How to Make It Real

When what you see is all you see

“Eros Bendato” by Polish sculptor Igor Mitoraj, in Kraków’s Rynek Główny

We’ve been traveling recently — to Milan to visit The Uncles and celebrate PRIDE, and before that, to Poland. Though I’ve been to Italy over and over again (it never gets old), this trip to Poland was my first.

Months ago, when Marido and I sat down to tetris our calendars and make a space for a family vacation, we realized he’d be finishing a job in Kraków just as Mirtilo’s school year ended.

And so, three days into summer break, with my friend Nicole ensconced in our guest room for dog/bird/house-sitting, Mirtilo and I stepped off a train at Kraków Główny and Marido whisked us away for a walk around Planty park with detours for Lody (ice cream) and Obwarzanek Krakowski (a doughy Krakovian snack that’s the tasty love child of a pretzel and a bagel).

I failed to take a photo of our bread rings because every time I had one I stuffed it in my mouth immediately, so here is a photo from the internet to satisfy your curiosity. And to complete my mission of making you wish you were snacking your way through Poland right now, here we are below, freshly arrived, faces full of Lody…

I found Kraków delightful — the cuisine, the people, the architecture. I found it difficult to say even a simple hello in Polish (Cześć, like “tchesht”), and Thank you (Dziękuję, like “jen-koo-yeh”) was nearly impossible to remember for some reason. My brain kept reverting to Portuguese. But nearly everyone we interacted with spoke English, including a very enthusiastic twenty-something guy selling old books at a flea market.

I gave him 146 złoty for three volumes: a 1922 edition of a German book called Geelenleben unferer Haustiere (The Lives of Our Pets), a tiny book published in Warsaw in 1908 and inked with a multitude of blue stamps bearing the name of the Polish Socialist Party, and a slim modern volume of poetry titled Nie Będzie Tablic (There Will Be No Tables).

We spent at least twenty minutes chatting about the charm of old books —the beauty of their intricately-embossed bindings, the feel of history between your fingers as you turn the yellowed pages. I told him how, even though I can’t read Polish or German, I still treasure volumes in these languages. We agreed: Every book contains a world.

Every town contains a world, as well. Every city, every village, every country I haven’t been to. Most of these worlds I’ll never see with my own eyes, never taste the flavors of their prized pastries, never stuff my senses with all manner of local delights. There are too many places I will never know outside pages and pixels, outside other people’s voices telling me what it’s like.

There is so much you miss when you only see a place on a screen or a map. Like it gathers weight and substance when you finally see it in real life. No longer an idea, an abstraction, but a place fully realized and just as complex as the inside of your head.

In the handful of days we wandered through Kraków, I was astonished by the number of young people. Teenagers, twenty-somethings, hordes of them. Maybe I’ve gotten used to a population that skews older, since Portugal has nearly twice as many people over 65 as children 14 and under.

It’s not just that these Polish kids were young, it’s that they were goth. Exuberantly so. I have not seen so many legs clad in black fishnet, so many platformed shit-kickers, so many metal t-shirts and black-slicked lips since my own Siouxsie days haunting Chicago’s Dome Room wrapped in vinyl and black velvet.

I loved these kids, these gothlings, so adorable in all their chains and angst. I wanted to pose them for portraits, ask them to scowl into my camera, but I didn’t even say hello.

A preponderance of disaffected youth is not the only thing I did not know about Kraków. Here are a few more fascinations:

• The city was once terrorized by a fearsome Wawel Dragon and you can still visit the cave where he lived (it’s beneath the castle, naturally)

• Kraków has its own prime meridian, which Nicolaus Copernicus used to make astronomical calculations for “De Revolutionibus”

• It is only city in the world which still has prehistoric mounds

• It is one of the oldest cities in Poland, having been inhabited since the Stone Age

• The city itself escaped World War II fairly unscathed, unlike Warsaw, which the Nazis razed to the ground in retaliation for the 1944 Warsaw Uprising

• If you’re into chess, Kraków is known for its hand-crafted chess sets

  

Long after I walked those Polish ulice, I kept thinking about all the things I didn’t know. Even though I lived in Chicago, which boasts one of the largest Polish populations outside of Poland itself. Even though our friend Andrew — one half of The Uncles in Milan — is Polish. Not just ancestrally but actively. He speaks the language fluently, visits the country often, bears a Polish passport. I remember one of his birthday parties back in San Francisco at which we dined on Polish cuisine, watched folk dancers perform the Krakowiak and Polonaise.

Even though I had access to all of that, I was never curious about Poland. Never flipped through travel books, daydreamed about its wonders the way I did about France or Argentina or Japan. Never romanticized living there the way I did Rome or Amsterdam.

“Did you tell jokes about Polish people when you were a kid?” I asked over dinner one night in Kraków. Our friend Michael (the other half of The Uncles) was with us, and he and Marido didn’t even have to hesitate before responding, “Oh, yeah, definitely.”

“What was that all about?” I wondered, and we couldn’t come up with an answer.

It was just a thing that happened on the playground, like moonwalking or Red Rover: “How many Poles does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

The punch line was always derogatory.

Was there some newsworthy event that engendered an onslaught of anti-Polish sentiment? Why were we so casual with our insults? As kids, did we even know where Poland was?

History tells me that Poland has been repeatedly colonized; even disappeared from the map for 123 years from 1795 to 1918 when it was partitioned first by the Russian empire, then the Kingdom of Prussia, and then the Austrian Monarchy.

Fleeing tragedy, waves of Polish immigrants arrived in America throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. One of these waves occurred when Michael, Marido and I were children.

Martial law came to Poland in 1981, and thousands of Polish people emigrated, seeking a better life for themselves and their children. They arrived in American cities like Chicago with only one or two words of English tucked beneath their tongues. Like many immigrants, they were forced to take rough jobs driving taxis, cleaning hotel rooms, all those menial tasks that natural born citizens are loath to do.

