Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Wednesday, November 2, 2005

I received an email from my first cousin, Grzegorz Urbanski, who lives in Poznan, Poland, over the weekend, telling me that he had heard that our Poland Special program on the SIMPLE LIVING television series had recently aired in the Washington DC market. Another Polish cousin of mine, Tad Tuliszka, who now lives near Washington in Fairfax, VA, had called Grzegorz in Poland to report his excitement over seeing the show.

Much of the footage for that special was shot in November 2004 at a manor house in Brodnica, Poland. It was here that my sister Jane and I, along with Frank and Henry, had met up with Jane’s and my four first cousins from our father’s side of the family. All told, there are six first cousins who are the children of the three Urbanski brothers, who were scattered by World War II to three countries. The oldest brother Alf changed his last name to Ursen and wound up in Germany; the middle brother, my father Edmund, married my American mother and became a college professor, an American citizen (and great patriot!). Only the youngest brother, Jozef, remained in Poland. So we had a first-ever “union” of six first cousins who had grown up in three countries: German, American and Polish. It was an emotional meeting, made all the more so by the fact that we had an American cameraman shooting the encounter. In a sense reality tv was intruding on our meeting, but in another way, it was documenting it.