Eve Zaremba was born in Kalisz on 29th December 1930. One year after the outbreak of the war she and her mother left Poland and went to Paris to meet Eve’s father, a Polish Army officer. After one and a half year in France the Zaremba family moved to London for a while and then to Scotland where they lived for 10 years.
In 1952 Eve Zaremba emigrated with her parents to Canada. Since 1955 she has been living in Toronto where she graduated from the University of Toronto. Back in the 1970s and 1980s she was an activist in organizations promoting equal rights for women. She was a co-founder of „Broadside, A Feminist Review”. She is the author of a series of mystery novels and „Privilege of Sex. A century of Canadian Women”, an anthology of Canadian women writers prose.
Eve Zaremba worked in a library, advertising agency, publishing house and she owned a bookshop. Currently, she is retired.
Interviewed by Magdalena Wnuk on 23rd May 2015 in Warsaw.
I was born in Kalisz, but we did not live there very long. A few months, so it does not matter, actually. Ma father was stationed somewhere around Cracow, so for a few years, the first three years, I lived in Cracow, in a military house for officers which was a townhouse-turned-officer accommodations. I do not remember much at all, I was very small. I have an older brother, had, he is gone now of course. All of those people are. He was 10 years older than me. He was born in 1920, his name was Andrzej. So in 1935, maybe 1936, but I think it was 1935, can’t remember exactly, they moved my father to Warsaw, so the last 4–5 years we spent in Warsaw, in Mokotów, at 39 Narbutta Street. That is where I attended school for the first two years. In September 1939, had it not been for the war, I would have been in the third grade.
So we have no news about father, and then we get a message. A message with fathers handwriting and he wrote something like “My beloved, I am working as always and reminiscing our engagement period”. So, of course it had been censored but we all knew what he meant. He was saying he was still in the army and that he is reminiscing their engagement period. They got married in Paris in 1919. We had known that father crossed the border, then we found out it was through Romania, he was wounded, but not heavily. Then he reached France and many Polish soldiers reached it as well. So my mother, like I said, she was very spirited, said we had to go find him. So the Germans have reached Warsaw, you couldn’t go anywhere without a stamped permit. There’s this saying, “It isn’t about what you know, it is about who you know”. My parents were bridge players, they played bridge with the Italian ambassador. So my mother went and got a permit from the Italian authorities, an Italian visa. It was still 1939, so Italy was not officially at war yet. So now we needed a permit from the Germans with that visa. That was the beginning, because later, after January 1940, they stopped giving it, but they gave us a travel permit from Warsaw to Italy through Vienna. So they gave my mother, two other little girls and me permission to leave. My brother didn’t, he was 19, conscription age, they did not let him go. He didn’t want to anyway. He didn’t want to go. He had already got involved there, naturally, he was a guy, in his teens, had been doing his own thing, the Underground, you see. And Grandma, Grandma Anna also didn’t want to, or... anyway we got it... mother got permission to leave, so you could say that I left Poland as a, I don’t know what it’s called, an emigrant or a runaway. A refugee, okay? We would later be called exiles. Okay. I mean that I left with mother and those two little girls whose parents had asked mother to take because they had family in Rome, in Italy in any case. That was in early January 1940 and I just turned 9. I turned 9 on December 29 and left Poland about a week later.
From Rome, we went to Paris. Father was there with the army and the Carpathian Brigade in Syria was being formed, so father went to Syria from France. That was before France fell, because Syria was French territory. Father spoke French, he really disliked what the French army was like anyway. He had little faith they could defend themselves because they just refused to listen to what the Poles were teaching them about what Germans were doing. And the French still had that barrier, the Maginot Line, and they thought it would somehow... Never mind. Anyway, father left with Kopański. Kopański would later become a general. As his superior, he commanded the brigade that was being formed... there was no brigade yet. It was being formed in Syria. I was sent to a French boarding school. I didn’t get any... I did not learn any French because it was only a couple of months and I only remember rote memorisation and that they would give us wine, they would give wine diluted with water to nine year olds, always with water. But that is all I can remember from that time...
