Maria is a consecutive career chameleon — currently a family lawyer, formerly a history teacher and author of text books. She is a bi-lingual New Zealander of Polish ancestry. The Polish refugee and immigrant past of both her parents motivates her writing memoir.
 
Dear Dad,

As we do each anniversary, we gather at your graveside. This year, it is 29 years since you passed. What an unbelievable number of years. I remember every detail of your cancer and death as if it were yesterday, it stays so fresh. We meet — me, daughter Kasia, and the family you never knew, grandson James, and son-in-law Mark.  It is a Kazmierow theme - family loss and never knowing those who have departed.

​But for those who did not know you Dad, you are alive. By regaling you at our regular birth, death, All Soul’s, and Christmas Day grave side family catchups, updating you on the latest family gossip, we are keeping you close to us. You are the centre of our lives on those days.

But Dad, this year, the spotlight is on you. How did you manage that from the grave after nearly three decades? The boys want to ask, have you and mum, close to you in the ground and beyond, had a chat? You’ve had some secrets (which to be fair, there’s one you may not have known about) but we reckon, you and Mum have to have a talk. A “one-to-one” about my two new older brothers discovered in the last year.  You can’t put that off.

My “oldest new brother” Pita is very lovely. He looks just like you, a complete doppelganger. Being part-Polish is really special to him. He’s even in the process of taking on the “Tomasz Kazmierow” name. You both would have loved swimming in the sea and fishing together. Pita is so pleased to have found you. My “younger-older new brother” Dean is a treasure too. Just like you, he loves his politics and history, and is a witty and intelligent conversationalist. Both brothers enjoy gardening also, sharing the family green thumb. It would have been wonderful if you had known them Dad.

You’ll have to tell mum. You can’t keep this quiet any longer! Love you!

Dad, we had a graveside giggle, imagining this heavenly conversation. We lit the candles in the lanterns on your graves, for our family remembering, and left you your flowers.

Just to get you hungry, as you always had a great appetite, we shared with you the menu for the dinner in honour of you tonight – your Death Day dinner, your favourite meal – roast lamb and roast potatoes, peas and gravy, with Edmonds cookbook banana cake to follow. Dad you could be a surprisingly kiwi boy, for a Pahiatua Pole. Followed with a Polish Vodka toast - Zubrowka Bison Vodka of course.
 
We continue to tease you Dad for your naughty past, previously only hinted at in a very hip photo of you in your twenties. Living up to your “James Dean” period. Channelling leather jacket and jeans, riding your Royal Enfield motorbike, hair brushed back in a “Dean quiff”, with the essential sultry attitude. Too cool, a touch rebel. And now with secrets travelling beyond the grave. 

Maria is a consecutive career chameleon — currently a family lawyer, formerly a history teacher and author of text books. She is a bi-lingual New Zealander of Polish ancestry. The Polish refugee and immigrant past of both her parents motivates her writing memoir.
 
Predictably, I arrived late, just missing the Waitangi Day public holiday. I was born on a Friday, in St Helens Hospital — a place which no longer exists. It was 1964.
 
The heat and humidity of the tropical Auckland summer sapped everyone’s energy. Our labour was long. But the joy in being born, a new family after so much loss, awash in tears of joy. So far away from the cold wastelands of Siberia and Communist Poland. We were a family at long last.
 
I am Maria Katarzyna Kazmierow, always Kasia. Maria after Dad’s mother who died in Siberia in the second World War. Kasia, after his baby sister who perished soon after in his arms at three years, when he was just a boy of primary years. Death took all the women in my father’s family first. Little Kasia was the last.
 
What’s in a name? Much — sorrow, honouring and love of those lost. Tears are flowing, for the first time as I read what I have just written, words which I have said many times before, for a family I will never know, for my father who named me so.
 
I was born, and I am me. What’s in a name for young me? Kasia, my childhood name, became “Kashin” like the elephant at the Auckland Zoo, pronunciation mangled at primary school. Because of this I changed my name and was known as Maria at secondary school and from then on. But Maria who? She was Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music, or a Hispanic maid in a US sitcom. My name was a cultural crown of thorns, in a country ill equipped to value its beauty.
 
Being a new mother in a foreign land was not so easy for my mother. It was much more than speaking little English. There was the loss of her mother to cancer at thirteen years after Hitler’s horrors, then immediately replaced by a genuinely evil stepmother in the best Disney tradition. Her heart’s compass was lost, its pole torn away. The signposts for parenting this small bundle of noise and demands, that was me needed to be found.
 
Mother and baby had to learn what to do, and we were struggling at home. Soon our new family was parted again, as mother and child moved to a Plunket Karitane Hospital without Dad. That hospital was as histories say “for newborn babies who failed to thrive, and to help new mothers cope with their newborn baby”. Just how difficult things were for a new mother who had lost her own so early was not ever said.
 
Suburban Auckland isolation was never so close as for those silenced in the language asylum of a Polish quarter acre paradise. Fortunately, warm and welcoming neighbours and that “noisy bundle” broke down the seclusion through humorous exchanges and the international language of children and food.