Jews and Germans, yet she held no bitterness toward either one.
    She hid two Jewish families and a German soldier for twenty months and asked for nothing in return.

Chapter 66
    A fter my mother passed away, some people askedme, “Why? Why do you think she hid the Jews?”
    The honest answer is, I don’t know.
    We didn’t think about our motives, my mother and I.
    There was certainly nothing to be gained by our actions at the time.
    We weren’t religious, and we didn’t have an affinity with the Jewish people.
    I think it simply came down to not being able to turn away people who would have otherwise faced a certain death.
    Does that make us exceptional? Or is it only exceptional because so many others chose not to do the same thing?
    The standard defines the exception.
    We did not think of ourselves as extraordinary.
    All we knew was that we needed to be strong to see it through, and thankfully we did.

Chapter 67
    I miss my mother.
    When I see her in my mind, I see this tobacco-chewing, defiant, small woman with a spirit that would not be dominated. She always wore the same skirt that looked too big for her, and it never occurred to me until many years later that she might have liked a new dress for herself. I was too self-absorbed to realize this at the time.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    I N FRONT OF where we live now, I have planted an apple tree with seeds we kept from the tree that Damian planted.
    An apple tree is again the first thing I see in the morning from my bedroom window.
    I am grateful, and it is a peaceful feeling.

 
    Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time;
    it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.
    â€”S YDNEY J. H ARRIS

Epilogue
    T his book is fictional, but it was inspired by the true story of Franciszka Halamajowa, who with her daughter saved the lives of fifteen Jews in Poland during the Second World War. She also hid a young German soldier in her attic at the same time. Her son died while transporting a wagon full of supplies to partisan Jews hiding in the forest.
    Before the war, there were six thousand Jews in Sokal, Poland. Only thirty survived the war and half of those because of one Polish woman, Franciszka.
    I believe that all of us, like Franciszka, have within us the potential to be great. Sometimes we coast through life without this potential surfacing because life has been easy on us.
    When we have much to lose, but still choose to do the right thing, we uncover the nobility that is within all of us. To endure what is unbearable and to do it with grace, that is how we know that we have arrived.

T RIP TO I SRAEL

    In 2012, I visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, where there is a tree planted and a plaque to honor Franciszka Halamajowa and her daughter, Helena.
    People who were not Jewish, but who nevertheless risked their lives to help the Jews escape execution during the Holocaust, are recognized as “the Righteous among the Nations” in Israel. This is how Franciszka and her daughter are