Jozef, or Joe, didn’t discuss his past, and neither his daughter nor his wife ever asked. It was only as a grown woman that Kobak learned that her father was born in a Slovak village of Polish parents, who moved across the border to Poland when Joe was 13. She got her father to break his silence by traveling to Australia, where her parents had moved after she started her own family. In a series of interviews, Kobak learned about his wartime journey, beginning in Lwow, then in eastern Poland, after Hitler’s armies attacked Poland from the west and Stalin’s armies invaded from the east. At 19, Joe managed to escape capture by the Russians, return to his village in the Carpathian Mountains under German occupation, elude the Gestapo and lead escapees across the border to Slovakia. He kept going south and west, joining Polish Army units in France that were evacuated to Britain after that country fell.
In the most evocative part of the book, Kobak retraces the early part of her father’s 1939 journey. As she struggles across mountain paths to villages haunted by brutal memories, she tries to imagine what her father felt as well as experienced. There are no bombshell revelations, since Joe could count himself as one of the lucky ones simply by virtue of surviving, though the emotional scars lasted a lifetime. Gradually she realizes that his often volatile behavior and retreat into a “taciturn limbo” were their outward manifestations.
But even when he opened up, Joe left some questions dangling about his ordeal in one of the most desperate corners of Europe. For instance, did he kill a Russian guard while fleeing, or did he make up the story to cover up his unease about leaving a fellow Pole struggling with another guard? At one point, he says he had “no option but to take care of” the first guard; at another, he asserts: “I changed the story because I felt bad about it.”
It’s clear that Kobak knew as little about the war itself as she did about her father’s personal history. Discovering how the West sold out Czechoslovakia before the war and Poland at war’s end, she retells those stories in breathless detail. She often barely connects those events to her father’s tale except to note that his fate was a product of the fates of those two countries. This makes the book disjointed, even rambling, in places, yet oddly moving precisely because of its almost guileless feel.
The war’s legacy explains the bitterness and inwardness of so many exiles still in London and elsewhere. At times, Kobak confesses to ambivalence about “these emigres”–including her father. But she points out that Australia’s Aborigines believe that “our stories are what we are here for.” By finally learning her father’s story, she recognizes, her own becomes much richer.
