Dennis Warner

Dennis Warner

Dzień dobry. I'm pleased to be here in Warsaw at the Polish History Museum. Well, let me give it a little factual background. My grandfather, Ewaryst Makowski, was born in 1883, and he came to America in 1904 or 05 I'm not sure. But he was married shortly before coming to his bride, Anna Makowski-Szmidt and he brought her over to America shortly after he first arrived. The two of them first lived in Buffalo, New York, for a short period of time. And then they eventually moved to Chicago in the middle part of the country. Chicago was a city which attracted many Polish immigrants and people who came from Poland in the years between 1880 and 1920. And at the time, and it still is, the largest concentration of Poles in America. My grandfather came with talents. He was a tailor, and he was a master tailor in the European guild system. And his whole life, he worked making fine suits for gentlemen. He set up a shop in the Chicago area where he and his wife, Rosalie, had four children. Well, some of them were born before they moved to Chicago, but they had four children: Sophie, Jeanette, Helen, my mother, and a fourth girl, Cecilia. I knew the three older ones, Sophie, Jeanette, and Helen. Cecilia died in 1940. My grandfather was a very strong patriot. His focus was on Polish affairs in Poland. He was always associating with Polish institutions and organizations that were very active in the Chicago area. These were fraternal societies and social groups. And through them, they supported people coming in to America from Poland. And I don't know what the population was at its peak, but it was a very large population of Polish with Polish immigrants who had backgrounds in Poland. My grandfather was quite a successful tailor. We knew him when he had a shop in Chicago, in the Polish area. I have vivid memories of his store with pictures of men in fine clothing. And the store had a lot of bolts of clothing and tables for cutting and sewing fine suits. Grandpa was not a warm person in the sense that he was not a hugging person, but he was very kind to me and my brothers and sisters and my parents, Helen and Walter. At the time, the name was Wojnarowski. They changed the name to Warner when I was in high school because there were many brothers in the Wojnarowski family, and they all decided to change their family name to Warner because it was easier for them to work in business with a more pronounceable American-sounding name. So I knew my grandmother, who was very warm, and she was a person that would love to hug you and tell you how good you were. I remember her apartment with my grandfather. She had a wood-burning stove in the kitchen, running water in the sink and electric lights and so on. I remember clearly that their refrigerator was an ice box. And once a week, a man came pulling a cart, or a donkey pulling a cart with big blocks of ice, perhaps 20 kilograms, and he would carry a block of ice up the stairs and put it in the ice box, and that was to keep the food fresh for the next few days. Another vivid memory I have of their apartment was they had a big bed in the bedroom. It seemed big to me because I was very small. My memories are when I was in early primary school, and the big bed had a large pile of fluffy blankets on it. My strong memories are diving under the blankets and swimming around the bed as if I was underwater. I've never had that sensation in a bed since then. But that was the thing that I remembered about their early apartment. My grandmother died shortly after World War II ended, about 1949. My grandfather, his name in Poland was Ewaryst Makowski. He changed it in America to Everett Makowski. He moved to a smaller apartment for himself above his tailor shop, which was in the Polish area of Chicago. And this tailor shop had a kitchen and a bedroom and bathroom and so on. And my parents would take me and my brother and sister to visit with grandpa, as we called him, and he would make us food, which was always Polish food. It was chicken soup and gołąbki and pierogi and kapusta. It was very nice. He spoke English with a very strong Polish accent. He was not one to speak about Poland, at least in my presence. But I know he was very interested in what was happening in Poland because he had written many letters to his friends and colleagues in America and in Europe. And of course, he was writing a great deal about events in Poland. And this writing culminated in some 70 journals of his observations of the social and political issues, roughly from about 1938 to 1948, more or less. We don't have all of the journals. We have 42 of what may have been 70, but the 42 were very representative of the heart of his interests in World War II. Unfortunately, for us, they were written in longhand and in Polish, and we couldn't read Polish. When we were children, this was not a major issue to us. So after Ewaryst died in 1967, the journals passed on to my mother, Helen Makowska, who was married to my father, Walter Wojnarowski, but they changed their name to Warner, and they were kept by my mother for some years. And then when she died around, I don't have the exact date, but 1993 or '95, the journals passed eventually to me and my wife in our house. I was a water engineer, and my work took me to developing countries around the world. I worked in about 50 countries, especially in poor areas, rural areas and villages. And so I was looking at wells and water conditions and sanitation conditions in these villages. So it wasn't until I retired. My wife and I, after I retired from the World Health Organization and came back to America, I was working full-time with another organization, Catholic Relief Services, doing quite the same thing, providing advice, technical advice on water resource services in developing countries. At that time, the journals that had been passed from my mother's control to us, we temporarily had shipped them to a temporary place in West Virginia, where we had built a log cabin because we had no residence in America. But around 2005, we moved back to America into an American home. The journals moved in back with us. But grandpa always had it. There were Polish papers in his house. And during that period of about 10 or more years, from about 1938 to 1948, he was very active in writing his observations about politics and social conditions, both in America, and in Europe, especially Poland. And eventually, as I had said, he had written, we learned as many as 70 journals, which were notebooks, of which 42 of them have survived, and we have eventually sent them to the museum here. So he had passed on his passion as a Polish patriot to his children. And my mother picked up very much of it. She and her sisters all spoke Polish, and my mother became a professional singer and would sing in Polish concerts and directed Polish choruses for many years. And she was very well known in Polish circles for this. So the Polish feelings and sense of connection were passed down through his children. And they tried very hard to pass it down to my generation of children. But It was difficult because we were all trying to be Americans more than anything else. And it was only after I was able to ease back into a life in America that I began to realize how important these journals that we were now the keepers of were to history. But of course, I could not read them because I don't read Polish.

After years of working in my profession, back to where did I come from and What makes me Polish? And why were my people that I remember, who speak Polish and knew Polish? Unfortunately, the relatives that I had known when I was young, by this point, had passed away. And so I had no real contacts to Polish relatives back in Poland. And we were fortunate enough to get a good lead to them from the museum here. And Konrad Pyzel was able to find a relative of my grandfather, Ewaryst Makowski. In the town that he had come from Pyzdry in Poland. And so they were contacted and they were very responsive and interested in meeting us. And so this opened up something which would be a surprising new world for us. And I realized that this was an opportunity to establish, acquaintances and relationships with the families that we were related to but had lost contact with. This has led to many correspondences. It led to us eventually sending the journals to the museum. We were very pleased to meet the family in Pyzdry, and we were also surprised how many there were. We were expecting one person, two persons with a distant connection to the Makowski line. But they were people who remembered the Makowskis, and they still had the same name. They knew the brothers and sisters of Ewaryst. It was very interesting to know there was this world of people here in Poland that were aware of our family, and we had forgotten about it. And so it was so refreshing to reestablish these connections, because now I hope we can continue the relationships between not just us, but our children and grandchildren and keep it going down into the future, because I think it's so important to keep these connections, these relationships for people to know where they have come from, what makes them in part what they are now, and who are people that are in their genes that have done things that often are very remarkable. And so we're very pleased. And so if these journals of our grandfather, Ewaryst Makowski, can be used by the museum to foster the understanding of Poles who emigrated to another country and settled and they raised families. That's very good. We feel very satisfied that we may have contributed to helping rebuild a bridge between Poland and America that we have, on our side, allowed to wither over the years. And now we hope it's healthy again.