June 28, 2026
The next morning, we set out in search of strawberries.
By then, Warsaw was already beginning to feel a little less unfamiliar. We knew where to find the neighborhood bakery with its wonderful fresh bread and pastries. The little produce shop with the sign Owoce & Warzywa was just down the street. Even the route to the tram had become familiar.
It was a small thing, but I found it comforting. The city that had felt so overwhelming just twenty-four hours earlier was slowly becoming a place where we knew our way around.
And, of course, we couldn't pass the neighborhood bakery without stopping in.
I had to try one more pączek (or, as they're known in Michigan, paczki).
We had been hoping to find one with a more generous filling than the first we'd sampled, and this one was exactly what I'd been hoping for.
One thing that surprised me was how different Polish pączki were from the ones served in Michigan during Lent. The dough was much lighter and less rich—nowhere near as "eggy" as I remembered. Perhaps the bakeries in Poland make a different version for Fat Thursday (Tłusty Czwartek) or Lent. I honestly don't know, but it was another reminder that even familiar traditions evolve as they cross oceans.
Just beyond the bakery was the little produce shop.
The sign still read Owoce & Warzywa.
Fruit and vegetables.
Of course, Duolingo had neglected to teach me the Polish word for strawberries. Or plums, for that matter. Fortunately, pointing, smiling, and a few imperfect Polish words proved to be more than enough.
I left the shop carrying both.
The strawberries were every bit as delicious as I had imagined. But it was the plums that surprised me. They were perfectly ripe and so wonderfully juicy that I found myself eating them over the sink as the juice ran down my chin. I don't think I had tasted plums like that in years.
Later that morning, Daniel Banasiak met us at the apartment. If you've been following this blog, you'll remember Daniel as the cousin I met for the first time in New York in May after years of piecing together our shared family history from opposite sides of the Atlantic. Now, it was his turn to introduce us to Warsaw.
Before long, the three of us were walking through one of Warsaw's many beautiful parks. That was another surprise. Despite everything the city had endured, it seemed to have an abundance of green spaces, quiet places where people could simply slow down, walk, and enjoy the day.
We wandered through the Saxon Garden, stopping for a few moments at the Great Fountain (Fontanna Wielka). The photograph I took that morning still makes me smile. Couples strolled along the paths, people lingered on benches enjoying the sunshine, and children darted through the park. It was peaceful in a way that seemed almost impossible after everything I had just experienced the previous day at the Warsaw Uprising Museum.
Just beyond the Saxon Garden we came upon the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. An honor guard stood watch over the eternal flame while a military ceremony quietly unfolded before us. We stood silently to one side, watching as soldiers paid tribute to those who had given their lives in service to Poland.
Daniel explained that the arcade standing before us is all that remains of the Saxon Palace, destroyed during the Second World War. The city hopes one day to reconstruct the palace, restoring it to its former grandeur.
As we stood there, watching the eternal flame burn for a soldier whose name is forever unknown, I found myself thinking about all the names I had spent years trying to recover. Some stories survive because families remember. Others survive because an entire nation chooses not to forget.
From there we walked past the Presidential Palace and the Hotel Bristol, or as Daniel describe it, "the most expensive hotel in Warsaw". Both had survived the war, though not without damage, and had been carefully restored over the decades.
I admired the beautiful flowers as we paused for a few moments before the Monument to Adam Mickiewicz, Poland's national poet, who was born in 1798. Daniel told us that the original monument had been destroyed during the Second World War. Later, pieces of it—including Mickiewicz's head—were discovered in Hamburg and brought back to Poland, where the monument was painstakingly reconstructed.
In a much smaller way, it reminded me of the years Daniel and I have spent searching archives, piecing together fragments of our own family's history. We haven't been searching for bronze or stone, but for people—for names, photographs, stories, and memories scattered by war, emigration, and the passage of time. Like those who searched for the monument, we have been trying, in our own way, to bring something home.
From there we walked to St. Anne's Church. It was another breathtakingly beautiful church, yet I found myself thinking not only of the salt and the toiling miners whose labor had helped make such beauty possible, but also of resilience, reconstruction, and hope.
