The following article originally appeared in the Big Issue (Australia) #392, All rights reserved.
I am posting this here as I've been informed that my Baba, the greatest person I have ever known, will not be with us much longer. I dedicate this to her. Please read so that her memory is kept alive.
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It is easy to underestimate older people – as Tom Valcanis realised when he learned about his grandmother’s life and noticed her electrical skills.
One frosty morning when I was six, I was sitting in my grandmother’s lounge room transfixed by Agro’s Cartoon Connection. As usual, I was toasting myself against her glowing gas heater. Back then, I knew my grandmother as my Macedonian “Baba” but, apart from that, I didn’t know much about her at all. For all I knew, her life was full of cooking, cleaning and telling jokes to keep us young ones occupied when there was nothing good on TV.
Baba always wore a simple, faded floral apron and cheap, unassuming clothes no matter where she went. This day was no different.
Leaving me to watch cartoons, she set up her ironing board and went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea while the iron heated up.
Minutes later, my concentration was broken by the sound of Baba, back at her ironing board, muttering a string of Macedonian expletives at her unresponsive iron. She whisked out of the room again and returned just as swiftly with a tool box in hand. What on earth was she doing with a tool box?
With deft precision and lightning speed, she opened up the iron, examined the parts, twisted some screws and, within minutes, had it up and running again. I watched in awe. “How… How did you know how to do that?” I asked. The answer was more remarkable and inspiring than I could ever have bargained for.
It started with Baba as a nine-year-old girl in the midst of a war that eventually tore apart an entire continent. After guns fell silent between the Allies and the Axis forces, another conflict engulfed the Balkans just a year later – the Partisan War. Baba’s village life on the Aegean coast was turned upside down as the fascists invaded. Her family fled into a cave, hiding for two days without food or water. Emerging unscathed, she returned only to watch her house burn to the ground, all of her possessions engulfed in the conflagration. Within a week, Baba was a refugee on the run from both Greek fascists and Yugoslavian communists.
As bombers choked the sky and bombs slammed into the ground mere feet from where Baba stood, the Yugoslavs separated children from their parents. “Give them your blankets,” the soldiers commanded. “They will need them.”
With nothing but their parting gifts to steel them against the bitter winter, these refugees were marched off to safe havens – Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Baba’s final destination, Romania.
During the day, they would hide in makeshift bunkers. At night, they would walk for hours and hours in pitch darkness. All the while, they felt nothing but pain, hunger and exposure. When they finally arrived in Romania, soldiers confiscated their blankets (“the worst part was over,” Baba said), but the refugee children were still shunted around between all sorts of buildings and temporary shelters commandeered by communist forces. Householders were ordered to take in the children when nightfall came, sometimes in grand feudal estates. “We even slept in a palace,” Baba recalled in her croaky, careworn voice. “Not in the good part, but, still, it was a palace!”
Eventually she ended up in a convent. It was there, as a teenager, that she was assigned a job like all the other girls and boys of her age. She stood in a line as an officer designated their new life-long occupations. The hand of fate chose doctors, bakers, boilermakers. What would Baba become? An electrician in Transylvania.
Baba’s next base was a plant near Bran Castle, the supposed residence of Count Dracula. There she learned her trade, mending fuses, constructing simple circuits (like those in her iron) and manning the power station that supplied the town. For foreigners and refugees, punishments for mistakes were harsh. Baba found that out when she inadvertently blacked out half the village, including the castle, during a training exercise. She got a beating for her error.
When the Red Cross informed her that her parents had escaped to Australia, she made the journey through Hungary and Vienna and on to Italy, where she boarded a boat for a new, peaceful life.
When Baba finished telling me her story, tears were trickling down into the contours of her cheeks. Even at the age of six, I could feel her gratitude for living in a country where she’d never had to go through that kind of pain again. Her former life under the grip of terror was over. For good.
An unbreakable connection with my heritage was made that day. I stopped whining when I was taken along to migrant reunion picnics and dances – I wanted to connect with my ancestry and hear others’ stories. I learned that through knowing Baba’s place in time, I also knew my own.
Sometimes we underestimate our elders, but their stories are worth so much more than the afternoon cup of tea we only seldom afford them.