It’s a gloriously sunny day in November, but the stone angel’s face remains in shadow. She holds a hand to her face, perhaps trying to hide her feelings.
A sculptor created her probably a century ago, sitting atop a gravesite in St. Adalbert’s Cemetery in Niles. The cemetery is marking its 150th anniversary, and some people, including me, are driving around it on this All Souls Day, also called Day of the Dead, visiting historic sites courtesy of a cemetery tour map.
The stone angel, portrayed as a girl of five or six, isn’t on the grave of a famous person, but she has a story to tell. She’s part of the monument of a family that enjoyed fairly long lives – except for one. A black-and-white oval photo shows a beautiful 23-year-old woman named Marie, with her birth and death dates below it: 1882-1905.
I just happened randomly on this monument, but I imagine the sorrow of Marie’s father Vaclav, 1854-1922, and mother Marie, 1856-1934, at having lost their daughter at such a young age. Did they mourn her for the rest of their lives? I silently honor the younger Marie, who missed out on so much.
Cemeteries can be like that. Gazing at graves can put you in a kind of reverie, imagining the life stories of people with only weather-beaten stone markers for clues.
“As you drive through the cemetery, Deacon Glenn likes to say, you know two things about the people buried here – that they were loved and cared for by their families, and that they shared the common faith memorialized in these stones,” said Ted Ratajczyk, executive director of Catholic Cemeteries of Chicago, with a nod to Deacon Glenn Tylutki, outreach coordinator for Catholic Cemeteries, who was standing next to him.
Both of them had come to St. Adalbert’s for the 150th anniversary celebration, and were handing out brochures explaining that in 1872, Polish and Bohemian church pastors in Chicago joined forces to buy the original 12-acre plot that became St. Adalbert’s Cemetery because, essentially, they needed someplace to bury their parishes’ dead. Today, it’s more than 250 acres, stretching from Harlem Avenue east to Milwaukee Avenue, and from almost Touhy Avenue (7200 North) to almost Devon Avenue (6400 North).
More than 323,000 people are buried here.
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That’s more than 10 times the population of Niles, and it isn’t even the only cemetery in Niles, which is why Niles folks like to joke, if you will, that there are many more residents below ground than above it. One’s gotta have a sense of humor about these things or they can get pretty grim pretty fast.
Anyway, the Bohemians and Czechs later built their own cemeteries, such as Bohemian National Cemetery on Pulaski Road, and St. Adalbert’s became known as predominantly a Polish cemetery, at least for North Side Poles. On the South Side, Poles buried their loved ones at Resurrection Cemetery in Justice or Holy Cross in Calumet City.
Polish immigrants built “cradle to grave” protection for their community, creating hospitals, churches, schools and cemeteries in Chicago neighborhoods in an effort to create a Poland abroad, said Dominic Pacyga, professor emeritus at Columbia College, who has written several books on Polish-American history in Chicago.
“The idea was to also imbue the children and grandchildren with a sense of Polishness,” he said. “These were rural people who came from a very different culture, moving to an industrial city that was hostile to them, and they were working unskilled jobs on the lowest rung of the ladder. It was important to them to create a sense of community.”
Judging from the many, many Polish names on graves at St. Adalbert’s, they succeeded.
Continuing my tour, I visited the monument to St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest imprisoned at Auschwitz during World War II. Kolbe offered his own life to the Nazis if they would spare a man who had a wife and children; the Nazis accepted the deal. I got goosebumps the first time I heard that story.
On the east side of the cemetery, visible from Milwaukee Avenue, a stark black granite cross, perhaps two stories high, towers above everything around it. Angel wings, carved in a flowing contemporary style, stand behind the cross, and a Madonna figure in front embraces a person in Pieta’-like fashion.
This is the monument to victims of the Katyn massacre, a name that still hurts Polish hearts. In 1940, the Soviet Union conducted a mass execution of many thousands of Polish prisoner-of-war military officers in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, Russia, according to britannica.com.
The story doesn’t end there.
Wojciech Seweryn, a Polish Chicago artist with ties to Niles, designed and created the Katyn monument at St. Adalbert’s partly as a tribute to his own father, who was killed at Katyn. In April 2010, Seweryn told his daughter, here in the Chicago area, how excited he was to travel on a plane from Warsaw to Smolensk with the president of Poland and dozens of Poland’s top leaders for the 70th anniversary of the massacre.
The plane crashed. Everyone on board was killed. At the same place where thousands of Polish leaders were killed 70 years earlier.
Poles and Polish-Americans reeled in shock. It was so eerie, so unbelievable that such a tragedy-upon-a-tragedy could happen. Even now, 12 years later, flowers and candles were lined up in front of the monument, and people stood before it paying their respects.
I walked away from the Katyn monument, walked through other parts of the cemetery, slightly disoriented by the dissonance between the warm sun and the vast expanse of stone monuments stretching in every direction, with each one, each name, telling a story. A story here of a husband who died decades before his wife; a story there about two children in a family who both died. Walking among hundreds of graves, I felt the sorrowful energy of so many people who had lost their loved ones. It was getting overwhelming.
Getting back in the car, I drove through parts of the cemetery unfamiliar to me, then came around a bend and saw something that created a wave of relief. I smiled; the heaviness vanished. It was a place I’d been to many times, though I usually approached it from a different direction. It was my own family’s plot in St. Adalbert’s Cemetery.
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I got out, and visited, as I have so many times before, my Polish grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my mom and my (non-Polish) dad. There is no sadness here; only comfort, only joyful memories of Christmas Eve dinners, parties, graduations, Sunday suppers and all kinds of get-togethers. All these relatives are still alive in my memories; I think of them and pray for them, and other relatives and friends on the other side, every day. The love is alive, not buried in a plot of land. But, once in a while, going to the plot of land helps bring back the memories, and the joy.
For the other 320,000 people resting at St. Adalbert’s Cemetery, some since 1872, I offer the wish that they, too, are remembered–either by dear ones, or descendants, or just a person walking by who takes the time to push the overgrown grass off a headstone, read the name and think about that person and their story.
Pam DeFiglio is a senior content editor for Pioneer Press/baiduhai. [email protected]