Identity, Attachment and Resilience

Exploring Three Generations of a Polish Family

Antonia Bifulco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138701724
• eBook ISBN: 9781351789509
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Identity, Attachment and Resilience provides a timely foray into the new field of psychology and genealogy, exploring the relationship between family history and identity. The field encompasses family narratives and researches family history to increase our understanding of cultural and personal identity, as well as our sense of self. It draws on emotional geography and history to provide rich yet personalised contexts for family experience.

In this book, Antonia Bifulco researches three generations of her own Czechowski family, beginning in Poland in the late nineteenth century and moving on to post-WWII England. She focuses on key family members and places to describe individual experience against the socio-political backdrop of both World Wars. Utilising letters, journals and handwritten biographies of family members, the book undertakes an analysis of impacts on identity (sense of self ), attachment (family ties) and resilience (coping under adversity), drawing out timely wider themes of immigration and European identity.

Representing a novel approach for psychologists, linking family narrative to social context and intergenerational impacts, Identity, Attachment and Resilience describes Eastern European upheaval over the twentieth century to explain why Polish communities have settled in England. With particular relevance for Polish families seeking to understand their cultural heritage and identity, this unique account will be of great interest to any reader interested in family narratives, immigration and identity. It will appeal to students and researchers of psychology, history and social sciences.

1

TRUST

Introducing family narratives

Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. If life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired.

Erik Erikson

A famous Polish ship

In April 1958, a Polish transatlantic passenger ship, the MS Stefan Batory, docked in Southampton, England. The liner had crossed the Baltic Sea from its base in Gdynia, North Poland, leaving behind a grey communist Poland locked behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ of East Europe. It was one of the first ships transporting Polish nationals to visit their displaced families in England. It brought my grandmother Maria Czechowska to her only son and his family after a separation of nearly twenty years. This ship had a history of its own – one that mirrored not only an important piece of Polish modern history, but also the eccentricity, heroism, hospitality, determination and flair for being at the centre of events, typical of Poland and the Poles.

I only learned about this ship when checking the facts of my grandmother’s journey to England from Poland in researching our family story. I had in my possession one first class ticket, a list of personal items to follow on as freight and a letter recalling difficulties of leaving the country. One of the delights about such research is that seemingly peripheral elements can prove to be a rich source of cultural interest. The MS Stefan Batory is one such instant. Named after a 16th-century king of Poland, the ocean liner was built for luxury, comfort and culture, and in the 1930s transported passengers across the Atlantic. The ship was 160 metres long, several levels high, with seven decks, guest cabins, dining halls, dance halls, a reading room, three bars, a swimming pool and a gym. The interiors were elegant and modern for its time, decorated with silver art deco by famous artists of the day, giving it a name as a floating art showroom¹ (Aksamit, 2015). A tourist attraction when it arrived at the Polish Baltic seaside town of Gdynia in 1936 from Italy, it was among the best-known Polish ships of the time. Her sailing route was from Gdynia to Southampton, and then across the Atlantic to New York. The ship sailed for 34 years, undertaking hundreds of transatlantic crossings.

The aspects that carried it into legend include an eccentric captain (Borkowski), a large-hearted mariner crew and a list of daring escapades. It pirated illegal liquor from Canada to the USA during prohibition. When war broke out in 1939, the Batory was in Canadian waters and was one of the few free Polish ships in the conflict, being refitted as an Allied warship and then spending 652 days continuously at sea. All the luxurious interiors were stripped out, and it was refurnished with guns and sailors’ accommodation. It was given the name ‘the lucky ship’ because of the number of times it evaded the German U-boat submarines and bombers throughout the war. Its escapades involved transporting treasures to Canada from Britain and Poland for safekeeping away from the Nazis, and taking injured French and British soldiers from the ill-fated battle of Narwik in Norway to safety in England. It also evacuated 500 British children to safety in Australia in the summer of 1940. The children enjoyed a happy eleven-week voyage and called it the ‘singing ship’ (Aksamit, 2015). They later remembered the Stefan Batory with affection and formed a reunion on the ship in 1968 for its final voyage. In the early post-war years, the ship carried more than 100 people to asylum in foreign cities from East Europe behind the Iron Curtain. During the communist years the ship was a more sombre affair used only for the political elite of the regime, and for those artists and writers who found political favour. The atmosphere on the ship grew grim. The ocean liner finally went to China to be scrapped in 1971. Its importance is only now being recognised, and a replica is being built and housed in a museum in Gdynia.