There were many Poles in London at that time, it was certainly emigration. For most of the war, we hoped that we would return to a free Poland. The government still existed and when you have a government, then you have politicians and things. Not my cup of tea. I had no interest in that. I loved my family and would speak and read Polish. At the time, I would read all Polish authors like Sienkiewicz and others, but actually my relationship with Polish ended when I was 10 or 12 years old, something like that.
Then of course the Germans attacked so mother rushed in and grabbed me and we went with the others, a whole group of Polish families, to the north of France, to Saint-Jean-de-Luz. And there, in 1940, it was 1941 or the end of 1940, can’t remember anymore. Anyway France was falling and “Batory”, a Polish ship was docked in Saint-Jean-de-Luz and we loaded everything up onto that ship. Nobody checked anything. People fought to get on board and we went to England. And I stayed in England since then. In England and Scotland, because we later moved to Scotland. I attended school in Scotland and learned English there. And I spent the rest of my childhood in Scotland and England, in England, in London. When Gen. Sikorski died in Gibraltar, my father and Kopański were moved to London. The other way around, Kopański was moved and my father with him. So the final two years of the war we spent together. We knew nothing about Andrzej, the only thing we eventually found out was that he was in Auschwitz: he had been arrested, locked up in Pawiak and taken to Auschwitz, that was it. That was the message we got from grandma through Switzerland. Eventually, the war came to an end, Jalta, our passports were taken away, I had a job, father had a job. In 1952, I said I had had enough, I said I did not like it there, but I was completely... my English was fluent I had a Scottish accent. So what? I had actually learned English in Scotland over the first few years. Those first few years were important. So in 1952, with my father and mother, or they with me actually, it was my initiative. I said I was not staying in England. All of our friends, many friends from London, mostly officers and their wives, families of Polish officers who had stayed in England, about half a million at the time, not like we knew half a million people, but we did have many friends. But I said I was not staying so they decided to go with me. So we went to Canada. Why Canada? Why not? It went like this. There was no difference between Australia and Canada for us as we knew nothing about either of those places. But father had a friend he had met in the army who had already gone to Canada and had a tomato farm there. So we came to Canada thinking we would be working the fields, that we would be picking tomatoes. Many others also came to work as housekeepers. It was supposed to last for two years and later... But nobody really cared. So we came to Canada aboard the “Empress of Canada. Canadian Pacific”, to Montreal. We took a train from Montreal to Toronto and were picked up in Toronto by the son of that guy from... that friend of my father’s. It was late June, early July 1952. And I live in Canada to this day. I live here and like it a lot. This is my home, my country. I feel at home, I understand the politics, I understand what the people here are saying, not only the language, but the culture as well.
Well… I'll tell this in English, it will be easier, because it all happened in English, that makes difference. It’s a little science fiction, it’s a little… a messenger from another world, you know. And they, they, very of course, very interested in some ways as to what it was like, but I really can’t tell them because I was eight. But I know it was different. And my, and my sensibility is a very North American one, now I realized. You know, it’s a lot of the, the formalities, the things that used to do here. On one hand, you know. On the other hand, the language which is changed and been added to in ways that, you know, I just don’t comprehend at all. So, it’s a, it’s a foreign country to me. I have recollections of course, but it’s, it’s not home. It has nothing to do me with, you have, I mean, you know, I am who I am, but this country has gone through so much, that I have no idea, that I have not experienced. That, that it’s, never going to, you know, never going to be anything but a very exotic place.
Past matters and I think the past matters. I am very historically oriented. I read history, I am interested in history, I think history matters. And in that sense it’s not a very North American way to be, but you know, we’re not all the same, you know. So, it's just an aspect of mine. I think partly, I certainly inherited the interest of my family, was that, was interest of my, my family, but it… It’s why I left London or England, even then in ‘52 I felt like I was being held back somehow, like I was being restrained. There was all this tradition, all this way of doing things, that you know… So when I go to Canada see, it really freed me, I really felt very free.
