Looking for peace - 05/9/2005

Six years.

Six years of starvation. Six years of imprisonment. Six years waiting for liberation.

Polish 2nd Lt. Zbigniew Orlowski had spent six years in the German prisoner-of-war camp with more than 5,000 other officers and generals of the Polish army.

But when Allied forces opened the gates of Oflag VIIA, the POW camp in Murnau in southern Germany, on April 12, 1945, Mr. Orlowski and many other POWs were left homeless.

For several months, he and his fellow POWs remained at Oflag VIIA while American soldiers determined if the soldiers were competent and healthy enough to return to the outside world.

When they were allowed to leave the camp permanently, some of Mr. Orlowski's friends and fellow officers chose to return to Poland, to wives and children separated from them by war in 1939. For Mr. Orlowski and many others, however, returning to Poland was not an option.

"You don't know what to do." His thickly accented voice rises with remembered panic. "Poland was invade by communist. Door to Poland was closed."

At age 32, he'd not only lost his homeland, but also much of his family.

While Mr. Orlowski was in captivity, his family had been torn apart in Poland. His father, a church organist, and his mother had waited out much of World War II in a single room far away from their home in Radziejow, in central Poland. Two of his younger brothers were arrested, one of whom was beaten to near death.

"They beat him so much that my mother said his back was like hamburger," he remembered. "When he was almost dying they send, they bring him to my parents and he was so skinny and … he live only two, three days and he die."

His third brother was killed during the war. His younger sister was sent to a Nazi labor camp and returned to Poland after liberation, where she died during childbirth, her body still weak from the war.

"Of six, I am the only one left," he said, quietly.

His fiance, a fellow teacher before the war, was killed during the war in a concentration camp, a story the 92-year-old bachelor now repeats in a quick emotionless voice.

"We intend to get married in … 1940. In 1939, come war and destroyed everything. I got only one letter from her: ‘We are living in very dangerous conditions,' " he said. "Second letter, somebody wrote me that she was captured by (the Nazis) and executed."

He looked toward America, where he heard many Polish had immigrated. He corresponded with relatives in Toledo, Ohio, hoping he could soon see the land of opportunities.

"Only I must wait. They have law - displaced person, they call - mostly laborer," he said. "We from prisoner of war, they says that come time that law change and you be accepted (into the United States)."

He remained in Murnau in the German Alps of Bavaria for some time, hiking through the Alps on short camping trips, and visiting Munich and Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp just north of Munich. The camp was still covered in blood months after liberation, when bodies began rising to the surface of the shallow mass graves.

"When I was in the (prisoner of war camp) and I hear anything about torture and crematorium and about disaster for people, I in my mind made, that all people around the world seeing this horrible treatment by German, there would be end of war. There would be peaceful," he said. "And the peaceful didn't come."

In his own life, peace remained elusive.

"I like to be like I was born," he explained of the memories he learned to keep hidden. "For many year, I never want talk about prisoner of war, about war, about nothing, I want to live again. Long, long time, I never mention about prisoner of war."

After two years, he left Germany to join a unit of the Polish army in Italy - a two-month experience he used to visit museums and art.

Then he moved to London, England, to wait for a visa to the U.S. He spent his weeks working in an ice cream parlor, and his weekends searching for art.

"Because my hobby was art, London was just this what I was dream. A lot art. A lot of museum. A lot of palaces. A lot of beautiful things."

After four years, his visa was approved, and he moved to Toledo to live with his aunt.

"From prisoner of war, I feel like animal," he said. "Freedom. Opportunity. Big opportunity. If you work, you start living here and be like a human being. You buy house. You buy car … and start life, perfect life. Government have not tell me ‘You do that.' You come here to our country, you have brain. Do what you want.' "

Before World War II, Mr. Orlowski had taught elementary school in Poland and tutored a young aristocratic boy privately. In the prisoner of war camp, he continued his education by taking art history lessons from fellow officers and prisoners who assured him he would receive his master's degree when he returned to Poland.

When he arrived in Toledo in 1951, he lived with his aunt, though he left after only one year when his aunt began raising his rent and ordering him to perform chores around the house.

He soon realized he would not find a permanent job again as a teacher, nor would he see the fruits of his POW "master's" course work.

"First my job was washing dishing, in a restaurant close (to) downtown," he said. "I make two big jar of onion, I washing dishes, I scrub the floor, I washing dishes. All for 90 cents."

He eventually settled into the heavily Polish Lagrange St. section of North Toledo, and took a job as a short cook at a friend's restaurant, and later at University of Toledo as a janitor, where he watched his wages slowly rise $2 a month.

"No complain," he insists. "Better I go and do these jobs than beg somebody for piece of bread."

In 1956, he gained citizenship to the United States, giving him a new homeland.

Eventually, an opportunity to teach did present itself.

"When I come to United States, one lady, some lady, she found out I was school teacher and she said, ‘In Bedford here, we organize Polish classes. And would you like teach them?' "

Once a month for two hours, Mr. Orlowski was again the head of a classroom at Bedford Community Education in Temperance.

But life in the United States was not easy.

"I have a few moments very, very critical to me, and they bring me to tear," he said. "‘Why you come over here, you take job from our children? Why don't you go to old country?' There was many time and there was still hanging on me that people don't accept me when I come over here. … Of course when we come, and when I got job washing dishes for 90 cents, I took it … .

"So (I) live between many, many nationality. Easier life and more understanding people are here. So I am not surprised that so many people, like from Mexico, or everybody want to come, want to come here," he said. "Everybody want come to United States."

In February, 2002, he moved to Monroe because he no longer felt safe in Toledo. In the safety and comfort of his small apartment at the Monroe Center in the Mable Kehres Apartments, Mr. Orlowski - now called Joe - displays the hundreds of pieces of original art and replicas he's collected over the years. On his balcony, he grows a small garden of pansies and other flowers.

His life of art, flowers and church at St. Michael Catholic Church on Sundays is quiet, but, finally, it is the peace he's been waiting for since 1939.

"When I come to United States, I said I start my life here," he said. "Just make me peaceful life in United States."