WBEZ | Polish

Happy Pulaski Day!

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:02:00 -0600

Go Casimir, it's your birthday. We gonna party like it's your birthday.

Chicago Poles, I assume you're already drunk by this point but if you're not, remember--today is YOUR day!

Sure, we may not get the river dyed a certain color in our honor or enjoy a big annual city parade or a semi-annual kind of messy South Side parade nor do our baseball teams wear red in honor of St. Joseph's Day, but guess what: We have our own holiday where schools and libraries are closed along with City of Chicago and Cook County offices!! (But all federal and state courts remain open. Banks and the post offices will remain open, and postal service is unaffected. Public transportation will run on normal schedules.)

Paaar-ty!

Sculptor who died in plane crash that killed Polish leaders honored

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 21:13:00 -0500

A Chicago area artist who died in the plane crash that killed the Polish president and dozens of other Polish leaders last year is being remembered this weekend. He’s beloved in the Polish community because of a monument he sculpted that stands in a Niles cemetery. It reminds them of a terrible moment they vow to never forget.

Sculptor Wojciech Seweryn was born the first day of World War II and never knew his father. His father was killed by the Soviets, massacred along with 20,000 soldiers and intellectuals in a forest in Katyn, Russia.

Anna Wójtowicz is Seweryn’s daughter.

“All his life he wanted to remember his father he never knew, and fighting for the truth, showing people the massacre in Russia happened, and never forget,” Wójtowicz said.

Seweryn came to the U.S. in 1976 and started sketching his plans for a memorial.

“He always had this plan, this idea that he’s going to build a monument for those soldiers," Wójtowicz said. “But it was really hard, he came here as an immigrant. In the beginning, he didn’t have legal papers. He didn’t know English. He didn’t know people who could help him, but he never gave up.”

Seweryn envisioned a Virgin Mary holding a dying Polish soldier, with an eagle rising to show Poland surviving, but with no head.

Wójtowicz said her father finally found others who shared his dream. They raised money for years, and the monument, looking much like his vision, opened in May of 2009.

"This was his life,” his daughter said. “He very often said that when I will do this I can just step one more time on the Katyn soil, and I can die, and he never realized how those words will be so realistic.”

NPR NEWSCAST: Shock and grief ripped through Poland today….

In a terrible irony, the plane crashed near the site of the massacre. Seweryn and the others were on their way to observe the 70^th anniversary of the Katyn tragedy.

The plane crash devastated the Polish community here in Chicago. Thousands immediately flocked to the monument Seweryn created.

Even today, people gather there at the sculpture on occasions both happy and sad.

Niles Trustee Christopher Hanusiak says the memorial plays an essential role.

“Nobody spoke of Katyn, nobody talked about it, for years, even as myself, growing up here in the United States, I was born in Poland also, we never talked about this in schools, we weren’t educated about Katyn,” Hanusiak said.

Until recently, Hanusiak says, the Soviets blamed the Nazis. Information was suppressed.

That’s why Hanusiak thinks Seweryn and his Katyn monument are so important.

“So what he did is besides being a creator, a sculptor, a father, he’s educating the world about this event that happened that we were never allowed to talk about. It means so much to the Polish people that this information was given to the world,” he said.

This weekend, the Polish-American community will honor Seweryn starting with a 9 a.m. mass at St. Hyacinth’s Basilica in Chicago, followed by a noon ceremony at the monument in St. Adalbert Catholic Cemetery in Niles. The ceremony includes the unveiling of a portion of a street named after Seweryn right near the monument, as well as a plaque being presented by a leader from near his Polish hometown.

NOTE: The broadcast about the Polish plane crash is courtesy of National Public Radio.

Writer Karen Brenner sees friendship in Chicago's melting pot

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 14:37:00 -0500

Writer Karen Brenner no doubt heard Arabic and many other languages in her Northwest Side neighborhood. Everyday, her neighbors remind her that Chicago is the ultimate melting pot. She shared notes on her neighbors on Eight Forty-Eight.

