TALES FROM A TEACHER’S SUITCASE

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Let me tell you a story

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Let me tell you a story

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Let me tell you a story

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Humankind thrives on a marketplace of ideas, so diversity has a vital role. New voices and experiences enrich the debate. Intelligent humans do not fight power with power, threats with threats which risks replacing one abusive ruler with another. Instead it uses facts and evidence, tested in debate, to help the weak take on the strong.

Human race is resourceful enough to offer a fairer, more promising route to new better cleaner and more sustainable world. The world that would assert the dignity of the individual and the legal, civil and moral equality of all people, wherever they come from. The world that believes in progress though argument and debate, in which reason and empathy lift truthful ideas and marginalise bigotry and falsehood. We all have right to live in this type of the world and we all have responsibility to make sure we do.

The Power of a Woman

(extract from the memoir)

Julia

In the black-and-white photograph, softened by age, Julia looks out with a seriousness that seems to have settled into her face for good. Her dark hair is pulled smooth, her lips are thin, and the red-and-black embroidery on her dress carries Croatia into the room before any story about her begins.

She was born in Croatia in 1900. Years later, when I went looking for the place, I found that it no longer existed. No one alive remembered exactly where it had stood, and I understood then how easily Julia's memory, and the place I was named for, could disappear.

She was ten when her village burned. Her family joined the line of people walking north and west, carrying what they could, until they reached Lamac, a Croatian enclave where men broke stone in the emperor's quarry in exchange for the right to stay.

Lamac meant the breaking of stone. Its first Croatian settlers had come centuries earlier as refugees, and Julia's family inherited the same bargain: hard labour, suspicion from neighbouring villages, and a life built from vineyards, orchards, animals, and whatever could be grown.

When Julia's family arrived, the village had been thinned by disease and war. The priest gave them an empty house, and her father and brothers went to the quarry while the women made food and order from the land around them. They were outsiders, and so they learned to rely on one another. Then the century began taking from her.

She was fourteen when the First World War began and eighteen when it ended. By then both her parents were dead. The Spanish flu followed, taking her husband soon after her son, Vladimir, was born. Czechoslovakia was created, old imperial borders shifted, and Julia survived by selling fruit and vegetables in Bratislava's market and collecting a small widow's pension.

During the Depression, the market emptied. Julia kept herself and Vladimir alive through the vineyard her parents had left her, teaching him the work because there was no one else to do it.

She was thirty-nine when the next war began and her first grandchild, Julian, was born. Within days of his wedding, Vladimir was conscripted. German soldiers took the house, and Julia kept the orchard running and the wine flowing for the occupiers because there was no other way to keep the household alive.

By forty-one, Julia had seen her house ransacked, her orchard burned, neighbours shot, and prisoners beaten before being marched away. She also watched Vilma, her daughter-in-law, endure what the soldiers demanded in exchange for food and medicine for Julian, whose heart was already failing.

Vladimir was captured, branded a deserter, and put on a train bound for Germany. He escaped. Roma families hid him, and in their care he fathered a daughter whose twin girls Julia later raised as her own great-granddaughters. The family absorbed them the way it absorbed everything else the century handed it.

My mother, Anastasia, was born on the day the war ended, carrying within her the final violence of a village caught between armies. The family carried this quietly, the way it carried most things.

Afterward, Vladimir and Vilma drifted apart. He worked as a train driver and disappeared often; she kept the household, gardens, and animals going while her mind grew weaker and her body kept working.

Around Julia's forty-fifth year, Soviet troops passed through Czechoslovakia as the war ended. Three years later, Communist rule took hold. The vineyard was later taken into the collective. Vladimir was taken to Siberia, joined the Communist Party, and became Volodja.

When Julia was sixty-five, Anastasia married a young dissident artist studying in Bohemia. The secret police began watching the house from the day the wedding was announced. I was born soon after, and my father named me Lamaca: the girl from Lamac.

Three years later, my father was swept into an uprising against Communist rule. When tanks crushed it, he ran to Austria, then Germany, and was granted asylum. We would not hear from him again for twenty-five years.

At seventy, Julia lost her house and garden when the Communists bulldozed whole streets for a highway. The village that had survived wars, plagues, and hunger did not survive the Party.

At seventy-five, she shared one room with three great-granddaughters, myself among them, in a flat planted in the construction site her village had become.

Her son, daughter-in-law, children, and grandchildren lived there too, whoever needed a roof. Everyone old enough to work was expected to be out building the great Communist project, so Julia looked after the rest.

She learned to whisper. Old neighbours had been recruited to listen for news from my father abroad. Vilma spent long stretches staring at the ceiling, wanting both to live and to die.

The nearest shop was five kilometres away, so Julia walked there and carried food home with whatever small hands could help.

In warmer months, she sold cherries and vegetables from the little land Volodja had managed to claw back.

At eighty, she buried Julian, who died suddenly of his damaged heart while in secret-police custody. That same year, Julia was diagnosed with cancer. She chose pain over hospital treatment and kept that choice for the rest of her life.

At eighty-five, she watched me marry and later cared for my daughter so I could finish university exams and keep working while my husband served in the army.

As her ninetieth birthday approached, she began quietly stockpiling food, certain more tanks were coming. When the Velvet Revolution filled the city square with people ringing their keys like bells, Julia stood beside me, leaned on her cane, and whispered one word:

freedom.

Near ninety-five, she met my father again, back in the country he had fled.

A few years later, she said goodbye as my family left for Australia.

She died at home, just shy of one hundred, still refusing the hospital she had never trusted. Soon after, Vladimir died too, on the same day as Vilma, whose mind had never recovered from the century they had lived through.

Julia's last words, as far as anyone remembers, were about the fear of war.

