Rose of the Mountains

Life is a flower. It blooms with beauty and colors, only to wither in time, like petals falling, leaving behind fruits that one might call karma or destiny. Not everything is beautiful or joyful. Every childhood is marked by its share of sorrow and tragedy. These silent companions follow us throughout life: untold stories or the traumas of mine, my friends, and my family.

My own childhood, as far as I can recall, spared me from direct violence. Of course, I occasionally felt the heavy hand of my father. Once, I was even knocked out by a cabbage head hurled in despair when Dad realized my legs were long enough to outrun him. It hit me square in the head, and I fell. Dad was terrified; I learned that obligations outweigh hanging out with friends. Sometimes, I’d flee from my mother armed with the cord of an old oven. But most of the blows came from my brother.

Yet tragedies loomed everywhere. Some now rear their grotesque, twisted faces as I begin to understand—listening to others’ stories, piecing together fragments of memory. The hunchbacked tales of my ancestors, torn from their world after the war, stripped of their mountains, forests, and lives, condemned to oblivion.

I was fortunate enough to know two of my great-grandmothers. One of them, Anna, would read us the Bible. We sat together on a bench in front of the house, and I soaked up those stories. About long-haired Samson and Delilah, about Abraham sacrificing his son to God, about Moses and his revolution, about Pharaoh enduring all ten plagues despite almost letting the Israelites go after each one. These stories shaped me, formed my moral backbone, even amidst my atheism. But this is not that story.

The other great-grandmother, Maria, was a broken woman, both in body and spirit. To me, as a child, she was terrifying—perhaps because I couldn’t understand or feel her. She was so different, incomprehensible. Her empty, gray eyes haunted me most. They reflected nothing but my own image. Whenever she caught us playing, confiscating our toys only to chop them to pieces with an axe, we’d run to Grandpa. He’d drag her back to her tiny room, shouting as she cried, pleaded, and eventually fell silent…

Yet I was not an ordinary child. One of the Sunday rituals I couldn’t tolerate was church. Its scent of death and decay repelled me. I spoke to God on flowered meadows and resin-scented forest paths. I talked to Him through Dingo, my dog, and to myself. In church, God was dead, hanging on the cross, looking miserably sorrowful. It didn’t resonate with me. So I did everything I could to avoid that place and the God who dwelled there. My God was Joy.

The only reliable way to escape this tedious ceremony was to hide just before the family embarked on their twenty-minute walk to Sunday service. The walk itself wasn’t so bad—Dad would sometimes carry me on his shoulders, and the wild roses along the way smelled so intoxicating that my head spun with delight. And then, of course, there was the return home.

I found a hiding spot no one would think to search—Great-Grandmother’s room. No one expected a child to willingly enter that space. I’d slip quietly through the door, hoping she wouldn’t notice. But she always sat on the bed, watching silently. And there I stayed, alone with her. Perhaps those were the only moments she truly spent with someone, a child who didn’t see her as mad, held no grudge, didn’t shout. A child grateful she didn’t give him away. Perhaps, in those moments, she remembered herself before… I recall those moments vividly: her smiling beautifully, her face lighting up when everyone had gone. For a fleeting second, her gray eyes turned a true blue, like an August sky mirroring golden fields. But then she would return to her void, and I’d run outside, terrified by my own courage and the glimpse of what lay behind her eyes—fading beauty.

Great-Grandmother Maria was born a Kalynska—a flower, one of the loveliest to grow in those harsh mountain conditions, a rose of the Bieszczady. She was renowned for her beauty: petite, graceful, with hair cascading to her hips and sky-blue eyes. She was married off to Ivan, a carpenter. She didn’t love him; her heart belonged to Stan, the miller. Ivan, short, ungainly, and awkward, was the best match in the region.

Their life in the post-war chaos spiraled into tragedy, as it did for many Lemkos. Maria’s story echoes the pain of displacement, the loss of home, and love sacrificed to the void. And so, their flower withered, its petals lost in the winds of history, leaving behind seeds of sorrow.

This tale, like many others, begs to be remembered. By me. By you. Perhaps you shed a tear for the beautiful, proud woman and her gifted husband. They wanted nothing more than to love and to bloom. Like you and me.

During the war, building a house wasn’t the wisest endeavor. Yet Ivan persisted, determined to finish the home that would prove his worth to Maria, hoping it would finally make her love him.

