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Post by pieter on Jan 21, 2014 3:27:58 GMT -7
Karl, Very interesting reply of yours from your personal autobiographic in the Danish-Frisian perspective of the South-Western part of Jutland (Denmark). Again I see a similarity between us. I grew up in the South-Western coastal area of the Netherlands, with a similar North-Sea climate. I didn't thought of that before. (I mean from the geographical context) It is also interesting from the Newest Social history perspective, because it gives an insight how people (you, your auntie and cousins) lived inn the last part of the war and in the first Post-war years. Again I see a similarity with how the people of the Zeeland area in the Netherlands lived in the last part of the war and the post-war years. With poverty, but a good life due to their fishermen, farmers and sailor skills of coast people, who are used to both the sea and the agricultural farm life. Ofcourse some details are different, but they smoked hams, sausages and fish too. In the Netherlands, Northern-Germany and Denmark we eat peasoup as a dinner or our last meal of the day. Sometimes we eat the soup during the day, for instance during skating on the ice, when you can buy that soup on the ice, and next to that a hot cup of hot choclate milk or Mulled wine. (Grzane wino in Polish and Glühwein in German and Dutch) It is interesting how you describe the proces of sausage making and the collaboration of the family members, with each person having a task. Your trade and cooperation with your neighbors is interesting and typical for a local farming community. Very practical and useful. Often small farming and fishermen communities functionne well due to the fact that together people have to survive. And one family or individual has this skills and the others have other skills. And all skills and professions are useful in such a small community. People of these small agricultural community and fishermen towns know eachother better than people of large anonymous cities. Both have Cost–benefit with positive and negative aspects. The large social control was a lesser side in my view, but the free space and solidarity between people who knew eachother well was a benefit. Cheers, Pieter ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%B5%D0%B9%D0%BDPieter Yes, how so well do I agree with you in our simularities. Even though we are of two different peoples, but not so different. I think you are right in the manner of our lives being shaped by the conditions we live in and we are people of the sea. I am happy of your reminder of drinking Glüwein on the cold winter days/nights {we called it: Glögg which is Dansk for the same thing}. On a holiday evening, many of our neighbours would gather in an open field on a cold winter night. To then build a large fire and sit or stand around it to sing carols or what ever songs. Some one always brought an accordian for music and most of us brought from our homes both a heavy jug of hot spiced cider and a seporate heavy jug of Glögg for the adults and we children drank the hot spiced cider. once I was in my teens, then I was allowed to drink some of the Glögg with the adults and other teens. It was all fun, but then with the cold as it got more cold, then it was dodging the fire smoke and turning our selves around like a roasted pig with one side freezing and the other side roasting. We would then have to give up and go inside for the rest of the evening. I have never visited your Zeeland and curious, I think I would like it from your discriptions. Karl Karl, We aren't so different as you say, we are North-West European North sea brothers. We can understand eachother in probably three or two languages. One brother is Danish-Frisian-German, the other is Dutch-Polish. I can speak German and English with you and probably could understand you if you spoke Frisian in your regional version. Via these sweet two Danish friends I met in France (and saw them again in Amsterdam , where they visited me and Copenhagen where I visited them in 1992 and 1994) I got connected to Denmark. (Not your Jutland, but Region Sjælland, then Island of Copenhagen) Another connection to Denmark is the connection which comes closer to your background, but in a different melange. You are half Danish (Frisian) and half German. I have distant family in Denmark via my Polish grandmothers branch of my Polish family. A Polish male family member, a very sporty guy, olympic swimmer/sailer (something like that, a mentally and physical strong man) jumped of a Polish boat in the Baltic sea who was near the Danish Sjælland coast and swam to the Danish coastline and landed on the Danish beach. The incredible story is that the first person he met on the beach was an older Polish woman who lived in Denmark. The world is full of wonders isn't it? Poland was Stalinistic back then, it was during the fiftees. This distant Polish-Danish uncle of mine, an entrepreneurial chap, a guy who wanted to make something of his life, was fed up by the Polish Peoples republic of that time and wanted to escape. He managed to do so. He swam many miles and survived. He married a Danish wife, and got 'Danish children'. I remember a large family reunion in an Orbis state hotel in Poznań in 1984 where a lot of people from all over Poland and Europe were gathered and there I saw that Danish family for the first and last time. The distant uncle and his blond Danish wife and very blond and blue eyed Danish children (very Danish/Scandinavian looking; very handsome). My mother told me they live in Jutland and that the man was a business man (Import-Export business). He imported Polish busses, trams and machinery to Denmark. Unfortunately I did not have contact with them during that family reunion. I was playing with my Polish cousins (two girls), as I was an exited and energetic (and a little bit childish) 14 year old teenager. I didn't thought about it back than that it would be the only chance to connect to them. The Danish children were a bit introvert and shy I believe. But anyway I have Danish family. Probably that Polish boy and girl now have children of their own? So in that context I have three connections to Denmark. My Danish friends Monica and Kira, my family and you Karl!  