The Yellow French Enameled Drip Coffeepot
Danielle Omelczuk and Therese Korzeniowski
My parents’ departure from their homeland, Poland, during World War II was unexpected and brutal.
On Sunday, July 10, 1943, my then twenty-three-year-old mother, Stanislawa Knyrowicz, returned from church in Derewno (now in Belarus, then in Poland) to her home in the village of Niwno, where German soldiers waited for her. They took her and transported her west to Germany for slave labor. After two weeks in a cattle car with other young women from neighboring villages, in the most primitive and unsanitary conditions, she was processed in a transitory facility. Naked, she was marched through a physical inspection line, called “a dirty Pole,” and smeared with disinfectant. Once clothed, she was literally put up on a block (with others like her) to be taken by Germans as badly needed factory workers or farm laborers. Almost all able-bodied German men were in military service. Poles and other Slavic peoples were considered “untermeschen,” racially and socially inferior people, and therefore suitable only for labor in the Third Reich.
After the transit camp, Mom went to work temporarily as a seamstress for a German woman, possibly in Aachen, Germany, the westernmost German city. Aachen, bordering Belgium and the Netherlands, is in the tri-border area of Germany. When my mother saw a portrait of Adolf Hitler hanging prominently on the wall, her fear became evident to her employer. The woman took down the portrait and spat on it before putting it in a closet, which calmed Mom down enough to be able to function and work.
Mom’s group was then chosen for factory work, but they were one person too many. Everyone cried and held on to each other in hopes of not being separated. Being the eldest, Mom volunteered to stay behind. She was taken to a cattle car filled with strangers. At various stops during the transport, people were taken off the car and assigned to work for Germans. When the car finally arrived in Neidingen, Belgium, Mom was one of the last to be taken by a German farmer’s wife as a farmhand.
As my mother began to learn German and communicate with her employer, she learned that authorities told the farmer’s wife and others in the German-occupied area that the Poles had come voluntarily to work in Germany and Belgium. Not everyone in the area was fully supportive of the German tactics. When Mom met the husband, an SS man, he apologized for what the Germans were doing. Once, he brought her silk from a parachute as a gift from which Mom made a blouse for herself. The farmers’ children liked Mom. His mother, however, revered Hitler and told Mom that Hitler was too kind to the Poles. On November 10, 1944, my mother was liberated by the Americans and asked about the treatment she received from this family. Her truthful testimony saved the family from retribution. On December 12, 1944, my mother was issued an Allied Expeditionary Force D.P. Index Card (which I still have). Then she, along with other liberated Eastern European laborers, was transported from refugee camp to refugee camp in Belgium and then France, eventually ending up in Roubaix, France.
Sometime in February 1944, my then twenty-two-year-old father, Witold Samulski, left Warsaw, Poland, with a Gestapo bounty on his head. He had already served two years and nine months in the Armia Krajowa (AK), the Polish home resistance army, working to sabotage German occupation forces, following in the footsteps of his older brother, Jurek. Jurek spoke flawless German and often went on covert resistance operations dressed as a German officer. Tragically, after someone in his resistance cell betrayed him, Jurek was thrown into the infamous Pawiak Prison in Warsaw. The Warsaw underground put a plan in motion to rescue him during transport from Pawiak to a labor camp. The night before the plan was to be put into action, Jurek died from torture in the prison.
Luckily, my father found an ingenious way to escape his brother’s fate. He signed up for a German work detail and was shipped off first to Germany and then Austria, probably close to the mountains near the Italian border. Once he and a friend heard about the Italian partisans in the area, they somehow managed to escape the Germans. They fled into the mountains and wandered from village to village asking where they could find the partisans. Tired and hungry after two weeks of being chased out of villages, they sat in a forest clearing and contemplated their fate: either die of hunger or be captured by the Fascists. Suddenly, the partisans came out of the forest and asked them, “Are you the two idiots who are asking everyone where to find us?”
Life with the Italian partisans was a study in contradictions. The partisans were Communists who held a Catholic field Mass every month. They all wore a medal of the Madonna blessing them. Dad kept his medal; it remains in my hands with the rest of his memorabilia. As teenagers, my sister and I were so entranced by his story that we begged him to teach us the Communist partisan anthem, which he would sing on occasion. I still remember the verse he taught us: “Avanti o popolo, ala riscossa, Bandiera rossa, bandiera rossa….” Since Dad did not like to talk about the war very much, I don’t know the names of the places in Germany, Austria, Italy, or Egypt where his story took place. Shortly before his final illness, however, he assembled all his and Mom’s wartime documents in a three-ring binder. These documents provide dates for the events of their stories.