When the war ended, life in the Bieszczady seemed relatively untouched by its chaos. However, whispers began circulating. Initially, no one paid them much attention. Families were said to have left for Ukraine, to the Soviet Union, to freedom—where they could speak their own language, where new homes and lands awaited them. But in the spring of 1947, persuasion from local authorities ended. The army arrived. Families could take only what fit into a single suitcase.

Ivan, resourceful as always, decided to negotiate. He pulled the officer aside and handed him a bundle of banknotes wrapped in cloth—the entirety of his savings for the new house. They shook hands. Ivan believed he had secured his family’s right to stay. But all the money earned him was a rifle butt to the head the next morning, followed by being thrown onto a truck. He would never see the Carpathians again.

Thus, my great-grandfather’s life’s work vanished. The carpentry workshop, the tools, the wood carefully stockpiled for Maria’s dream home—all gone. Along with the forest, the fields, the mountains, and the officer who vanished with the money.

In the West, Poland’s “Wild West,” Ukrainians weren’t treated as human beings. Ivan—now Jan—brought nothing but a suitcase, his delicate hands, and his talent. He worked tirelessly but was paid a pittance, often receiving nothing but bruises. Every coin he managed to save, he offered to God. Every Sunday, he trekked over forty kilometers through the woods to the Church of Saints Peter and Paul in Legnica, carrying prayers for a change in fortune.

And fortune did change—but cruelly. One Sunday morning in September, he set out on his pilgrimage, carrying not only hope but a greater sum of money than ever before. Perhaps, for the first time, he had been paid what his work was worth. He planned to offer part to God and buy Maria a new string of beads.

He never reached the church. Along the way, he was beaten, robbed, and left for dead. God didn’t want his offering. Evil men—if men they were—took it instead.

That evening, bloodied and battered, Ivan staggered home, barely alive. He needed help, a doctor, but received neither. He died the next morning.

Maria wrapped herself in a shawl and walked to the militia station in Chojnów, seeking justice. No one knows what happened there; she never spoke of it. One can only imagine what might have befallen a beautiful woman with sky-blue eyes. She returned the next day, her coat unfastened, her skirt torn, bruises covering her body. From that day on, the blue in her eyes faded to gray. The sun no longer reflected in the sky of her soul, replaced by a void.

She spoke only two sentences for the rest of her life. To her son, my grandfather, she would repeat: “Give me back my thoughts…” And she would reminisce about her beloved Staś, dreaming that he would one day take her to his mill.

On a cold November morning, over forty years later, she set out to meet her destiny. She had withered long before, but on that frosty night, the last petals of her rose fell. A week later, they found her in a pond, deep in the woods.

This tragedy, like so many others, calls out to be remembered. By me. Perhaps by you. Maybe you shed a tear for the proud, beautiful woman and her husband with gifted hands. Both of them longed only to love and to bloom. Just like you and me.

The post-war chaos uprooted my great-grandparents’ entire world, stripping them of their home, land, and identity. They were forced to abandon the mountains that had nurtured generations before them. The promise of a “new life” in the west was hollow—a cruel irony for those who longed only to stay where their roots ran deep.

Maria, once the vibrant, graceful “Rose of the Bieszczady,” became a shadow of herself. Her beauty, renowned across the region, faded into the dull gray of her eyes, mirroring the emptiness she carried within. The dreams she clung to—the hope that love might one day bloom in her marriage, the belief that her children would flourish despite their hardships—withered under the weight of displacement, grief, and loss.

As a child, I didn’t fully grasp the enormity of these sacrifices. I pieced them together much later, in whispered family stories and half-forgotten memories. The weight of these unspoken histories shaped the person I’ve become, just as surely as they defined the lives of my ancestors.

Today, I feel a quiet responsibility to carry their stories forward—not as relics of a distant past, but as living truths. These tales remind us of the resilience of the human spirit and the fragile beauty of hope. They whisper to us, urging us not to forget.

Because even in sorrow, life remains a flower. It blooms and fades, but its essence endures in the seeds it leaves behind. Perhaps those seeds take root in us, in our dreams, our struggles, and our own journeys toward love and meaning.

Maria and Ivan’s tragedy, like the countless other stories of those uprooted and scattered by history’s tides, is not just a tale of loss. It is a testament to the enduring strength of those who, even in the face of devastation, sought to create, to love, and to bloom again.

And so, their story becomes part of mine, just as your story will become part of someone else’s. Together, we weave a tapestry of resilience, a shared history of beauty and pain. Let us remember and honor it—so that the roses of the past may continue to bloom in our hearts.