I recognize your gathering in the open field on a cold winter night around a large fire. Only our generation didn't sing, but talked with eachother with digital-analogue sound systems with music in the background. Beer was always present next to Glüwein and (we live in the modern days) Coca Cola and mineral water ( Spa blue or Sourci). (for the girls/women and the chaps that didn't drink -who had to drive people back home-) I wonder if Zeeland would fullfill your expectations. It will be different than Northern-Germany and South-West Jutland, but there will be similarities too. The North sea is the North sea, sand is sand, salty air is salty air, the dunes, and the screaming seagulls will be rather the same. Architecture and infrastructure will be different, and the people will speak a different West-Germanic language. (Zeelandish dialects and Dutch) But there will be sailors, fishermen, harbour workers, middle class and civil servants just like in Cuxhaven and Esjberg. And tourism is in Zeeland a major source of income too. Cheers, Pieter |
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Post by karl on Jan 21, 2014 12:19:06 GMT -7
Pieter
Now is this not just something!!! You have family that are Dansk,,this is so wonderful, but and so sad,,,Your uncle must have been a very special person to have braved so much to pursue his dreams, and then to find them in Sjaelland. I have never been there, but it is well known as both very historic and with quite a history mixed with mystery in Norse.
Do not find fault in your self whilst at a family reunion, for of course, being 14 of years, your interest would be in girls and adventure, a very normal situation that also my self once was to share by. It would be very special to both your self and your two cousins: Monica and Kira, to some how locate them for your own re-union. It brings to mind a notion of perhaps they have the simular spirit in finding their cousin {your self} in The Netherlands...Now would that be something to behold if the three of you were able to do this....
My goodness now, you have family in Dänmark, how so wonderfull....I am both happy for you, and saddend all the same, it is my sincer hope that all well come to the three of you as a good ending in find each and every one well and good..
Karl
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Post by pieter on Jan 22, 2014 8:43:09 GMT -7
Dear Karl,
This is indeed amazing and very nice! I don't consider having Danish famil sad, I just haven't got contact with them. And I never have asked my mother about them. But I remeber that my mother during the years talked several times about them. It is a fact that for me they are distant family members, with whom I never had direct or indirect contact. They were there at the family reunion. And I was a little bit curious, because like us they were family from Western-Europe too.
In their blondness (their Polish father -I believe- was blond and blue eyed too)they looked similar to some Dutch families. A lot of Germanic people are blond and pale in various (Germanic) countries. The Dutch and Danis branches were a minority on the family reunion. Maybe for us Westerners the Polish family was more interesting, because in fact we had more contact with the Polish family in Poznan and Warsaw than with other Diaspora branches of the family in Western-Europe and the USA (there also was Polish family in France and Great-Britain - the brother of my Polish Grandfather - Jan Kotowicz - was an officer in the Polish army in Great-Britain. He stayed in England after the war due to the fact that it was not safe and good for Polish officers and soldiers who fought on the side of the Western-Allies to return to Poland, which was aligned with Sovjet Russia. My mother had no contact with Jan and his wife in Great-Britain. The families lost contact unfortunately. The time did the rest. I have no idea if Jan Kotowicz has a son or daughter in England. That is the downside of a Global or international family. The various branches have their national identity and they lose contact. Each person has his or her life in the place, region, country and continent he or she was ment to.
My uncle for sure must have been a very special person to have braved so much to pursue his dreams, and then to find them in Sjaelland. I have great admiration and respect for this selfmade man and entrepreneur, who managed to built a Danish family as a Polish immigrant. I believe though that he doesn't live in Sjaelland, but that he had settled in Jutland. I am not sure, but I have to ask my mother. Maybe I can find out his name and search via Facebook or Telephone books in Denmark.