Its most valuable cargo for my family in April 1958 was my grandmother, Maria. She left her homeland from the port in Gdynia and settled with us in England for the remaining four years of her life. She had last seen her son, my father Jurek, on the eve of war in September 1939. She was to meet my mother Christine for the first time, and my two older sisters (aged 9 and 6) and myself (aged 3). Like the ship, my grandmother had been in the centre of the historical cyclone in the first half of the twentieth century. She had lived through three wars in each of which her city of Warsaw had been threatened, until eventually razed to the ground. The ship reunited a family. The lady and the ship were both carriers of their culture and history. Both were survivors.

While I have no memory of meeting my grandmother for the first time, the family story tells that my parents; two older sisters and I piled into our secondhand black Buick car and drove from our home town of Derby in the English Midlands to Southampton docks. My grandmother arrived in style, first class on the ocean liner, quite an occasion in austere 1950s England and more so for passengers used to far greater austerity in communist Poland. This marked the first year that people could cross the Iron Curtain. My grandmother had sold all her possessions in Warsaw, travelled by train to stay with her Cygler relatives in Gdansk and sailed alone for a new country. She brought with her beautifully made Polish presents for us children, and to my mother she gave her jewellery collected from more affluent times: aquamarine from Russia, a Longine Swiss watch, a diamond bracelet, coral and amber. She was giving away her few treasured possessions to her only daughter-in-law. Maria returned with us to our modest 1930s three-bedroomed, semi-detached house in Chaddesden, Derby.

All four grand-daughters (my youngest sister, Joanna was born the year after she arrived) learned Polish and benefitted greatly from the additional care and culture she provided in the home. My mother Christine found it less easy. The understandable female competition in the household was perhaps a burden for her, but her own strong Irish Catholic sense of familial duty kept her steady. Indeed, it was Christine who insisted my grandmother come to England to live with us. I knew little of my grandmother’s earlier life and, like many of her generation, she seldom spoke about her past. I was to learn much more. Having started with the aim of writing about my father, one of the unexpected treasures along the way included the story of my grandparents and their extraordinary times.

The biographic enterprise

The story behind my father’s family and how we came to be living in England involves a fairly common tale of people transplanted across Europe, propelled by the key political events in the middle of the twentieth century. The story is a variant on a well-known European theme about wartime displacement and movements of populations due to fight or flight, but the details vary for each family or individual. Many of the details remain largely unfamiliar to a British audience, particularly those of a younger generation. Behind the sketchily known historical facts about Poland lies the more complex detail of individuals and families caught in the historical drama. Focusing history on particular times, places and contexts reveals additional detail of the mechanisms around travel, resistance and survival to provide insight into how individuals coped, the choices they made and the determinants of resilience. For my generation (I was born in 1955), we feel a relatively close connection with the Second World War. I was born ten years after the war ended, my eldest sister only four years after. During childhood, it seemed an age later, a different world and time. Now looking back it seems only a relatively short time after, and many of the post-war impacts were certainly present.

