Looking for Omelanka: Jean-Michele Gregory
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Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm Michelle Jalowski. The past can be a difficult place to visit. There's joy there, yes, but there can also be a lot of pain. In this episode, we're going to share a story that deals with those painful parts of family history. Jean Michelle Gregory told this at a New York City main stage in 2005. And stick around after the story for an update from her. As a warning, this story contains graphic descriptions of violence. Here's Jean Michelle, live at The Moth.

Crossing the border from Poland into Ukraine was a revelation because once we crossed that line, boom, the road beneath us turned into dirt, the street lights just disappeared, and there we were just bumping across this dirt road in the pitch black night.

And after 14 hours of this, I was dropped off at this bus station in western, rural Ukraine. And there's like concrete all over the ground. And I'm standing there in this pre-modern, godforsaken place, wondering why in the hell I chose to came to this place that my grandmother had always warned me never, ever go back.

I grew up in this big, multi-generational home, and it was the four of us kids, and two parents, and three grandparents. But my grandmother and I, or "bapcha," as I called her, we shared a very special bond. Like, when she was writing letters, it was me who would correct her English for her.

And it was me that she would tell stories to about the old world, about this amazing, fantastic land, you know, where girls skipped through meadows and there was wild sorrel growing in the fields. You know, I mean, just these fantastic stories I couldn't get enough of.

And I was also the only one that she taught to speak Polish. And I loved that language. I loved the feel of those words in my mouth. And I loved the attention that I would get from Babcia when I spoke it to her. But I especially loved, I think, the way that when I spoke that language, I felt somehow like I was connecting to that mysterious old world that she told me about. That world where she said, God was everywhere, but the devil was too.

So, ever since I was a little girl, she told me that I was going to write a book. This book was going to be the book about the experiences my family had been through in the war. And I knew this. Like, I knew this, like, I don't even remember a time when I didn't know that someday I was going to have to write Bapch's book.

And then I was 20 years old and I'm in Poland, it's my junior year of college, I'm an exchange student, I'm having a very good time, drinking lots of vodka, dancing with every Swabek and Pawek and Arkadiuszek and fine, just having a blast really. And I get this letter from my grandmother and it's written in Polish.

And see, the thing is, is that everybody in my family sort of knew, you know, the broad strokes of what had happened. That my grandparents were from eastern Poland, and then World War II had started, and then they were taken by the Nazis to slave labor camps in Germany, and you know, yada yada, and they came to the States. In this letter, she really started to open up to me. She started to tell me,

All these details, these heartbreaking details that she had never told to anyone before. You know, telling me about the death of her child and the terrible guilt that she had felt. And, you know, all these things that she had not told her friends, she hadn't even told her children, but she was telling it to me. And I felt simultaneously honored,

and also awed because I wasn't sure that I was really, you know, me, the vodka-swilling dancing girl, that I was really worthy of her confidence. But at the same time, I knew that it didn't actually matter whether I was worthy or not because I had been chosen, and that was my job. So it was time to put the vodka away and get to work.

So after I graduated from college, that's exactly what I did. And I was trying to write this book. And I had, you know, like six months worth of interview tapes with her. And I had a whole stack of books all about the World War II and, you know, reams of research and notes and all of this. And I'm trying to synthesize this together and, you know, tell her story. And it's not going well. It's going, you know, just terribly. And the thing is, is that I just...

I cannot find her voice because I have never experienced anything like that. I've never suffered like that, you know? So after two years of this, and you don't want to know how many drafts, I decide that I'm going to go to Ukraine, and I'm going to try to find the village where she came from. I'm going to trace her path through the whole war, and maybe, hopefully, somewhere along the way, I'm going to find the mouth to tell this story with.

So I've arranged to meet up with this Ukrainian driver once I got to Ukraine, and he is going to take me to this village. And I'd sent him the map in advance of exactly where we're going to go. But once we get in the car, Sergei wants to know where this map came from, because this is his job. He's got all the maps there are out there, and he's never seen a map like this one. And I'm afraid to tell him the answer, which is that I actually just kind of made this map up.