Being 14 years old I was to childish or immature to really have interest or the guts to chase girls. I was a little bit shy, skinny, pale boy who liked to read books and study history, architecture, cultural things and politics. I collected images which I cut out of magazines and I drawed and painted a lot, also mixed media. (Collage; Meaning an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. Magazine, adveretisement and newspaper clippings, bits of colored or handmade papers, portions of other artwork, photographs and other found objects, glued to a piece of paper or canvas) I lived in my own fantasy, fiction world next to the reality of Poland, Germany (the two German states we travelled through to Poland by car or train) and the Netherlands/Belgium (where we had our holiday house in the Ardens mountains) My interest in girls and adventure also belonged to a romantic fantasy world in my head, it sometimes matched with reality when beautiful girls or young women crossed my path. I enjoyed Polish and German discotheques during my journeys of the late eighties to communist Poland. My two cousins had other names: The eldest was called Joasja, the name of her sister I forgot. Time goes fast and decades have gone beye. Monica and Kira, are the Danish girls from Copenhagen. I lost contact with them too. In the late ninetees or early this century I have had a phone conversation with Kira. But life has created distance. She has an Indian-Danish husbant, two lovely daughters, and she works for the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I am so glad that she made it well. That she has a good job and position and that she is a wonderful mother. I have lost contact with Monica. Her old address is no longer valid. And I couldn't find her with her name. Probably with the name of her husbant (if she is married; and I do believe she is married, because like Kira she was a beauty, with grace, a very fine body -anatomical-, and that quintessence Danish women have. I love the beauty, energy, directness/openess, intelligence and the international mind of Danish women. Many of them have good education, have traveled the world and are easy to make contact with for a Dutch (or English, Belgian, French or German fellow). I met them with my sister when we entered the station of Montpellier in Juli 1990, when we went for a summer course french for one month. They were Danish students who went to the same language course as we did. Kira was 17, Monica was 18 and I was 20. Later that afternoon I spotted them sitting in a restaurant, looking very exotic (they were danish brunettes, and first I thought they were American - Kira the daughter of a Danish general practitioner, had lived in the states with her parents for a few years, when her father had work in New Jersey -next to New York city-, so the fact that I thought that they were Americans was not so strange after all. Monica and Kira were good in both English and French. Monica's mother was a professor at a Copenhagen university and her father was an Egyptian -I don't remember his profession-. She had the look of a wonderful balletdancer. I was in love with Kira during that holiday, but also was fond of a Indian-Dutch girl from Canada, with a Dutch father and Indian mother. So I spend a lot of time with these girls during that wonderful month in Montpellier, where we lived in Roman style, primitive student apartments without windows, but wooden covers to close the open window during the night or heavy rain. Fortunately it was a very hot summer. After that summer I missed Kira, and kept writing with them. The next summer Kira and Monica visited uis in Amsterdam (they traveled from Copenhagen to Amsterdam). That was in the summer -August 1991-. They spend a few days at my and my sisters student apartment in Amsterdam. We cooked for them, went out with them to pubs, discotheques and nightclubs. We had a wonderful few days with our dear two Danish friends. We kept in contact and I remembered their birthdays. I visited them in the sumnmers of 1990 and 1994. In 1994 I went to Copenhagen together with my sister and her future South-African husbant (boyfriend back then). I liked Copenhagen back then. I stayed a few days longer than my sister and her boyfriend. I rented a city bike in Copenhagen and drove through the city and went up along the coastline. Cycling throught the wonderful light (yellow) Green Sjaelland hill land with countryroads, little hamlets (Weiler/Utbuorren), villages and small towns, and enjoying the rock coast of Denmark there, occasionally swimming in the sea or just walking in it with my feet and ankles. In Copenhagen I drove many kilometers too exploring various parts of that city. I know your troubled memories of that city. So therefor I don't go into details and I will not mention some places. Copenhagen is Copenhagen.
I do have my curiosity about that Danish family. If I want to contact them I have to ask my mother or Polish family if they know where they live? This Polish-Danish uncle probably is dead, because his escape was during the fiftees and he was already an adult man back then. I don't know excact how old he was?
Cheers,
Pieter
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