Sąsiadek is an unusual last name. Between April 1945 and July 1950, Mama received 34 letters from a friend named Halina. During the time they corresponded, Halina married and took her husband’s last name Sąsiadek. That’s how I was able to track down her son Krzysztof, an architect who moved to the US from Poland in 1979.

Clearly, our mothers were good friends. Perhaps they met during the war or perhaps they met while studying medicine at the university. They kept up their correspondence as they moved between Warsaw, Poznań, and Krakow, through my mother’s operations in London and move to the US, and Halina’s move to Wrocław where she met the man who became her husband and they had a child (Krzysztof). The main topic in many of the letters was Halina’s attempts to obtain documents for my mother to verify her education. Mama wanted to continue as a doctor in the US, but had trouble proving she had attended the underground university during the war and completed her coursework before leaving Poland. Halina kept facing bureaucratic hurdles. Multiple times, Halina refered to Maria as “dziewcinka” in her letters, a term of endearment indicating the warm connection between them.

Why did their correspondence stop after five years? Perhaps because life got hard in communist Poland and Halina was busy with work and family, including a second child born in 1950. Perhaps Mama withdrew after struggling with more surgeries, tuberculosis, and the break up of her wartime romance.

I found a phone number for Krzysztof online, and took a chance calling him, not sure if the number still worked or if it was in fact his mother who knew mine. After we talked and I had shared his mother’s letters with him, he wrote me, “My mother mentioned your mother many times and that’s why, the first time you called I knew immediately who you were referring to. My mother also expressed the desire to find your mother, but neither she nor I knew how to do so.”

Krzysztof and I have since met twice in Poland–two years ago in Warsaw and this week in Krakow.

I wonder what our mothers would have said if they saw us together like this? I wonder if they would have rekindled their friendship if they had reconnected before they died?