From Beyond the River Bug
By Katarzyna Nowak, Safina Center Fellow
One recent August morning, a friend and fellow immigrant-settler in the Yukon, Canada, read me a poem called “Home.” Written by poet Warsan Shire, born in Kenya to Somali parents, it begins so: “no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.”
That same day, I stumbled upon a book of poetry by Kevin Craft whose ornithology-inspired title, “Vagrants and Accidentals” refers to birds “that appear out of their natural or normal range, blown off course by a storm, or inadvertently introduced into a new environment by human trade.”
The close convergence of similar notions of displacement, conveyed through poetry and references to nature, stirred in me the question, “Why am I only now learning about the River Bug?”
August 1st, 2020 marked the 76th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, Poles’ rebellion against Nazi occupants as the Russian Red Army advanced from the East in 1944. What the anniversary brought to the surface were memories which my maternal grandmother—85 years old—recounted to me over video call.
“They called us the ‘people from beyond the Bug’,” she said. “The Bug?” I asked.
The River Bug’s 481 miles (774 kilometers) have shaped the demarcation of East and West. This is because the Curzon Line—used in 1919 to divide Poland and Soviet Russia—follows, in parts, the River Bug. The line was brought back in the Second World War as a border between German-occupied Poland and Russian Red Army forces. It meant that, in May 1945, before the war ended, my grandmother, her parents and younger sister, were loaded up into boxcars leaving their city of Lwow for lands west of the Bug. In Lodz then Poznan, they were told “no,” eventually arriving in Leszno, where they were permitted to stay.
Map: “Kmusser”/Wikimedia Commons
Leszno lies 50 miles (80 kilometers) from Wroclaw, a city that for some 600 years was under Bohemian then German rule before it was returned to Poland (70 percent of it destroyed) in 1945. My great-grandfather got a job in the postal service in Wroclaw in 1949, and it’s the city where my parents (and my sister and I) were eventually born, into lands of more transition, uprising, and accidental vagrancy. I grew up on my grandmother’s stories imbued with nostalgia for Lwow, “the city of lions,” “the city of Renaissance,” today Lviv, Ukraine.
When my Yukon First Nation colleague and friend—with Alaska and Yukon roots—says, “We don’t want lines on maps,” this takes on new meaning.
Like many borderlands, the Bug River region has been described by environmental scientists as “hardly impacted by human activities.” It’s of high biological diversity value, called “a cornerstone of the Pan European Ecological Network” and has been proposed for designation as a trilateral biosphere reserve.
For a conservationist, these are developments worthy of celebration. For a person trying to fathom her family history, they wilder.
Nearly half of the Bug River basin belongs to Poland, some 27 percent to Ukraine, and 23 to Belarus. Near Warsaw, the Bug drains into Zegrzyńskie Lake, a human-made reservoir.
After 63 deadly days of resistance during the Warsaw Uprising, Polish rebels—having run out of water, food, arms, supplies—surrendered. Much of Warsaw’s population was deported by the Nazis, who razed the city; the Soviets then established a communist regime. It was this regime that eventually drove my parents to seek asylum. They applied to a number of countries, and one of these—the United States of America—approved our entry. It could have been Norway, Canada, Australia, another place.
I now know that my matriline—and patriline too—originate from beyond the River Bug.
“I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet,” offers writer Anne Fadiman, whose ponderings resonate with me. “I like shorelines, weather fronts, international borders. There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these places, and often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were in the middle of either one.”
I crave to one day stand on the banks of the River Bug, and behold one of its wilder stretches where colliding borders blur.
I am indebted to my maternal grandmother and to friends Joe Copper Jack, Paul Salopek and Asad Chishti, without whose sustained sharing of stories, perspectives and written word about lines, edges, borders, origins, “home”, I’d not begin to make sense of peregrinations.