Two very different families live next door to us on our street of two flats. One family has a young daughter with hair the color of the sun; hair that streams across her face so that she is constantly pushing it out of her eyes and mouth. Upstairs lives her best friend, who has hair the color of night; hair that hangs down past her knees when it is not gathered into a long, thick, braided rope.

During the bitter winter months we barely see them. Now that it is summer, they are constantly out of doors, riding their bikes, or playing in the little garden that their families share.

The girl with the dark hair has a large family. They have planted strawberries and tomatoes in their side of the yard. We give them some of our bean plants; they give us a kabob hot off the grill, dusky with spices. Her family cooks out almost every night, accompanied by smoke and laughter.

The girl with the blond hair has only one little brother. Her family gives us pirogues, fat with sweet, mild cheese or pillowed with potatoes. We give them bouquets of roses. To both families we smile and nod over the fence to say, “as-salamu alaykum” or “dzien dobry." Those are the only words we can speak to our neighbors.

But the little girls switch effortlessly from one language to the other. When their mothers call them, they answer back--without missing a beat--in the staccato of Arabic, or tongue-twisting Polish. Then they turn to each other and continue their conversation in the broad, flattened-A of Midwestern American English.

They call to us as they fly by on their bikes--best friends; bold adventurers. Their hair streams out behind them--one the color of sun; one the color of night. They wave and shout, “Hello neighbors!”

We wave back, smiling, watching what is special and wonderful about America ride by. Here, in this great city, in this good land, there is a child of the Middle East and a child of Europe who daily cross the cultural chasms of religion, world view and language with complete ease and grace. As we watch their bikes disappear into the distance we know that they carry with them the promise of our country and the legacy of our city; the world comes here and becomes our neighbors, and sometimes our best friend.

Music Button: Second Sky, "Hourglass", from the album The Art of Influence, (Rhythm & Culture)

Polish immigrant recounts her journey to Chicago

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 13:47:00 -0500

Regardless of actual status, many immigrants share a common goal – they moved to make a better life for themselves and their families. Writer Karolina Stepek Faraci knew all too well the joy and the pain of starting over. Stepek, now a Chicago resident, shared her story with Eight Forty-Eight.

In the early ‘90s our family lived in coastal Poland, in an old house with no bathroom; only cold water running. We’d use a large electric heater submerged in a bucket to heat up the water. We washed ourselves in an aluminum bowl that stood on a wooden stand in the kitchen. Every Saturday we would bathe in a blue plastic tub that my mom would bring down from the attic.

We peed and pooped in another bucket – this one with a lid that was hidden under the sink, opposite the small kitchen. I dreamt of a real toilet; not typical for a fifteen year old.

My friends’ fathers, they all worked in the West: Berlin, Dusseldorf, Munich. Illegal construction work for the most part, but they also sold vodka, silver and amber out on the streets. But the luckiest ones had families in the States who could send out invitations for them to get visas; a golden key to the Eden on Earth: America. Living in damp basements, they ate nothing and saved everything. And it didn’t matter that their pride was all damaged; they were post-communist, Eastern Block peasants; half humans, half-creations of the former system of terror and dictatorship, now made to serve the capitalists. It didn’t matter because the deutche marks and American dollars tasted sweater than strawberries picked at dawn.
There was nothing in Poland: no jobs, no money, no prospects. The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which ended the Communist era in Europe, had brought the wealth of the West a little closer but it was far from peachy-keen. There were Snickers and Marlboro cigarettes in stores now, but no one had money to buy it. It was like licking a lollipop through a Plexiglas.

The money my father brought home as a fisherman didn’t get us far. But he was too proud to serve the capitalists, as he’d say, “I thought he was either too lazy or too drunk” because he was always against the communists.

He would say, “I’m never going to work for capitalists! Never!” And then he would pick the remote control and turn the volume up, as this was the end of discussion. My mother, who every night sat at the chair across from him, would bark, “You dumbass! You alcoholic!” and then she’d light up a cigarette and walk away to the kitchen where she’d toss pots and pans, making noise.