“Moreover,” writes Wojciech Oleksiak in his article The Anatomy of a Polish Joke, “because of their longing for their lost homeland, Poles were often somewhat unwilling to assimilate into their neighborhoods and showed deep commitment to the Polish language, culture and customs.”

Prejudices had traveled with them from Europe, where the Prussian, German, and Nazi German states leveraged the classic public relations maneuver of the colonizer — make the native look untrustworthy, uncivilized, unworthy so you have good reason to steal their land. Anti-Polish propaganda deliberately created the image of “a dumb Pole whose only ability is to work in the field.”

From there, the idea of the stupid Pole was picked up by popular culture. The unsavory Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Polish punch lines on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, with Jay Leno too. From TV, from our parents, these sentiments filtered down to us kids on our playgrounds.

Why did I never dream of visiting Poland?
Because it was never portrayed as a land worth dreaming of.
It was barely even a real place to me. Just a name on a map and the memory of a joke.

I am enmeshed in a brilliant memoir right now, The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza.

Sarah’s mother is a white woman from Minnesota. Her father is an exile from Palestine. Her father’s mother, Sarah’s Sittoo, was driven from her ancestral village of ‘Ibdis in 1948.

There is an excerpt I read recently that I cannot stop thinking about. In it, Sarah recalls a day a few years after her grandmother had come to live with them in Illinois. Sarah was small, seven or eight, on this morning when Jill, her mother’s most fashionable friend, stopped by for a visit…

It was a sunny morning, Sittoo rattling pots in the kitchen as I read on the couch. The doorbell rang, and a moment later, I heard Jill’s voice… I rose to say hello, meeting the two women at the corner where the hallway met the kitchen. I saw Jill stop in her tracks, their conversation dropping like a stone. Jill’s pretty face puckered with shock and something like disgust. Her son Devon — a quiet, bowl-cut boy roughly my age — was at her side. Oh wow, Jill breathed.

Examining the source of their shock, I found a familiar scene. Sittoo sitting cross-legged, cotton thobe hiked up to her swollen knees, bare toes wiggling as her body gently rocked. Around her lay large bowls of zucchini flesh, raw beef, and onion stubs. Her deft fingers shone with grease as she pushed a pungent mixture of meat and rice into hollowed vegetables. She was preparing mahshi, a dish I knew to be succulent and labor intensive, but hardly remarkable. I saw no reason to stare.

Yet the moment gathered weight. Jill and Devon’s silence was compounded by my mother’s, her face pasted with a closed smile. No introduction was made; I assumed my mother was shy about her weak Arabic, but Sittoo had no English with which to extend her own greeting. Just a few feet from us, my grandmother seemed suddenly distant, confined to a language that, I now realized, sounded like gibberish to those outside.

Jill broke the spell at last, leaning over to Devon to whisper, See honey, that’s what people look like in other countries. She spoke with a teacher’s forced enthusiasm, as if trying to persuade a child that math is fun! The O of Devon’s mouth broke into a question. Why are her hands slimy? His mother opened her own mouth, hesitated, then resumed staring without a word. I followed their gaze back to my grandmother.

My own vision shifted, taking in her details in a new and slanted light. I saw an old woman, her wiry hair tangled, her cheeks a filigree of wrinkles and age spots. She seemed both small and too large, her breasts straining the fabric of her thin cotton thobe. Noticing their stares, she lifted her mandil to loosely cover her hair, but the scarf slipped backward, exposing a bald spot at the crown of her head.

As the silence stretched, I felt my skin grow hot, prickling. I blurted, She’s cooking! As if by naming that obvious fact, I could anchor Sittoo in context, banish their bafflement. Jill glanced at me, murmuring with grown-up politeness, That’s nice. Then she turned to my mother, asking, So she doesn’t speak any English at all? Sittoo continued stuffing zucchini, her movements growing faintly rigid, her eyes fixed downward, toward her work. I stood, frozen and clenched, until at last, my mother led Jill and Devon down the hall.

Polish people are proud of their people’s spirit, of their collective history. I saw this first in my conversation with the young bookseller and again with tour guides at different locations whose chins lifted, shoulders straightened as they spoke of their country’s resilience and resistance to invasion and oppression, no matter how futile. Again and again, they have survived.

None of this proud history is written into a Polish joke. In a world ruled by Empire, it is the conqueror who decides what is valuable. What story is worth telling. What place is worth seeing. What people are worth saving.

Sarah Aziza writes of the way that moment of seeing her beloved Sittoo through that white woman’s eyes changed something inside her. Broke something. How she began to withdraw from her Arab heritage, how she began to try to erase the parts of herself that were Other so she could emphasize the parts that could Pass.

I think about the place I grew up, not far from Sarah’s family in Illinois. I think of the way I was surrounded by Sameness. The way I learned to turn my eyes away from Other. To write it off as Not Important. Not Worthy of my curiosity. The way I absorbed the regulations of what was American and what was Acceptable.

Dreaming of seeing the Pantheon? Acceptable. Taking French in college? Admirable. Moving your whole family to Europe? Enviable. So long as you go to the right part of Europe, you know. The romantic part. The part that Rick Steves recommends.

I’ve come a long way from that grade school playground, I’ve unlearned so much of that selective storytelling, that spoon-fed spin.

But the longer I live and the further I roam, the more I find I have to unwind. I am so far from finished.

I hope I never stop unraveling.

Mural by Piotr Janowczyk outside Pub Wręga, portraying historical Polish figures connected to the Kazimierz district in Kraków

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Copyright © 2025 LaDonna Witmer • {all photos by author, except that one of the bread rings!}