When I returned in my later years to place flowers on Julia's and Julian's grave, the chapel of Saint Rosalia was the only recognisable part of the village left. Around it stood blocks of flats and a highway where Julia's vineyards, garden, and house had been.

Everything she once held dear was gone, except us: her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren.

I am writing this memoir for her…

‍ ‍Only love is stronger than pain, and when the pain is immeasurable, the healing love needs to be infinitive. The rest is tears.’

The underlying message of my creative pieces is simple: Freedom is something to achieve which is never given. Searching for love never stops. Safety is often taken for granted. And one thing you should never stop searching for... a tender human heart.
It is about being honest to yourself and others and write what you see, being an observer of history in making that is happening around us right now...we all need to do our bit I feel we are on the crossroad and the road we choose from now on will shape the future for our children and the children after them, we have a big responsibility to do it right...all of us ..
In the quiet hours of daylight and daybreak
I hear your voice
Don't cry, be brave
Restless, wandering mind like grains of sand
bouncing around the desert thirsty for past memories
To see, hear, feel you again
Reality pierces the illusion
to the moving present
To survive and live

Samples of creative online writings:
An extract from the Saranda’s Story: A Land to be loved, people to be hated that was published by Literary journal
https://creative-writingteacher.blogspot.com/2022/11/a-land-to-be-loved-people-to-be-hated.html

https://creative-writingteacher.blogspot.com/2022/12/three-teachers-on-beach-of-sorrow-by.html

One of the finalists in the 2022 Travel Nonfiction contest:
THE PRESERVATION FOUNDATION, INC.
Beata Stasak – A Mother’s Travels Across Australia

Thank you for sending your short fiction to Ariel Chart. I found "We Are Born to Share" a very heart-warming story and would like to include it in our February edition.
Many thanks in advance and Happy New Year!

Jana Begovic, M.A. Literary Criticism
Senior Editor

Thank you for thinking of us. We have scheduled one of your submissions for January 3rd at 10am Mountain time (USA).. This is the link for the upcoming one. It will go live on Jan 3rd: https://wanderlust-journal.com/2023/01/03/gday-welcome-to-the-top-end/

Two articles: ‘From a Diary of A Farmer’ and ‘What about Your Neighbour’s Trauma’ will be included in this Year edition of Green Issue Magazine.
The Greens (WA) Robers Delves editor
Finalists for our contest on Defenestrationism.net , publishing across April 2023
Beata S "What do Nikolai Gogol, the Dalai Lama and Jeff Bezos have in common?" publishing in its entirety, April 10th

Your article was selected for a HubPages Network Site. Only the highest-quality articles are selected.
The following articles have been moved to LetterPile:
• Sandy, queen of Green Island
https://letterpile.com/personal-essays/Sandy-queen-of-Green-Island

Author Biography: Beata S is an Art and Eastern European Languages Teacher from Eastern Europe with upgraded teaching degrees in Early Childhood and Education Support Education. She teaches in the South Perth Metropolitan area.

After further study in Counselling for Drug and Alcohol Addiction, she has used her skills in Perth Counselling Services. Beata has been a farm caretaker on the organic olive farm in the South Perth Metropolitan area for the past twenty years.

Beata is a migrant from post-communist Eastern Europe, who settled in Perth, Western Australian in 1994. She came with her husband and children to meet her father, who she never knew. He was a dissident and refugee from Czechoslovakia, after his country was taken over by Russian communists after the unsuccessful uprising against the communists in 1968.

As the daughter of a dissident, Beata was denied the choice of a career. Journalism was her dream, but instead she was ordered by the communist regime of the day to become a teacher of Russian Language and Russian History.

For part of her studies, she was sent to the Volgograd University, Russia by train with her classmates. Part of the study was a re-education camp for the children of dissidents, marked as the enemies of the state. From the train, the 20 year old girls experienced the apocalypse of the post Chernobyl disaster while travelling through the Ukraine a few months after the accident happened.

They disembarked a few times, unable to continue on their journey. All the students suffered health problems on their arrival in Volgograd. Many girls ended up in hospitals - including Beata. Their condition worsened, as the medical treatment was rudimentary and applied by the ill trained nurses that looked after up to a hundred patients each.

There were no washing facilities in the hospital and no food provided, except for the watery porridge in the morning. Each patient was labelled and known only by a number. After her arrival back to her own country, she was forbidden to talk about her experience of Russia, or the disaster witnessed.

Instead, she was sent to teach Russian Language and History to year 12 students and prepare them for their final exams. Beata has lived the first half of her life in denial. Silenced, following the strict regime guidelines to keep her job and her standing. She was not allowed to travel, nor have any contact with anyone from overseas. She suffered miscarriages and blood disorder problems, which continue to follow her throughout her life.

On the eve of the Velvet Revolution, Beata stood proudly with her two young children on the city square with other protesters, under the watchful eyes of army personnel with guns, waiting on order to shoot. Fortunately for them all, the communism fell apart peacefully.

After the end of communism in her country, Beata worked on new curriculum guidelines for the experimental new schools, built by an American charity in her town. Her curriculum was successfully implemented. She continued to showcase new aspects of teaching, while improving her English, until her application to re-settle in Australia with her husband and young children was accepted.

Beata wrote poems, stories and commentaries for magazines and newspapers in her own language and the Russian language, in Eastern Europe before her re-settlement in Australia. She completed a few unpublished manuscripts while studying Creative Writing for Children at university in 1999.

“For all the creative souls out here who are searching endlessly for the lost humanity and how to re-claim it because the world around us is bigger than our single threads of individual connectivity but together those threads make the world turn just the right way...”

https://hubpages.com/@beatastasak