Cindy Lange-Kubick: In the camps, a familiar love story

The love story of Olga and Walter Plosky starts when they were young, as love stories often do.

Girl meets boy. Hearts beat fast.

There is falling over, into love, followed by a wedding, followed by children and all the rest.

A son Wally is born and then their dark-haired daughter, Mila  —  “Two of them and two of us,” says Walter, leaning on his cane.

And there is one house and then another and yet another on the edge of town.

There is a job for Walter at the railroad. And a job for Olga at the University Club. A couple new to America in 1950, with barely a word of English to their names.

Their lives unspooled happily. They had their kids and their church and they had each other. “Even the birds know us here,” says Olga, waving her small hands at the sky.

And Friday, they celebrated the 63 years that have passed since their wedding day.

The day that still makes them smile. Walter fresh from the barber and Olga in a German farmwife’s nightgown, transformed for a bride.

But it is the days that came before that day that make their love story unlike most.

Perhaps it was an unlikely love, a young Ukrainian woman from a small village in Poland and a young Ukrainian man from a farm near a big Polish city, meeting in the middle of a bombed-out country, hundreds of miles from home.

Or perhaps it was the most likely thing of all: A girl. A boy. Lonely and hungry, longing for something familiar, finding it in a face and a voice that spoke the language of their mothers.

Olga and Walter tell their love story together, by turn.

Her brown eyes watching him. His brown eyes watching her, cane tapping on the carpet of the final house on North 14th Street, the one they built for their last years.

Can you hear the question, baby?

Is that how it happened?

Maybe he has it not quite right? Maybe she tells it a bit too slow?

They try to say it all.

How Walter went to Germany first to work in the coal mines. The Germans came looking for young strong men and he volunteered, he says. If he didn’t, they would take him anyway.

How they took Olga’s older brothers, one in 1941 and one in 1942, and finally Olga, too, a girl who fled the forest as the Germans and the Russians pushed each other in a bloody back and forth to take her country.

They already had taken the Jewish people, Olga says. Flushed from the hay fields and the barns where they hid.

And so she went into the boxcars with a thousand others, the train’s wheels rolling for a week and eventually to Germany.

And they took her to work at a big train station, where she and the others pulled weeds from the tracks and shoveled snow and did whatever it was they were told to do.

And six kilometers away, a young man with wavy black hair worked underground, digging coal, wondering when he could go home.

She stayed in this camp, with guards and watery soup — “No food hardly; no big deal” — until the summer of 1945, Olga says.

And the train took them again, Olga and her cousin and her best girlfriends, and all the others. And then it stopped, and there was no place to go except to another camp where thousands more just like them — “Every nationality,” Walter says — ripped from their homelands, waited.

Girls in one camp, Olga says. Boys in another.

Olga talks and Walter talks, their story weaving back and forth, a hundred details too distant to recall, too much to remember and tell.

Until there is a young man walking a bicycle across a field.

A young man who hears a voice, speaking like he speaks, then the girl the voice belongs to, thin and pretty, walking to the soup line.

“I take her on my shoulders,” says Walter, voice still strong despite the oxygen tank in the living room and the hospice nurses who come each morning.

Olga, still thin, still pretty, waves her hand his way.

She was shy, she says. She was scared.

But he kept coming around. He wanted to take her to the boys camp, where the food was better, she says.

“I wouldn’t go without my friend.”

And so Olga and her cousin Olga went. Her cousin met a nice young man. And that happened over and over with the boys from the boys camp and the girls from the girls camp.

“You don’t have to tell it all, it’s too much.”

But it’s not too much to say many of those girls and boys fell in love, too.

And that the Americans came and everyone was so happy. But then the Russians came later with big trucks to carry them all back home — where there were no homes.

And it was Walter who helped Olga and her friends escape that day — “Thank you to my husband he grabbed me” — and they spent the day walking by the canal until all the trucks were gone.

And so it was that on Oct. 10, 1945, Olga and Walter were married.

Such a wedding it was. Four couples all at once, so many people wanting to get married. The brides made a feast with meat and cabbage and the grooms made hooch.

There was a band and there was dancing and a ride in a buggy pulled by a strong plow horse.

And then they were Walter and Olga Plosky.

Who now stand outside their last house, on what was once the edge of town, on the block where their children were raised and where their grandchildren visit, where their church is close by and the birds know their voices.

And Olga sees a bicycle.

And she grabs Walter’s hand.

Do you remember when …

Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.