I have a vivid picture of my Opa packing his suitcase full of Levi’s. The year is 1972. He is on his way to his home country, Poland. I ask him why he is taking so many pants with him? He tells me they are his security, worth more than gold where he is going. In Poland’s struggle through communism and the Iron Curtain, blue jeans were worth more than money.
Opa was very nervous and excited, because it was his first trip back to Warsaw and the Old Country since he was a boy. But you see, where he was going was not where he was born. He was born in L’Viv. How many times as we sat in the Irish Pub he tried to explain that it was part of Poland, but then it wasn’t. It was part of Russia, then it wasn’t. And finally it was Ukraine. In the years that he was a boy, the Polish struggle for sovereignty was fierce, consecutively toppling a weak democracy with an assassination and a military coup, changing a class based system to communism, erasing his father’s job as carpenter to the elite. The president was replaced. His family was displaced. And when his mother died in childbirth, there was no one to take care of 11 children. He was 9 when he left home to find food and work. He went west into Germany. He lied about his age and found opportunity with guilds that were helping the German military build strongholds in the Black Forest. They fed, housed, clothed and payed him. It was all he could ask for. He learned every trade possible from carpentry to plumbing to electrical, from the ground up. He was a good worker and the work was good. Over years, they traveled throughout Bavaria, building and building. What he didn’t realize until it was almost too late, by then he was building for the Third Reich.
The long journey that brought my Opa from war torn Germany to Australia, to America by circumnavigating the globe is truly dangerous and miraculous. It is our family heritage, and I would say, it’s a story for another day. Unfortunately, that story begins again, today. Time folds as we watch the insanity of Ukrainian flight. My genes are here, in America, because he made that journey and survived. Now they will fight the same fight and spread out across Europe, many migrating here to America. They will mix their genes with ours and another generation of grandchildren will tell a story like my Opa’s, like mine. The great recycler of life will start again.
This week Levi’s withdrew from Russia. It struck a chord with me. Instantly I relived that moment — that conversation, about the jeans — like it was yesterday. What is wrong with humans? Why does it seem like one generation, one birth cycle… and we forget. Forget like dogs chasing porcupines. Even after a face full of needles, they will go back every time. The deja vu washed over me because we are here again, trading jeans for genes. Again? Yes, again.