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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project THOMAS KRAJESKI Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: February 23, 2016 Copyright 2017 ADST Q: Today is the 23rd of February, 2016, with Thomas ... KRAJESKI: Krajeski - we pronounce it the American way. "Krai-yefski" is good Polish. "Krai" is border, like Ukraine. It also means country in Polish; in Polish it translates as countryman or patriot. Q: K-r-a-j-e-s-k-i. KRAJESKI: The 'y' is the Russian way. Q: I'm Charles Stuart Kennedy. You go by Tom, I take it? Where were you born? KRAJESKI: Salem, Massachusetts, 1950. My father was the son of Polish immigrants who for reasons - who knows why immigrants settle anywhere, but there was a Polish community in Salem, so his mom and dad literally came up through Ellis Island and had connections in Salem. That's where they met and married. My dad was born in Salem in 1918. My mum's family is much more diverse; Quebecois from Quebec, Levecques and Laformes, and then her father's family go back to the Mayflower in New England. Q: Let's look at your father's side first. What do you know, where do they come from in Poland? KRAJESKI: One of the great things about the Foreign Service, as you know, Stu, is sometimes you have the opportunity to go back. I served in Warsaw from 1985 to 1988 as deputy in the consular section. My dad came to visit us (my mom had died), he was there for three months and part of that was going back to the place where his mom and dad were born. His mum was from a small town called Novi Bielun, just north of Warsaw. We actually drove up there, visited the church where she was baptized. Tried to get her records, but when the Nazis occupied Poland (1939-45), they destroyed thousands of birth and marriage records deliberately. So we weren't able to find her birth record. We did meet with an old priest who said they used to go down to the basement and copy the records before they gave them to the Nazis. My grandfather was from Łomża which is in the southeast of Poland, southeast of Warsaw, a rather depressing industrial town. Both of them left at the turn of the century, when part (of Poland) was controlled by the Russians, the other part by the Germans. Poland has had very few periods of independence in its 1 history, now being a great one. So they were part of the great migration of Slavs and southern Europeans who came to the States. Q: When they got to the States, your grandfather, what was he doing? KRAJESKI: It’s not as clear with my grandfather except there were Krajeskis in Salem, Massachusetts. So he had some kind of a relative in Salem, so when he came it was a deliberate plan to take the train (I guess) up to Boston and up to Salem, which is just north of Boston, where he had a job waiting for him. He worked in a small factory. He was not uneducated, but he was by no means a professional. He worked at a number of things. Then my babcia, my grandma, followed a few years, maybe seven, eight years later. She didn't know anyone, just had an address in Salem. She came up and they were introduced in Salem. They didn't know each other before then. Q: Your mother, she came from... KRAJESKI: She was born in Salem as well, my mother was. But her family, her mother, my nana's family were all Lavecques and Laformes from out of the eastern provinces of Quebec. If you know New England, there are lots of French Canadians who have settled in New England. They came to New England sometime in the 19th century, I'm not precisely sure because there were no border controls, no immigration, basically... Q: I know that. My grandfather was born in Prince Edward's Island. KRAJESKI: I also have relatives from Prince Edward's, McDonalds, this is on the other side, her (mother’s) father's side. Q: The Scottish side, this is where Celtics come from. Did your mother have much of an education? KRAJESKI: High school. Both mother and father only high school. Mom is born in 1920, so they're in their teens. It's the Depression, though the families did not do badly. Both had jobs. Large families, my dad comes from seven kids, my mom from nine kids. In Salem. I don't know much about my mother's father, a businessman, for that period reasonably well-off - well, not well-off; for that period they weren't moving around, they didn't lose their house, they survived the Depression intact. They went to Salem High School; both graduated in the same year, didn't know each other. My dad wanted to join the Navy, that was his goal. This is 1937. He worked for the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), one of the jobs programs that Roosevelt put into place. Q: The WPA (Works Progress Administration)? KRAJESKI: This was called CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps. He built a lot of the Appalachian Trail and the huts on the Appalachian Trail up in New Hampshire. It instilled in him a love for the mountains. As kids, he took us out to the White Mountains 2 every year, that's where we went, we camped, we hiked. So he joined the Navy, and then of course the war came along so he was very much in the Navy. Q: What sort of career did he have in the Navy? KRAJESKI: He was an engineer in the Navy. Q: Sea Bee or? KRAJESKI: No, he was a stationary steam engineer, he ran the power plants of the ships. He spent his war down below decks on the USS Iowa and the USS Newport News too. The Iowa was a battleship and the Newport News a heavy cruiser. Mostly in the Atlantic, almost entirely in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the invasion of southern France, off of the Anzio invasion. He was not in the D-Day invasion. He may have been back in the States refitting. He said he didn't see a lot of action, but basically everything was going on above deck. You can hear the big guns going off, you knew things were going, it was hard work. He was in the Navy till '46. When the war was done he went into the reserves. My mum was a WAVE (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) in the women's navy, worked as a clerk in New York City and Salem, Massachusetts. They had met each other during that time somehow. They were never very clear. They claimed they didn't know each other in high school even though they graduated from the same class. They didn't live that far apart in Salem, which isn't a very big place. But they met and married immediately after the war - met during the war then got married in '45. Q: You were born in Salem? KRAJESKI: I was born in Salem in 1950. Only lived there a few years. Again, I mentioned the huge families. My dad's ambition was to move a little bit away from the family. Plus he had a job at a big power plant. He worked his whole life for New England Power in their generating plants. He wanted to be a farmer; he loved farming, even though he knew nothing about it. So he bought a small farm in the Merrimack River valley north of Boston, a big 250-year-old colonial house with about 20 acres of land, and he moved us all up there. Eventually there were seven of us, seven kids, and I grew up on a small farm in the Merrimack River valley in Massachusetts. Q: What did you raise? KRAJESKI: All kinds of animals because he was always experimenting with different animals, and a lot of vegetables. He learned as he went; he was always looking at books. Of course, it was a farming community that in those days was transforming into a suburban community, Groveland, Massachusetts. They built a big Western Electric plant near there so a lot of farmland was being converted into suburban tracts, “Beaver Cleaver” housing was what we called it. So the town was changing as I was growing up. His ambition was to grow everything on the table; the table was ours. The only thing, he couldn't do was dairy; he could never keep a cow pregnant. I have lots of stories about the vet coming over attempting to impregnate another cow; it never worked. 3 Q: Pop over to Vermont... KRAJESKI: He used to barter. We had a lot of chickens, We'd have three or four hundred chickens, so we would barter eggs for milk and for dairy products. Q: What was it like being a kid on this farm? KRAJESKI: It was a very happy childhood. My mom and dad were terrific. We worked all the time. My dad had his day job, which was actually a 24-hour job; it was shift work, the power plants ran all the time. He was a shift manager, so he worked different hours. My memories of him are almost all on the farm. As kids we had to get up early in the morning, five, six o'clock in the morning, go out and gather the eggs and feed the animals.