The Church has been part of both of our lives. As I stood there, I thought of how it shaped our families, our traditions, and in many ways the people we became. We each carry our own history with it, along with our own questions and wounds. Even so, I was grateful that Daniel walked through its doors with me.
As we crossed Aleja Solidarności and looked toward the Vistula River and the Tin-Roofed Palace (Pałac pod Blachą), I found myself marveling at the city before me. Restored buildings stood beside modern architecture. Centuries-old landmarks shared the skyline with contemporary Warsaw. People moved purposefully along the sidewalks, crossing streets, riding trams, and simply going about their lives.
The city seemed to embody both memory and renewal.
It wasn't until much later, as I sat down to write these reflections, that I realized the name of the street we had just crossed: Aleja Solidarności—Solidarity Avenue.
For reasons I struggle to explain, the discovery brought tears to my eyes.
Perhaps it was because, by then, the word had come to mean so much more than the name of a street. Throughout our journey we had encountered people standing beside one another in countless ways: family members reunited after generations apart, strangers extending unexpected kindness, ordinary people risking everything for their neighbors, and a nation determined to remember rather than forget.
The name seemed to gather all of those moments into a single word.
Solidarity.
As we entered Warsaw's Old Town, it was almost impossible to believe that nearly every building around us had been painstakingly reconstructed after the war. Walking through its streets, I was never quite sure where history ended and reconstruction began. Perhaps that is the point. The city chose not to erase what had been lost. It chose to remember.
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| The traditional legend says that the Syrenka (the Warsaw Mermaid) swam up the Vistula River, settled near what became Warsaw, and was captured by a greedy merchant. Local fishermen rescued her, and in gratitude she vowed to defend the city forever. That is why she is depicted with a sword and shield, ready to protect Warsaw. |
Looking back through my photographs, I found the first picture I took of Daniel and Simon together. They were standing in the middle of the square, chatting as though they had known each other all their lives.
A Welshman from Australia.
A Pole from Warsaw.
Two continents.
Two generations.
Two lives forever intertwined.
Solidarność. Solidarity.
Leaving the Old Town, we wandered through the Royal Castle Gardens above the Arkady Kubickiego, managing to get ourselves pleasantly turned around before finally finding the path that led toward the Vistula and the bridge to Praga. Sorry. Simon, for the extra stairs.
I didn't mind.
Some of my favorite moments of the trip came from taking the wrong path.
As we walked, Daniel pointed out landmarks and shared stories that I never would have discovered on my own. One story that stayed with me concerned the famous brown bear that had long been associated with the Warsaw Zoo. Daniel explained that, years ago, the bear had eventually been moved because too many people, often after drinking, threw objects into its enclosure.
I could hear the sadness in his voice.
Anyone who knows Daniel understands why. He has spent much of his life working with animals, raising and judging cavies, and caring deeply about their welfare. To him, this wasn't simply a story about a zoo exhibit. It was about a magnificent animal that had suffered because people had forgotten their responsibility to treat another living creature with respect.
We continued walking toward Praga, crossing the Vistula as Daniel shared the city he calls home.
As we walked through Praga, my thoughts drifted to James Conroyd Martin's historical novels Push Not the River and the sequel Against a Crimson Sky. In the books, Martin brings this part of Warsaw vividly to life, describing the Russian assault on Praga during the 1794 Battle of Warsaw. I found myself thinking of Zofia and Anna Maria moving through these same streets more than two centuries earlier.
By then, my mind had begun to move almost effortlessly between past and present. Between recent history and more distant history. Between documented fact and remembered story. Every street seemed to carry echoes of those who had walked there before us. The city was no longer simply a place. It had become a tapestry of lives woven together across centuries.
As we walked through Praga, Daniel described it as one of Warsaw's poorer districts. That surprised me. Having read James Conroyd Martin's trilogy, I had imagined Praga very differently.
I found myself drawn to an apartment building with rounded balconies framed by ornate iron grilles. I stopped to take a photograph. It seemed to embody the Praga I had been imagining—the one of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Daniel knew the Praga of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a district shaped by war, communism, poverty, and neglect. Neither were wrong. Neither of us was wrong. We were simply seeing different layers of the same city, one shaped by a remarkably complex history.
