Jonathan Kołodziej Durand will be in Ottawa for a screening of his film, “Memory is Our Homeland” on April 13. It is a must for anyone interested in the history of defeated, betrayed countries, nations whose conquerors were determined to erase their history. Jonathan’s grandmother was from Poland, a country attacked by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia during WWII; the country survived but much changed. Mass murder, deportations and cultural destruction, followed by more post-war population transfers, all took their toll. But memory has a way of surviving even the most powerful aggressors. Remnants of memories, gathered and shared help us to understand our history “writ large,” as Tony Muszynski put it in our conversation today. Tony and I share a passion for that history, both the remnants and the writ large. He just found a new book by a geologist in British Columbia, Paul Wojdak, “Escape from Siberia, Escape from  Memory: An Odyssey Across Two Oceans & Nine Countries to Arrive Home.”  I have ordered it but meanwhile, here is an excerpt from Wojdak’s book about Durand.

“Jonathan Durand is the Canadian grandson of a World War II Sybirak. Durand produced the film Memory is Our Homeland, about the discovery of his grandparents' home in the Kresy region of pre-war Poland. Durand used family memories to locate the remains of the ancestral house in a tiny village that is now in Belarus and has a different name. Durand knew that his grandmother was in a Polish refugee camp in British East Africa during the war. He found film footage from a British documentary film project made during World War II. The project was not completed; the film lay in BBC archives for more than fifty years until he viewed it and, to his amazement, discovered images of his grandmother as a teenage girl! Truly a cultural memory. But Durand's story is more than the discovery of a cultural memory- it shows, once again, that loved ones may reach out across time to find us”

"Persistence and research can uncover amazing family history. My father grew up in Poland but he was born in Siberia. He was an orphan in Japan and America. He scarcely told me any of that but I found documents to prove it, including his registration at an orphanage in Milwaukee. I obtained World War Two military records showing he was conscripted into the German army and defected to the Polish Army in Italy."