I dreamt of nothing but to escape this place. Escape to the almighty, colorful, neon-lit, well-fed America, where people are happy, have jingle bell-like laughs, and strong, white teeth and smell like fabric softener. I dreamt I’d leave the coastal hole behind me with the stench of half-digested alcohol on my father’s breath; leave behind my nerve-wracked, chain-smoking mother, who no longer remembered how to speak calmly to anyone; my little sister who would still wet her bed, traumatized from the night my father beat my mother with a leather belt in front of us.

I dreamt of it all, not knowing that eight years from then I would be waving goodbye to my mom, my aunt and my uncle from an ascending escalator at the Frederic Chopin Airport in Warsaw to take my very first flight ever—flight to America. They looked up at me and I looked down at them, and this was the picture my memory preserved until six years later when I got the ultimate golden ticket – the Green Card – and saw them again on the Polish soil.

I live in Chicago now; torn between the place where I no longer belong and a place where I never will. But every time I speak to my grandmother on the phone, she says, “Stay, dziecko; stay. It is just easier to live there.” And I stay. Because she’s right: Where else in the world would I be able to purchase a plain ticket overseas with two-weeks worth of babysitting? Even now my father says working for capitalists isn’t that bad.

Sheriff mulls freeing inmates wanted on immigration charges

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 23:13:00 -0500

On any given day, the Cook County Jail holds hundreds of inmates picked up on criminal charges who also happen to be wanted for an immigration violation. Sheriff Tom Dart’s office keeps them up to 48 hours beyond when the criminal cases would allow them out. That’s to allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency known as ICE, to take them into deportation proceedings. Now Dart tells WBEZ he’s reconsidering that policy because it could be compromising public safety. We report from our West Side bureau.

SOUND: Keys open a jail door.

Beneath the Cook County criminal courthouse, one jailer pulls out keys and unlocks a door. Another, Officer Carmelo Santiago, leads the way.

SANTIAGO: We’re going through this tunnel that connects us from the courthouse to the jail. This way is where the detainee is going to be coming.

We step around crusts of sandwiches that the day’s new arrivals got for lunch.

SANTIAGO: And this is the receiving process.

SOUND: Entering the receiving area.

The smell of unwashed feet wafts from chain-link pens full of inmates who’re waiting to be processed. Santiago shows me the paperwork of a Mexican national busted last night in Chicago.

SANTIAGO: This individual was arrested for driving on a revoked or suspended license on a DUI.

A lot of immigrants who drink and drive end up in this jail. That’s because Illinois considers DUI a felony when the motorist lacks a valid driver’s license. And the state doesn’t allow any undocumented immigrant to get one.

SANTIAGO: He was issued a bond from the court for $15,000.

Santiago points out that the defendant could walk free for just $1,500. Except, his file shows something else.

SANTIAGO: This specific individual has a detainer that was placed on him through immigration.

MITCHELL: This man can post bond or not [and] he’s going to end up in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement?

SANTIAGO: That is correct.

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart says he doesn’t like holding on to inmates like this one for ICE to take away. He says these holds make it harder for local police to fight crime. Residents see cops and start thinking about the threat of deportation — the threat to the criminals, maybe even to themselves.

DART: It does not lend itself to a sense of community where people will gladly come to you with information about crimes, get involved as a witness, even come forward as a victim, frankly.

Over the years Dart has taken steps to reduce the jail’s role in immigration enforcement. The sheriff’s office says it no longer calls ICE with information about inmates. The sheriff no longer allows ICE agents in holding cells near bond courtrooms. The jail has put up big signs — in English, Spanish and Polish — that tell new inmates they have no obligation to answer questions about immigration status. But Dart says something has him in a bind. Every day ICE requests that the jail hold certain inmates two extra days so the agency can put the detainees into deportation proceedings. The jail ends up turning over about a half-dozen inmates to ICE each day. Two years ago, Dart quietly sought some legal advice from Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez’s office.

DART: The opinion was really unambiguous. It said I had to comply with the detainer. So, when the detainer was placed on somebody, I had to give the ICE officers 48 hours to come and pick somebody up and that it was not in my discretion.

MITCHELL: Could you ignore the state’s attorney’s opinion?

DART: Then I open myself up personally to civil liability.

Dart says that could include damages for someone hurt by a released inmate or the legal defense if an anti-immigrant group filed suit . . .

DART: . . . which is not something that myself or my five children signed up to do. And I open our office up to unbelievable amounts of liability.

But some immigrant advocates are pressing Dart about the ICE detainers. They confronted a few of his top aides at a meeting a few weeks ago. Reverend Walter Coleman got to question a sheriff’s attorney, Patricia Horne.

HORNE: It’s a legal document just like an arrest warrant, which we, under law, have to recognize.

COLEMAN: Under what law?

HORNE: Well, in this case, under federal law.

COLEMAN: There is no federal law. You cannot cite me the statute or the chapter or the section. You know that that’s the truth and we will not sit here and be lied to like this.

It turns out ICE isn’t citing a statute either. Lately federal officials have acknowledged that local jails don’t have to comply with immigration detainer requests. Last month the San Francisco County Sheriff’s Department quit honoring the requests for certain inmates. Here in Cook County, Sheriff Dart says that’s got him wondering again whether he has to comply with the 48-hour holds. He tells me he’s planning to ask the State’s Attorney’s Office for an updated opinion. He could do that quietly again and most people wouldn’t even know. But Dart doesn’t always operate quietly. You might remember that, twice over the last three years, the sheriff has ordered his deputies to suspend enforcement of foreclosure evictions.

MITCHELL: You run one of the country’s biggest jails. Would you really be willing to become a national lightening rod on the issue of immigration enforcement?

DART: Well, there is this notion of justice that we’ve always felt very strongly about in this office. And whether it’s dealing with people who we felt were being dispossessed of their houses in the mortgage crisis. So we stopped. It’s the same issue here, where we are attempting to do what is right and just.

But Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Greg Palmore has a warning for any sheriff who lets inmates walk free despite an immigration hold.

PALMORE: Though ICE has not sought to compel compliance through legal proceedings, jurisdictions who ignore detainers bear the risk of allowing that individual back into the public domain before they were thoroughly vetted to insure that this individual doesn’t have anything outstanding that warrants us to move further in that particular case.

Sheriff Dart acknowledges there could be a downside to ignoring immigration detainer requests. Let’s say ICE knows the inmate arrived in the country under an alias or is violent — and the information didn’t appear in the jail’s background check. But Dart says letting some immigrants out of jail even though ICE wants them could be worth the risk. It might help remove the deportation issue from everyday policing. The sheriff says that could make streets in Cook County safer.

Something You Should Eat: Bigos from Szalas

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 12:00:00 -0600

Here we go, locked firmly in the grip of another Chicago winter, spending as much time as possible trying to stay warm. Granted, it's not exactly Antarctica (or Anchorage), but we have plenty of chilly days and nights to deal with until April. This time of year, I spend as much time as possible seeking out those soul-satisfying, rib-sticking, body-thawing dishes as possible. Do yourself a favor and head to the Archer Heights neighborhood near Midway Airport, and head into the Alpine ski lodge that is Szalas (SCHA-wahs). They specialize in Polish Highlander cuisine (think hunting provisions), which would naturally include bigos (BEE-goes): a thick, fortifying stew of smoked pork, ham, cabbage and red wine, among other Eastern European staples. Pair it with a hoppy Polish Zywiec beer or glass of red wine, and you'll be drifting off to sleep in no time.

Polish Film Festival brings European cinema to Chicago

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 14:34:00 -0600

The 22nd annual Polish Film Festival in America is now underway at theaters throughout Chicago. Organizers hail the event as one of the most important European film festivals in America.

This year’s schedule includes big stars from abroad as well as the stories of locals. To navigate the schedule and explain some of the bigger themes of Polish cinema, Eight Forty-Eight spoke to Christopher Kamyszew, the festival's founder.

The Polish Film Festival in America runs from Nov. 5 -21.
Schedule
Tickets / Venue Info