Trains: A Journey of Remembrances

John Stanley is a senior policy advisor in the Corporate Policy Branch
Management Board Secretariat, Government of Ontario. He is co-editor of
Nation and History: Polish Historians from the Enlightenment to the
Second World War.

This memoir of an emigrant to Canada breaks the mould of immigrant
narratives: Irena Szpak emphasizes the first part of what she herself
terms a “double life,” while employing a non-linear structure.
It’s a useful construct in such a memoir. Although her Canadian life
pops into the tale from time to time, her book is dominated by an
exciting, if dangerous, life before coming to Canada.

The centre of this book is Szpak’s participation in the Warsaw
Uprising of 1944. As a Polish Girl Guide, she became a messenger, racing
throughout the city to deliver commands to various units, dodging
snipers and evading capture by the German troops who destroyed the city
and killed 150,000 of its inhabitants. She was captured and fortunately
regarded as a prisoner of war. After interment in a POW camp, she was
transferred to a work detail in various German factories. Liberation
found her enjoying the favour of the British army. Like so many Poles,
she did not go back to her Communist-controlled homeland, but instead
emigrated—first to London, and then to southern Ontario. These
adolescent experiences naturally shaped her life and her description of
life in Canada, where she eventually became a translator in the private
sector, has a distance that denotes an alienation from the bourgeois
existence that she now enjoys in retirement. While she lives a
comfortable life with her family and appreciates the cultural
opportunities available, all pales when compared to her earlier
experiences.

Given the author’s emphasis on her World War II experiences, neither
the title nor the Library and Archives Canada call number (which labels
the work as the autobiography of a translator) does justice to the book.
Szpak’s work is an atypical memoir that bears note.