The Last of the Immigrant Generation: She Wrapped Americans Around Her Little Finger
By: Joseph Serwach
Tags: Life Lessons, History, Family, Self, Catholic

Fifty years ago today — 10 days before Christmas — we lost Grandma Vickie. Exactly six years later — to the day — my Grandpa John joined her.

They were only related by my parent’s marriage, the date of their death, and a whistle. Grandpa John was my mother’s father, while Great-Grandma Vickie was my dad’s grandmother. Vickie remembered John (six years her junior) whistling as she passed years earlier. She always stood out.

Finding a long lost great grandparent— and your true identity

My mom was 22, and I was a newborn when Mom was bathing me. My Great-Grandma Vickie, then a 66-year-old widow in Hamtramck, Michigan, lived on the same street (Belmont Street, where the first American statue of St. John Paul the Great would be erected 20 years later).

Suddenly, Belmont’s peaceful harmony was disrupted by the jarring sounds of shattering glass.

“Victoria! Victoria!’’ a local Polish barber screamed as he smashed every window in her wood-frame home, sending the mighty winter cold air throughout the house. “I LOVE YOU! I love you! I love you!’’

Grandma Vickie’s influence over admirers was remarkable. We have photos of her standing front and center as:

The only lady in a room of powerful men (including Congressmen, judges, priests, and business leaders).

At the groundbreaking at what is now the Archdiocesan Shrine of St. John Paul.

At meetings, leading parades, standing on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.

Standing amidst a large group of students. Events she organized attracted thousands.

She asked a Polish jeweler she visited to appraise gifts given by admirers to determine whether they were precious or “junk.”

I once asked her daughter, my Grandma Helen, what Grandma Vickie did for a living, and she grinned from ear to ear, paused, then laughed, and said, “She was a socialite!’’

Grandma Vickie is the only one of my great-grandparents I remember vividly. She lived down the street from us on Belmont near Joseph Campau Avenue, and I remember her asking me if I wanted to eat some tongue.

I remember thinking tongue looked and sounded incredibly strange and foreign. But I trusted and respected my elders, so I ate it. That was the first and last time someone fed me tongue, which seemed like an unusual thing to eat then and, something that seems even more unusual now.

Polish women are “persevering and unrelenting insurgents”

My other seven great-grandparents died between 1937 and 1965 (before my time). Yet, all were vitally important because every one of them was an immigrant, the generation who made the big leap to leave Eastern Europe for America, and every one of them chose to move to Michigan eventually.

A 19th-century Russian autocrat, Governor N.W. Berg described Polish women with words that describe Grandma Vickie quite accurately. Berg wrote:

“There are few countries in the world where the feminine element takes on such importance. Men in Poland are prone sometimes to sudden changes of mood, to highs and lows, to the ebb and flow of events. “They change color and humor, they weary of combat, they fall prey to discouragement; women never. Polish women are persevering and unrelenting insurgents… “They are all beautiful, always effervescent. Small walking volcanoes. Beware of touching them! At once the sparks begin to fly. Their unrestrained imagination takes off into the infinite. Polish women are all radiance, vision, prayer. “Only the priest with the crucifix of the Savior in his hand, dispensing the forgiveness of Jesus or brandishing the threat of hell, has power over them. They admit to no subjection… They lack neither character nor courage.’’

Born in 1899 in Warsaw, she was among the last generation born during the 123 years Poland was wiped off the map by its conquering neighbors. In America, she was still a teenager coming of age when Poland regained its independence in 1918.

A follower of Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the “Polish George Washington” and revolutionary who regained Poland's independence in 1918, she dedicated her Hamtramck-based Sea League to Pilsudski. She raised money and support for the Polish Intelligentsia to fight the German Nazis and Russian Communists who captured Poland starting in 1939.

She grew up in a transformative time. Her father was a judge in Poland. But Russian-occupied Poland was coming apart at the seams in the first decade of the 20th century. She and her mother escaped.

At age 13, she came to America where she married my Great-Grandpa Antoni Polec (1885–1937), another Polish immigrant and a Ford mill-right who could “take any car apart and put it back together again.”

Their neighbors, the Kowalski family, started a sausage company that is now one of Michigan’s largest. Antoni Polec’s skills were so important to the Ford Motor Co. that he was able to set his own schedule to make return trips to Poland, where he invested in a hotel. Antoni Polec died in Poland in 1937.

Her second husband, Mieczysław Leszczyński (1892–1957), worked with the Archbishop of Detroit, leading a company that painted, built, and rebuilt many great parishes of the Archdiocese.

When she married Great-Grandpa Mieczyslaw on September 9, 1950 (the second marriage for both), more than 1,000 attended the wedding at their home parish of St. Florian in Hamtramck.

Her events at Orchard Lake drew crowds of more than 4,500 from Polish communities across the United States.

From bishops and priests to bankers, professors, and members of Congress to plumbers and tradesmen, men were hard-pressed to tell her “No.’’

She was often the only woman in large meetings of the male leaders of the time. She told her grandson, my dad: “I want you to go to Orchard Lake for high school and college then go to the Orchard Lake Polish Seminary to become a priest.”

When her grandson instead chose to stay close to home and pursue his dream of marriage, family, and a career in law enforcement, she told him, “I danced with the Sheriff on the Boblo Boat and whispered in his ear. Go see him tomorrow.”

The sheriff the next morning had one question for my father: “You’re the grandson of Victoria Leszczynska? Here’s your badge.’’

Our missions and the ancestors who died before we knew them

Modern culture teaches us to reject our families, past lives, faiths, and even our national icons as soon as they are criticized for doing something “unworthy” of current thinking.

It teaches us to run from troubled relationships, to rewrite our histories, and to defy all who prove unworthy in any way (which is ultimately, basically everyone and everything).

Father Mathias Thelen calls this “a culture of dishonor.’’ Many Americans spend 40 hours per week watching stories about messed up families and relationships, including children defying their parents, Thelen notes.

These modern shows and films typically portray the father figures as buffoons or monsters, with the sassy offspring offering the newest bright ideas. Some of the most successful, most enduring cultures, including Poles, the Chinese, the British, and the Japanese, teach us to honor and respect our elders, especially our fathers and mothers.

Father Mathias stresses the Fourth Commandment is “the only one with a promise” attached to it: “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you.’’ The other nine commandments don’t state what will happen if you follow them (at least not in the same sentence).

“Christian honor is honoring those who might not even deserve it,’’ Thelen notes. “You honor someone based on who they are, not how well they do it. If you only honor someone based on how well they did their job, it makes your actions a slave to their behavior.’’

Whenever I work with an organization, we learn about the founders and the history of how it started and where it came from and what it is best at, and what it does that no one else can. Each of us must do the same to learn our identity, our calling, our mission, and what God has planned for us. If we trust Jesus, pray to understand God’s Will, and call on the power of the Holy Spirit, anything is possible.

As St. John Paul said during his last visit to Hamtramck in 1987: