Since we were kids, we were told to fear them, that they had magic and would come and steal our bodies in the night. We never would have guessed that we feared ourselves. It was something that was always thrown around jokingly; if we didn’t behave the Gypsies would come and take us in our sleep, like how Santa would bring you coal if you didn’t behave.

Everyone knew Babcia was afraid of water, we never asked why or questioned it. As we grew up, we came to understand why from overhearing fragments of conversation in muttered Polish from our parents and whispered conversations from our curious older cousins. We learned World War II came and when Germany took over Poland our family had to hide. No one knew why and no one wanted to ask, our family was never particularly reminiscent or sentimental about anything. Babcia hid in the sewers and in river banks from the Nazis and as a young girl watched them kill her father in the streets.

The only person the younger circle of cousins in the family could get any of this information from was our older cousin Tony. It was all very dramatic in the way he told us these things we had never known about our family. It all just sounded like a story being read from a book and it made it hard to imagine that the characters in those stories were actual people, let alone people I knew and saw on a regular basis.

The summer after Babcia died we took a family vacation to Tennessee, the destination of my Wujek Mireks choosing. The cabin didn’t seem real, it looked like something out of a Google search for ‘Dream cabins’.  Walking inside the mammoth of a lodge in front of us made our hearts beat faster and filled us with anticipation as the moment that we had all been waiting for had finally arrived, making the journey through the tall, towering, twisting roads through the mountains much less regrettable.

There were three floors each revealing more rooms and surprises for us all. Everything was made out of pale wood that glistened when the light hit it at just the right angle. The posts that supported the queen sized bunk beds reflected a blinking light from the overhead fan circling its way under the light shining above In the room that the gaggle of us younger cousins shared. The kitchen was steps above the living room and the bar stools touching the ground in the living room required you to climb up it to sit in them. The deck had four levels the second one with the biggest of the three hot tubs but never actually heated up past room temperature, inspiring our referencing to it as ‘the pool’. On the third tier of the deck resisded the two smaller and warmer of the hot tubs.

We were in the final stretch of our stay in Tennessee, the appeal of being in the middle of the mountains with just our family still hadn’t lost its novelty. All of us were basking in the joy of our ignorance of our jobs and the summer homework that was waiting for us back in Michigan.

The day had evaporated and midnight was suddenly upon us. The sky was black like an oil spill and the stars seemed to be shining brighter than they ever had without the city lights fighting for their brightness. The moon, the faint glow of light from the upper levels of the cabin that had just barely managed to cut through the dark, and the light from the sloping base of the hot tub shining from below us like a flashlight on a face telling scary stories, were our only sources of illumination.

We got in, all shrieking and protesting the heat that threatened  to scald us until the water realized we weren’t an enemy and we finally adjusted to the heat. A sense of relief fell over us all after a endless day that threw white water rafting, hiking and ziplining our way.

The gossiping began as it always does, we talked in circles around each other, bouncing from from subject to the next like a game of foursquare. Our laughter and giggles filled the conversations that  explored the lives of our parents with sarcastic remarks regarding their weird quirks from that still followed our parent around from ‘The Old Country’. The unfortunate consequence of our ability to swap one topic for another so rapidly was that eventually our supply of discussion topics began to dwindle quickly.

Babcia was the single thing in our lives that brought us  all together - we were all so different and we all had such a vastly wide array of varying experiences - which lead us to default on that one commonality to help supply our infinite circle of gossip. She was the real reason why we were all here together. The pain still raw from when she first left us, anytime she was brought up all I could think was; I miss her so much.

“Why did the Nazis even go after Babcia and her family? Like I know they took over the country and all that but...” My cousin Katrena inquired.

“Well there’s a little bit more to it than that but basically the Nazis didn’t like when people openly didn’t like them, and ya’know they took over the country so no one liked them,” Tony insisted.

In my cousin Tony’s usual over dramatic storytelling fashion he proceeded “ I guess on her deathbed she started to say some curses or something to my mom before she died and my mom apparently said ‘I thought you said we weren’t Gypsies’ and then Babcia pretty much died, but yeah the Nazis went after the Gypsies too.”
No one put a curse on anyone, that’s ridiculous. She didn’t just drop dead after confessing to being Gypsy, that kind of stuff just doesn’t happen.

Tony being as great as embellishing stories as he is, I knew to comprehend this story with a grain of salt and by the slightly irritated looks on everyone's faces around they did too. This story was illegitimizing the heritage that we thought was ours, and it was no wonder why it was interpreted it as a malicious fallacy. Despite all of this I still accepted this tale in a more literal sense than my other cousins. I didn’t dismiss Tony’s know-it-all and slightly pretentious demeanor so easily which consequently left me puzzled.

A tsunami came over me and drowned me into a sea of misunderstanding. It felt like I had been stripped of everything I had ever known. It was like I had been walking about with an empty mind my entire life. Curiosities started to take shelter in my skull, there was almost enough floating around to make me think that I would combust. Faces crinkled up into confusion and questions were being spit out like when we were forced to eat ?ledzie on Wigilia. The air no longer seemed to be comprised of various gases, but was now a mixture of who, what, when, where, and why.

All of our inquiries were responded to with more questions and we weren’t permitted any satisfactory concrete answers. Before the debate could reach it’s final evolutionary stage, we all came to the consensus that we should finally retire to the room that the eight of us shared when we saw dawn finally tip-toeing it’s way into the sky. As we departed the cool nighttime air tickled our skin and chased us back into our room leaving me cold, confused and confuddled.

Later I was plagued with questions of my own that I still had and I knew no one could answer for me. Should I feel like a Gypsy? Should I talk about it or just keep it underwraps? Was this even true? I allowed these daunting questions escape my presence for the duration of this trip and decided to face them at a later point in time.
I had to come to the realization that two cultures are interconnected yet so different. I was brought up as both but had only known about this secret part of my heritage for a short while. I didn’t have to pick one or the other. I had the ability to to be more than just one thing, I could be as many things as I wanted. Having a new understanding about who you are supposed to be, doesn’t mean that’s what you have to be. Of course this new knowledge about my family and where I come from has shaped how I view the world and I saw my family, but it’s mostly helped me to be able to recognize who I am and has given me the ability to be able to see the difference between what I’m supposed to be and who I am.