Somewhat harder to grasp, personally, is the experience of our grandparents’ generation who lived in the late Victorian era emerging from a traditional to a modern mechanised world at the turn of the twentieth century. Much has been written and televised about the trauma and hardship suffered in the First World War starting soon after the century began. In Britain, we mainly think of the trench warfare in Flanders, with gunfire that could be heard across the English Channel from Hampstead heath, and needless slaughter of large numbers of men. Less attention is given to the Eastern Front (the war in fact having been triggered in Serbia), the warfare involving cavalry, as well as early armoured cars and machine guns, at the confluence of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. The fighting on the Eastern Front was mainly on Polish territory. For complex reasons, Poles found themselves’ fighting in these three different armies, at times directly against each other. The (now) capital Warsaw has been one of the most threatened cities in the last century. The only European capital invaded by the German army during the First World War, under attack by the Red Army in the Polish–Soviet war, and then under siege by the Nazis at the start of the Second World War. The city of Warsaw takes centre stage in much of the family narrative.

My aim is to turn a personal family account into a narrative woven through with the historical and social context of the time, to add to our understanding of cultural narrative as related to psychological themes. This can provide a more empathic way of understanding the past to aid our continual redefining of our sense of identity as a nation or culture. It also touches, of course, on the European enterprise – a brave consolidation of states united after the war to make a further world war unthinkable. It has now evolved into a more complex entity that recently had triggered very diverse passions.

A psychological approach

As a lifespan psychologist, I have been involved in the collection of many hundreds of life history interviews in the course of research to develop understanding of life stress, trauma and psychological disorder. These narratives have provided essential information about the impact of the social environment on individuals across lifetimes and generations. It has shown the long-term ill-effects of childhood trauma, which impairs adult well-being, relationships and parenting of the next generation (Bifulco, Bernazzani, Moran and Ball, 2000; Bifulco, Moran, Jacobs and Bunn, 2009). These stories from ‘ordinary’ people, living mainly in London, were provided willingly. The speakers were conscious of the importance of their experience, and of the intrinsic value of narrating such life stories to aid under standing of the experiential basis of clinical disorder or well-being. A lifespan model emerged showing how individuals deal with loss, trauma, rejection, neglect or abuse, sometimes with damaging personal impacts, sometimes with resilience, but always going through personal and psychological change (Bifulco, 2009). One recent analysis examined just two individual cases to illustrate key themes, involving the Second World War experiences of two women, one in Germany and the other, Jewish, in England (Bifulco, 2015). This was a spur to the current narrative. Whilst no life story is the same, patterns emerge that give us important messages about aids to survival, including the importance of close support and loving relationships – that is, our attachment context. Good coping strategies are important, as are competence, planning and emotional control to deal with adversity. Optimism is key. This book is an attempt to explore such resilience.

The book outlines a period from the time of my grandparents’ birth in 1886 through to my father coming to England in 1943, his marriage to my mother in 1948 and my grandmother’s voyage to England in 1958. It will conclude with an outline of my family’s life in England after the war up to the 1970s, and the current family contacts between Poland and England in 2016. Throughout, I will relate the family events to the political-social context of the times with a focus on Poland and East Europe and then West Europe and Britain.

Sociology and context

This approach, of understanding people within their social context, also borrows from a very long British sociological tradition (Mayhew, 1851). In this tradition, Young and Willmott studied poverty in East London through extensive detailed interviews and by this changed social policy (Young and Willmott, 1957/2007). This approach was also voiced in the research tradition where I first learned my skills, with Brown and Harris’s contextualised study of stress in London working-class women (Brown and Harris, 1978). In a similar vein, the mass observation documents of the Second World War, originally initiated to monitor morale, have been a rich source of data about day-to-day experiences for ordinary people in wartime (Koa Wing, 2007). The difference with the present narrative is that I will talk about a professional and upper-class family who lived through trauma, and the vilification and victimisation produced alternately by Bolshevism (regarding class) and Nazisim (regarding race), and how this impacted on them individually and as a family and led to their uprooting and replanting. The proposition is that individuals born into privilege can also suffer trauma and victimisation, which is psychologically no less meaningful.

