In my father's arms

I slammed into my father’s chest, almost crushing my toy stove and throwing him backwards. I was so excited, the kind of crazy excited a four year-old gets when Santa has just given her the best present ever. My father was on bended knee, his arms stretched out waiting for me as I screamed across the wooden floor. 

“Oop-la,” he laughed, scooping me up, and standing without disturbing the precious stove I was clutching. He feigned great interest when I showed him how to open and close the little oven door, and how to pretend turn the tiny stationary knobs on the front.

This is the only memory I have of my father, Stanislaw Zebrowski. It was the early 1950s, my first Christmas in Canada. My mother, my father and I were either in a church or union hall, I can’t remember which, in Timmins, Ontario. 

It’s not much of a memory because I couldn’t take my eyes off my stove. I didn’t pay much attention to my father. So my memory is simply a feeling of total happiness and contentment in the arms of a faceless man.

It’s also not much of a memory because my father wasn’t around much in the first four years of my life. Mama had met him after the war in Germany. He was a POW and she was a Nazi war slave. They married in Weiden, Germany, and I was born there.

My parents applied to emigrate to Canada. In those days, the men who were lucky enough to be selected by the government emigrated first. Women and children followed, once the men were settled in their new jobs. The Canadian government picked my father and sent him to Timmins to work as a logger. Mama and I waited for months in a DP (Displaced Persons) camp in Germany before we got our papers to join him. 

When we arrived in Timmins, my father was often gone for days or weeks at a time in remote logging camps. Mama and I were alone again... but not quite. Mama had a lover. Ten months after that first Canadian Christmas, Mama, with me in tow, left my father. We went to Sudbury, Ontario, with Frank Uzarowski.

As I grew up, the dim memories of my father Stanislaw faded completely. Frank became my Tata, my dad. I accepted Frank until, in my teens, I discovered my birth certificate, naming Stanislaw Zebrowski as my father.

I began to search for the mysterious man tucked away in the dark corners of my memory, my birth father. I had no idea what he looked like because Mama had cut him out of every picture. All I had was the  memory of a toy stove and the sweetness of being held in my father’s arms, and a name I glimpsed on a document my mother quickly snatched away from me.

Finally, after 73 years, I got to see my father. In May, I travelled to Poland and discovered his family, my family. That discovery included a photo of my father.

My memory is complete now. Once again I feel my father’s ams holding me tight as I cling to my toy stove. I raise my eyes, and see my father’s face.

This extract is taken from The Golden Daughter. which will be published by House of Anansi Press in August, 2025.