I mean, I'd taken a real map, you know, the real maps, and then I'd taken all the stories that my grandmother had told me, and I just sort of, you know, stitched them together and decided that this was where things were and this is what we were going to find. And suddenly it just hits me how just ridiculous and preposterous that is. So I can't tell him that. So I tell him that my grandmother gave me the map.

But as we're getting closer to the village, Sergei is stopping everybody we run into on the roads and asking them if they've ever heard of Omelanka, if they know how to get there, do they have any family from Omelanka. And nobody, nobody has heard of this village, which doesn't surprise me at all. But Sergei is getting very nervous because this map was so sketchy to begin with.

And I explained to him, "Sergei, no one here is going to have heard of Omalanka because it was a Polish settlement, because this region of Ukraine that we're in before the war was part of Poland, and then after the war the borders shifted. So it's okay they haven't heard. I just want to get as close as I can to where it was and just see what's there."

We get to Stepan and that means that we're 16 kilometers away from where I'm hoping Omalanka is. And in Stepan, I want to try to find the cemetery because a lot of my family was buried there. So we asked this woman that we run into if she can point us in the direction of the Polish cemetery. And this woman says, "The Polish cemetery? This is Ukraine, not Poland." You know, I don't think she said it so much to be rude, but I think she just thought we were really stupidly lost.

And the thing is, I knew 60 years had passed, and I was prepared that the people, of course, would be gone, and I was prepared that the buildings would be gone, and even maybe that the cemeteries would be gone, although I had hoped that those would be there. But I was not prepared, and I was actually kind of shocked to discover that the history had been erased, too.

Next we get to Huta, and now we are just four kilometers away. And I'm very excited, but I'm also very nervous because this is actually where my map, the real map, runs out. And so if the people here can't tell us how to get to Omelanka, we're not going to be able to find it. So we see this man on the side of the road, and he's on crutches. And we stop and we ask him, you know, "Have you ever heard of this place, Omelanka?" And the guy says, "Omelanka? Yeah, sure."

This is fantastic, right? And he takes one of his crutches and he's able to actually etch in the mud a path, the whole map for how to get there. And so Sergei asks him, you know, how big is this village? And he says, village? No, no, no, it's not a village, it's a field. And Sergei said, well, it doesn't have a name if it's just a field. And the guy says, I don't know, we've just always called it that.

So we follow his directions, and we're driving along, following his route, and then the road beneath us just literally ends. I mean, like, the road just ends, and there's just a field in front of us, and this is clearly as far as we can go. But Sergei looks at me, and he says, hold on, let's give it a try.

And then we are off-roading through this crazy field and we're in this tiny little Eastern European built car, you know, it's like not meant to handle this. And the car is tipping at these crazy 45 degree angles and we're wheeling through these puddles and Sergei, who has been so calm and restrained this whole time, he, I have never seen him alive like this, he roars, the Omelanka Highway, we found it! And we burst

We burst through these trees and we land on the other side and there's this woman standing there and she's wearing a leather vest and she's holding an axe and she is staring at us and we're looking at her and we just kind of wave.

And this woman has maybe three teeth left, but she shows them all to us in this wide, generous smile. So we get out of the car, and Sergei gives her a cigarette, and they chit-chat for a while while I just try to look friendly. And then Sergei asks her about Omelanka.

And when he does that, her whole face shifts. I mean, it's like this cloud just comes over her face. But she nods and she says, yes, she knows about Omalanka. Her mother told her about it. She said, it's only a field now, but once there was a village. Well, a Polish settlement, really. But then very bad things happened and there's no one left.

But she tells us exactly where to go to find where it was. And she tells us that when we get there, we should look into the trees and see what's there. So we follow her instructions and we go down this muddy path between these trees and eventually it opens up into this field and we're there. We're in Omalonka.

And it is a beautiful autumn day. I mean, bright blue sky and vibrant green field. And I'm just like walking up and down, looking into these trees and trying to figure out what the heck she meant. Look into the trees, you'll see something. And then I think, I think I know what she's talking about. Because there is an order to these trees. There's a sharpness and a cleanness to their edges. Very unnatural. And there's a uniformity of height.

