Degrees of Treasure

I have boxes... and boxes piled on more boxes. Some are full of memories I call mine. Some are full of memories that once belonged to wonderful people who are now gone. It is of the latter type I write about today.

Two nights ago, I came across some such boxes in the basement room I use for storage. It happened while I was doing my best to reorganize a room where these containers seemed more like boulders from the poem Mending Wall (Robert Frost, 1914) than boxes.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun...

There is not much ground-swell or sun to speak of in my basement; still, the boxes always seem to find their way to the floor in disarray. Nothing natural here, but more "the work of hunters" and the result of a year’s worth of looking for things stored away there.

While reorganizing such a room, it is fun to imagine stumbling across a lost treasure—and even more delightful to actually do it. One such box of “treasure” contained more than twenty complete newspapers that belonged to my Aunt Theresa and some partial newspapers that most certainly belonged to my Grandmother Victoria because of their age.

Upon realizing what I had found, I took photos of the newspapers that most awe-struck me and shared them here.

All of them have been uploaded in large format, so you can click on them to make the image larger (and more readable).

1 September 1939

My grandmother's older sister had a son who would be my great-grandparent's only grandson; he died that day, one of many who tried in vain to defend Poland from the invasion.

20 December 1939

5 June 1944

8 May 1945

And the oldest Newspaper in the box... from the end of World War One.

27 June 1919

My grandmother left Poland in December 1909 to come to America, sparing herself two world wars and the atrocities of a madman. Unfortunately, things were different for the family she had to leave behind.

These newspapers are treasures if for no reason other than my grandmother and aunt put them away for safekeeping.

However, it was after looking through the newspapers that the most valuable treasure in the box was found. A treasure that left me speechless. It is a photo of my Grandmother with her firstborn son, Alex. 

On the back of the photo, 1914 is written, the same year Robert Frost penned the poem I mentioned earlier. In the photo, my grandmother is just twenty-three years old and four years out of Poland. My mother would not be born until 1932.

The word treasure is often a relative term. And this, in my eyes, is a treasure of immense proportion.