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Articles: Moral Stories | My Father's Gift
- Mr. Kiran Ravuri
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“By the time he came back, in September 1920, my mother had died in the flu epidemic, and there was a letter waiting for him, from the American. Stafford had written because the door to America was going to close. Immigration quotas would be adopted in 1921. My father found a ship’s schedule, picked an arrival date, and sent a last letter to Stafford. In five days, we sold what we had and walked out of Nizkowice.
“Physically, my father wasn’t well. How could he be, after six years of war? He wasn’t a big man—just my size—and his lungs had been burned by phosgene gas. One day, when the Germans fired gas shells toward enemy trenches, the wind turned around and blew it back at them. There were no gas masks for the Poles.”
“When your father came home, he must have seemed like a stranger to you,” Janet said.
“He was. I was 8 years old when the Russians took him. When he returned for good, I was 14, and because of him, because of this stranger, I was leaving everything I knew. I didn’t want to go, but I had no choice. He was my father. I did what I was told.
“During that first day of walking, I kept hoping he’d change his mind, turn around, and go home. I watched him, and he never looked back, not once. At the end of that first day, I was farther from Nizkowice than I’d ever been before.
“We carried almost nothing—we’d sold everything to have enough money for the boat tickets. Along with a few days’ food, we only had two blankets, a pair of maps that were often wrong, the compass, and a calendar. At the end of each day, we’d find a place to sleep, in the corner of a field or beneath a tree, and my father would pull out the calendar and cross off another day. Then he would flip to the last page and stare at December 24th—the day we’d arrive in America.
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