Home Again In Auschwitz (Oswiecim)?

Eva Ross, subject of today's Ramblin' column in The Gazette, is going home again. It will be the first time since 1993 that she has returned to Auschwitz (known as Oswiecim until the Germans renamed it), Poland. If you read today's Ramblin' column you know that, as a child, Eva and her school classmates visited the concentration camp each Sept. 1, the first day of school and the anniversary of Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939.

But Eva, born Feb. 29, 1968 (yes, as a leap year baby she's only celebrated 10 official birthdays), came along well after the war. It was an OK place to grow up, she says. Her parents, Kaz and Grazyna Bascik, both worked. He was an artist and she was a photographer. And it was a wonderful historic, old city where they lived in a house that was 200 years old, Eva says.

According to one encyclopedia, "Oswiecim began in the 12th century and received municipal rights in the 13th century. It served as the capital of a sovereign duchy that in 1307 swore allegiance to Bohemia. Annexed to Poland in 1457 and passed to Austria in 1772, it was returned to Poland in 1918. After World War II

a new industrial town was built." Its population at the turn of the century was more than 40,000.

Eva and her parents often took family vacations, including to the Baltic Sea where this photo (left) was taken of Eva when she was about 5. Communist rule, however, made things uncomfortable, especially in 1980 when the solidarity movement took hold. That was such a year of unrest, including the U.S. led boycott of the Moscow Olympics because of Russia's invasion of Afghanistan.

At the time of the Olympics, Eva was on vacation with her father in Germany. After he left for the United States on business, she traveled home by herself by train. The normally 8-hour trip took 24 hours because of increased security.

Home was OK for a while, but in 1981 the effects of solidarity became noticeable when people had to wait in lines to buy anything. Grocery store shelves were suddenly empty. Compounding the problems was the fact that Eva's mother, who had befriended a state policeman, learned that her photo studio with negatives of many people involved in solidarity had been broken into. While the negatives of those photographs weren't found, the studio was a mess. Her police friend helped her and Eva leave the country.

Hoping to come to the United States, Eva and her mother had to spend 15 months in a refugee camp in Austria. While the camp was better than the concentration camps of old, quarters were tight, toilets barely flushed and tempers flaired. Many people died as a result of arguments among themselves.

When word came in February, 1983, that Eva and her mother had been selected to live in the United States, they were ecstatic. Others were going to South Africa, New Zealand, Switzerland, Sweden. But, they feared the future since they had no idea where they would end up after arriving in New York City. Train tickets to Baltimore determined their destiny.

"OK, show us where that is," Eva remembers thinking. "That just shows how much control you had over your life at that time," she continues.

Because they couldn't speak English, Eva's mother took a job as a manicurist while Eva went to school and learned English as a second language. Eva married in 1989, her mother died in 1993 and Eva and her husband moved to Cedar Rapids in 1994.

For the past 15 years, Cedar Rapids and Iowa have been pretty good to Eva. She raised two children here and had work opportunities, from operating her own cafe, Flavorable Reviews, to managing a retail store and becoming a supervisor at Adworks, a division of Yellowbook.

But, when Eva was notified earlier this year that her job was being eliminated, she planned a trip back to Poland. She hadn't been there since 1993 when she buried her mother. She had lost contact with her family, but the Internet and e-mail have made it possible for her to reconnect with them. They've been exchanging stories, sharing pictures, even chatting "face to face" on Skype. For Eva, who says she's had three lives -- growing up in Poland, the 15-months in the refugee camp and in the United States -- the lure of her childhood and family is strong.

In the early '90s, after a couple of trips to Poland, it was too much stress to return to the United States. "Every time I came back, I went through such emotions, such withdrawls," Eva says. "I couldn't do this any more. Every time I went back, it was home."

This time, nothing is forcing her to return to the United States. If  life in Poland looks good, it just might become home again.