Genealogical study and family narrative

Paula Nicolson has recently published a genealogical study of both her family and her husband’s family, in order to use personal material to highlight important psychological themes (P. Nicolson, 2017). This represents a new branch of psych ology. It brings together diverse writers like Erikson, emerging from the psycho analytic tradition of the 1950s, to the sociology of Giddens forty years later, in ves ti gating the development of a sense of self (Erikson, 1950; Giddens, 1995). Zerubavel, more recently, has looked at how culture drives our understanding about relatives and genealogy. He points to society rather than human nature shaping our mental lives, with social groups involved in shared patterns of thinking (Zerubavel, 2011). This is a broad span of theory in which to consider the impact of the social environment on the individual and family over time. Much of it develops through the family narrative created in family conversation across generations, but is also open to verification through public record. This inter disciplinary approach seeks to extend the usual psychological approaches to understanding individuals and groups.

Family narratives have also been used to develop individual well-being in therapeutic contexts. Understanding of our own past, but also that of our parents or previous generations, can generate self-knowledge (Fivush, Bohanek and Duke, 2008). Having the ability to share our memories with others enables us to incorporate a sense of past experience, which expands our own sense of self to take into account those common to the family as a whole. Personal narratives are often told by parents to their children, in the family setting. These can be about shared experiences, but can also include parents’ accounts of their past, creating a sense of self through historical time. The family story thus goes beyond personal recall. By the time children are old enough to go to school they begin asking for stories about their own parents’ childhood (Fivush et al., 2008). Studies of adolescents confirm that those with such family narratives show higher levels of well-being (Fivush and Zaman, 2011). They aid in the development of the self and a sense of identity. They also aid with socialisation though seeing things from others’ points of view. Whilst this relies on language for narration, increasingly we also have access to photographs and even video capture of earlier generations. These stories and images of prior generations became part of our own personal self-definition.

Claims have been made for family narrative and genealogy as an aid to psychotherapy (Mcgoldrick, 2011). The telling of life narratives can be used effectively, particularly in relation to trauma and clinical disorder (Neuner, Schauer, Klaschik, Karunakara and Elbert, 2004). This is because there are often blocks to thinking about our traumatic experience, and this can interfere with the coherence of narrative accounts. In the course of therapy, the client provides an initial chronological account of their experience, in as much detail as they can, and this is recorded for future comparison. The story is then revisited with the therapist and revised over time. The aim is to transform a fragmented account into one which is coherent, through such reworking. The client is then asked about their emotional response, thoughts and even physical response to the story, and then to relive the experiences in a supported environment. Eventually there is a synchronising of emotion with the final, coherent account of the experience. This aids insight and the ‘working through’ or processing of the trauma, which can lead to recovery.

More generally in counselling, use of narrative therapy explores people’s stories and the impact on their self and functioning ability. Because these stories are often initially ‘thin’ in terms of detail and description, the purpose of the therapy is to develop ‘thicker’ and deeper narratives and to explore alternative stories or interpretations (Freedman and Combs, 1996). These are subjective accounts that improve through further recall, organisation and understanding of information. They are not reliant on independent corroboration. The purpose is that of self-understanding, as well as therapeutic validation. The accounts are not open to independent scrutiny.

There are many published biographic enterprises and memoires, many of which involve famous individuals and which do not look towards psychological interpretations. For example, the Jewish banking family of Edmund de Waal, in the ‘Hare with the Amber eyes’, provides a chronological account of the rise and fall in family fortunes related to the Second World War. It discusses art collections as a sub-theme (de Waal, 2010). Juliet Nicolson describes her female family members over generations with a chapter focused on each individual, including her famous forebear Vita Sackville-West, in exploring women’s influence on society and the family ( J. Nicolson, 2016). There are also highly innovative approaches to telling such family stories, such as the ‘Maus’ pictorial book about the author Art Spiegleman’s parents’ Jewish Holocaust experience. This is drawn ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Spelling and pronunciation of Polish names
• 1 Trust: introducing family narratives
• SECTION I Poland: the first generation
• SECTION II Poland and England: the second generation
• SECTION III England: the third generation
• Index