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Articles: Moral Stories | My Father's Gift
- Mr. Kiran Ravuri
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“I am Józef Glodek,” he said as he took back the compass and studied it. “This is what we followed, and I’ve kept it with me for 80 years.”
“How far did you walk?”
“More than 1,000 miles, but I don’t know for sure. You can’t walk a straight line like you can fly one. You take any road you can find and just try to keep going west. But there are at least 2,000 steps to a mile, and 1,000 miles means 2 million steps.”
“Why did you leave Poland?” she asked.
“No one in Nizkowice understood why we were leaving. ‘Poland is finally free,’ they said. ‘We have our country back.’ And they were right. For the first time in more than 120 years, there was a Poland again. Russia, Germany, and Austria, together, had conquered Poland and partitioned it in 1795, each taking the closest piece, but The Great War—World War I—gave us back our country. Then the Russians invaded us again, and it took another two years to push them out.
“The Battle of Warsaw, in August 1920, was the turning point. When the Russians began their retreat, we knew we were going to be free, and my father came home.”
“But then the two of you left,” Janet said.
“I didn’t want to. I was only a boy, and I heard what everyone was saying. But my father disagreed. ‘It’s not over,’ he said. ‘It will happen again.’ He understood that we were living on the battleground of Europe. If a Western European country wanted to invade Russia, it had to go across Poland, and whenever Russia wanted to attack Europe, it had to cross Poland. You can’t have families and farms on a battlefield.
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