And

That makes sense to me, because 60 years ago, this village was burned to the ground. You know, the whole thing, not just the houses and the barns, but the orchards, everything burned completely to the ground. It was set on fire by the Banderovi, this fringe group of Ukrainian nationalists who believed that if they helped Hitler of ridding the whole area of everyone who wasn't Ukrainian, then they would be given their long-sought country, and they'd get a Ukraine for Ukrainians.

So, I'm looking into these trees and then I'm looking at this field and I'm trying to imagine this village that has been described to me so many times. And I'm also trying to imagine what it must have been like that night for my grandmother, her last night there.

when she was running out of her house and the house was set on fire and she's barefoot and everyone else, all the houses were set on fire and she's running and trying to get away from the Bandaravi and she's running and off in the distance in Huta, which I can see now, Huta, just four kilometers away. That's where she would have seen the Polish church burning to the ground.

And this kind of stuff had been going on through the region for months. Like my grandfather's family, a little bit further north, they were all rounded up and locked into the barn with their livestock, and the whole thing was set on fire. Terrible kinds of things. And the Ukrainians who tried to help were even sympathetic. They were killed. And then the Ukrainians and Poles who intermarried-- and there were a lot of them who intermarried-- they had to watch their children ripped in half in front of their eyes.

Just these terrible sort of medieval terror tactics sort of stories, you know? And so tonight it just happened to be Omalanka's turn. And so everyone's running out of their houses and trying to get away and they're running into the forest to hide. But that's where the SS is waiting for them and they're going to load them up onto trains. And then that's where my grandparents, they were taken onto trains and they were taken to Dachau and then from Dachau to a slave labor camp in Germany. So Sergei says to me, "I'm sorry.

I'm sorry that you came all this way and there's nothing here. And that's what my grandmother had said to me. She said, why go back? There's nothing there. But there is something here, actually. And there's this field, this very lush, dark, rich soil. And there are these trees that are grown out of the embers and the ash of those burned down orchards of Omelanka. And they're 60 years tall. And

I'm here, you know, the granddaughter of that woman who ran through that house. And standing there in that terrible, but God help me, beautiful field that day, I felt not sadness and not happiness, but just this feeling that I can only describe now as a kind of ecstatic serenity.

Nobody can speak someone else's story, you know? I mean, like, even if you follow her path, you haven't really walked in her footsteps. If I was going to tell this story, the only mouth that I needed to find was my own. Thank you.

That was Jean Michelle Gregory. Jean Michelle is a writer, story director, and speech-language pathologist who resides in Tacoma, Washington with her wife, Haley. She finally found the math to tell her story with and is putting it in her memoir, Tomorrow Doesn't Belong to Us. If you want to see photos of Jean Michelle with her grandmother, visit themoth.org slash extras.

Considering that we just passed the one-year anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we asked Jean-Michel to share a short reflection on how she feels about the story now. Here's what she had to say: "In the almost 20 years since I first told this story, awareness of the massacres in the Volhyn region has grown. I've been gratified to see renewed solidarity between Poles and Ukrainians in the face of Russia's latest invasion, and I grieve for and stand with the people of Ukraine in their fight for independence."

That's all for this episode. From all of us here at The Moth, we hope you have a story-worthy week.

Michelle Jalowski is a producer and director at The Moth, where she helps people craft and shape their stories for stages all over the world. This episode of The Moth Podcast was produced by Sarah Austin Janess, Sarah Jane Johnson, and me, Mark Sollinger. The rest of The Moth's leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Katherine Burns, Jennifer Hickson, Meg Bowles, Jennifer Birmingham, Kate Tellers, Marina Cloutier, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Leanne Gulley, Inga Glodowski, and Aldi Caza.

All Moth stories are true, as remembered by the storytellers. For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org. The Moth Podcast is presented by PeerX, the public radio exchange. Helping make public radio more public at peerx.org.