And nowhere were those layers more apparent than on Brzeska Street. History suddenly gave way to memory. This was the street where Daniel's grandparents had lived in a second-floor apartment, where they owned a small shop, where his mother had grown up, and where Daniel himself vividly remembered visiting as a child.
Then Daniel stopped.
He pointed toward the entrance of the building.
This was also where his great grandfather, Zdzisław Kuliński, was brutally murdered on February 5, 1940.
Zdzisław had been delivering bread to residents of Praga, defying Nazi restrictions, when he was spotted by German soldiers. He ran toward home, reaching the shelter of the building's alcove before they caught him. There, just steps from his family, he was shot and killed. He left behind a twenty-year-old widow and two small children.
Standing there, I could not help wondering what might have happened had Zdzisław reached the apartment. Would the soldiers have followed him inside? Would his wife and children have been killed as well? There is no way to know.
What we do know is that, in that single moment, a young woman lost her husband, two small children lost their father, and the course of an entire family's history was forever changed.
As I stood there beside Daniel, I couldn't help thinking how the smallest moments can echo across generations. Had events unfolded differently on that February day in 1940, the lives of countless people—including our own—might have taken very different paths.
Daniel led us through the alcove where his grandfather had been killed. We passed workers renovating the building and continued into the courtyard behind it.
Time seemed strangely suspended there.
Abandoned communist-era cars sat half hidden in knee-high grass. The courtyard felt forgotten, as though it had quietly witnessed generations come and go.
Daniel pointed to the walls, showing us where bullet holes from the Warsaw Uprising had once been. During the renovation they had been covered over, but he remembered their exact location.
Then he pointed toward the basement.
That was where his great-grandmother, his grandfather Bogdan, and his great-aunt Danuta had hidden while the Nazis searched the neighborhood in the aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising. Above them, Warsaw was being systematically destroyed and those who remained behind lived in constant fear of discovery. Discovery meant death.
Standing there, it was difficult to comprehend that this quiet courtyard had once been a place of terror.
We returned to the street in silent reverence.
As we continued walking, Daniel explained that Brzeska Street had once been considered one of the most dangerous streets in Warsaw, known for drugs, violence, and neglect. He was quick to add that those days were largely behind it.
Even so, the buildings still bore the marks of decades of hardship. Their worn façades, peeling plaster, and aging brickwork seemed to tell stories of poverty, sorrow, and survival. Standing beside Daniel, I realized that places, like families, carry the marks of what they have endured.
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| Streetview from Google maps as I did not take a photo |
For lunch, Daniel took us to one of his favorite restaurants, a place serving traditional Warsaw cuisine.
One of the servers realized we were visiting from abroad. As Daniel explained why we were in Poland, the server quietly shared a story of his own.
His grandmother had left Poland after the war for Canada.
Or perhaps "fled" is the better word.
She never returned. She never spoke of the atrocities. The memories were simply too painful.
For a few moments, our conversation shifted away from the menu and toward family, memory, and the many different ways war continued to shape lives long after the fighting had ended.
Only then did we turn our attention back to lunch.
Daniel encouraged us to try pyzy—small grated potato dumplings filled with meat served in a glass jar and smothered in a sauce. I chose turkey with chanterelle mushrooms. Simon opted for spicy pork, while Daniel ordered cracklings with lard. Seeing them immediately made me think of my mom. I have a feeling they would have been her first choice as well.
The pyzy did not disappoint, and we left the restaurant feeling almost as stuffed as the dumplings themselves.
It had been a long and emotionally exhausting day. After lunch, Daniel headed home. There were chores waiting for him and cavies that needed to be fed.
We said our goodbyes, knowing that the next morning we would board the train together for Gostynin, the village our ancestors had once called home.
Simon and I, meanwhile, managed to get off the metro one stop too early.
Oddly enough, I'm glad we did.
The unexpected walk through a nearby park gave us time to quietly process everything we had experienced that day. Sometimes taking the wrong path turns out to be exactly what you need.
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