On July 18, 1944, my father enlisted in the Second Corp of the Allied Forces. He served as a lance corporal in Italy, Egypt, and Great Britain. On September 29, 1947, he was demobilized in Greenock, Great Britain, earning honors from both the Polish and Italian militaries. He soon moved to France where he was assigned to work as a miner. As he watched the miners ascending from the pit, he threw down his gear and announced, “I don’t care if they jail me, I am not going down there!” But to remain in France legally, he needed to be employed. Somehow, Dad landed a job in a brassiere factory in Roubaix. Around the same time, my mother also found a job in a textile factory in Roubaix. It was there, in the Polish refugee community, where they met. In March 1949, both my parents were officially recognized as refugees by the International Refugee Organization (IRO).
The only keepsakes my parents had from Poland were their German-occupation identity papers, which they never viewed as cherished keepsakes. In their hearts, they carried fond memories of their home, a yearning to return to their country and their families, and stories of endurance they shared with my sister and me. Politics precluded their safe return to Poland. Treasured letters and photographs became their link to loved ones far away. They maintained their Polish identity with fellow refugees through traditional church and social activities. Preparing to eventually return to their homeland, my parents educated my sister and me to be fully literate in Polish. The refugee Polish community became our surrogate family.
On May 14, 1949, my parents began their married life together in Roubaix, France, with nothing. My mother sewed my father’s wedding shirt and it ended up having a crooked collar. Their friends organized an “al fresco” wedding dinner, which featured one chicken as the main meat course for all attendees. My sister and I (by now used to American family packs of chicken parts) would ask in sharp surprised tones, “But mom how could you feed all those people with one chicken?” She would answer, “Ah my children, you can’t imagine how grateful we were for the little we had, after having next to nothing during the war. Everyone took the piece of chicken they liked the most, even if it was just a part of the wing or the backbone.”
Stanislawa amd Witold Samulski'wedding in Roubaix, France 1949.
Eventually, my parents had to accept that they would not be able to return to their beloved homeland, Poland, any time soon. Poland’s socialist (Communist) government had branded wartime refugees “traitors” who would face harsh punishment upon their return to the homeland. My mother had cousins in the United States who helped our family immigrate. We arrived in New York City, aboard the ocean liner Liberté, in May 1956, some of the last post–World War II immigrants under the Displaced Persons Act. My parents had lived in France for about nine years. They sold their modest furnishings and packed carefully selected belongings into two large shipping boxes. A bank draft of their life’s savings was forwarded to a cousin’s bank account in Chicago.
Stanislawa, Witold, Danuta and Teresa Samulski) in Chicago approximately 1958-1959.
The shipping boxes contained mostly clothes and linens as well as some indispensable household items. The most important of these was the yellow French enameled drip coffeepot. It always stood tall on the stove, clean and ready to brew another pot of coffee, next to the kettle of boiled water. My mother did not trust tap water. She always had boiled water on hand for drinking and cooking.
My father could not function without coffee. Every morning my mother made a pot of coffee for our breakfast and his thermos. Yes, even my sister and I drank coffee for breakfast, just not the Starbucks-strength coffee my father preferred. Our coffee was watered down with boiled hot water and fortified with milk and a little bit of sugar.
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French yellow-enameled drip coffee pot.
The ritual of making coffee was sacred. My father did not tolerate percolated coffee (an abomination in his mind). “Who in their right mind boils coffee except Americans?” he would ask rhetorically. First the kettle was put on. While it boiled, the coffee beans were ground and deposited into the removable top of the coffeepot (the brewing compartment). This was a cylinder approximately four inches tall with a fine metal mesh bottom (the filter) and an open top, capped by a removable metal strainer. This coffee-filled cylinder was then placed back on top of the coffeepot. Freshly boiled water was poured slowly through the strainer until the brewing compartment was full. Then the cover was put on, and we waited until the hot water filtered through the ground coffee completely before pouring more hot boiled water through the strainer. It would take at least four or more pours to make one pot of delicious coffee.
This is how we always made coffee for our family of four, for guests, even for large celebrations of twenty or more. As we got older, my mother taught me and then my younger sister how to properly make coffee. You had to consistently pour the hot water as soon as the brewing compartment was empty, to ensure a continuous brewing process and extract maximum flavor from the ground coffee beans. My parents were not gourmands, but no coffee would ever taste as good as that brewed in the yellow French enameled drip coffeepot!
When the original fine metal mesh bottom filter deteriorated, my father fashioned a new one from a small sieve. Eventually, all the enamel wore away from the interior of the pot, and my mother wrote to a friend in France asking if they could send her a replacement. This was highly unusual, as my mother (like many immigrants of her generation) always made do with what was at hand. But as my sister and I had been unable to locate a French enameled drip coffeepot in the States and an electric drip coffeepot simply would not do, she had no choice. It was unthinkable to live without an occasional cup of properly made coffee!
As my parents aged, they mostly drank instant coffee. But no family dinner, celebration, or holiday gathering was complete without real coffee brewed in the yellow French enameled drip coffeepot!