The metal flap with the inscription „Briefe und Zeitung” opens a crack, revealing a slot for the postman to shove in the mail and the newspaper. In a house on the outskirts of Piaszno – once situated a few kilometers from the border, albeit on the German side – a solid wooden door separates the brick porch from the main body of the house. A semicircular window in the house’s sloping roof of ceramic tile looks down on visitors. A red-brick chimney climbs high into the sky. Outside, only the plastic PVC framing indicates that time has not stopped here and that the mail delivered daily to the household is no longer in German. The present owner, Urszula Landowska, takes small steps to cross the living room, pushes a heavy wooden chair away from the wall and slumps into its soft cushion. On the day of her birth in 1938, German border guards strolled around this room. Her father was a staunch communist who put up posters against Hitler in nearby Tuchomie. The locals were rather unimpressed by his views. They held him at gunpoint, threatened to kill him, and beat him up with a stake. The authorities watched his every move and when the war broke out, he got his combat boots from the Wehrmacht and was shipped off to Norway. During his absence, the communists had finally arrived in Kashubia. The old lady fixes her stare on the high-gloss tabletop.

‘Up to that point we lived completely normal lives, as if the war had never broken out. This was Germany. I was seven then, but I remember everything like it was yesterday. End of February 1945, bitter cold. At night, my mother dressed me in the warmest sheepskin coat and told me to climb on the cart because we were running away – first towards Słupsk and then Gdańsk. For three weeks I neither washed nor undressed. In the city we reached the port where a fishing boat was waiting for us. My uncle, my father’s brother, kept rushing us: „Hurry up, quick, before the boat sails away.” And it did sail away. A buzzing filled the air, black dots appeared in the sky, and bombs started to fall all around. Explosions, fire, flames. And thousands of people trying to board the great ship by the pier. Mostly women with babies, or kids my age, and old men. With suitcases, bundles, bags. Screams, panic.’

The woman gently strokes the lace tablecloth, moving the purple orchid closer to the middle. A calendar in Kashubian with photos from the entire region and a heart cut out of paper hang on a dark-brown tile stove standing in the corner. That winter they miraculously managed to board a ship to Germany and reach Bremen via Lübeck.

‘My mother and I were already feeling glad that everything would be fine after we had made it this far when the earth shook at night. Alarm sirens began to wail. The Allies were bombing the Germans. In a cellar, we lived to see the arrival of the English. One of them took my mother’s watch, while another wanted to rape her but stopped when the three of us kids started to yell hysterically.’

Due to exhaustion and frostbite, Urszula’s dad was taken from Norway to a military hospital where the end of the war found him. As soon as he recovered a little, he located his family in Dortmund thanks to his brother, and they tried to start a new life there. However, in 1947 they returned to Tuchomie to look after their ailing grandmother.

‘I couldn’t understand what happened here. It was Germany when we left two years earlier and then suddenly it became Poland. But I didn’t speak a word of Polish. Only German, with a little Kashubian. At church, I could only sputter three words, “Jesus”, “Mary”, and “amen”; at school, two: yes and no. Pretending to understand, I nodded my head while the teacher might as well have spoken Indian to me. The cover of the primer showed a doggy with the word “Ace” under it. So, I ran around the village shouting „Ace, Ace!” at every dog. Finally, a shopkeeper explained to me that „Ace” was a dog’s name while “dog” was a proper word for a dog. No one wanted to sit beside me at school because who would share a bench with Adolf?! The kids in the school yard kept calling me that.’

Excerpts translated by Mirek Lalas