I learned something recently that gave me a new perspective on the horrendous war in Ukraine, with the senseless destruction and death taking place there day after day. On one of those depressing news days, still trying to comprehend what was happening on the other side of the world, I read this in a local newspaper: Alexandra Szwec, 105, of Fulton, New York, passed away [on] March 14, 2022…Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and immigrated to the U.S. in 1950, Mrs. Szwec was a longtime resident of Fulton.
I was shocked to read that Alexandra was born in the capital of Ukraine, not only because someone who’d long called Fulton their home had a connection to that war-torn country, but also because Alexandra—or Alex, as her friends called her—was someone I knew personally. Alex was a good friend of my mother’s, and though I’d talked with her several times and knew she’d emigrated from Eastern Europe, I wasn’t aware that she once called Ukraine home.
In my conversations with Alex she never talked much about her early life. She was a devoted gardener, as am I, and whenever I saw her with my mom, we’d talk about our efforts to make things grown. About ten years ago, when I started volunteering at the Fulton Library to help them create their Memoir Project, which strives to collect the unique memories of Fultonians, I thought of Alex.
Without hesitation, Alex was happy to share her remembrances of life in Fulton. She was a respected employee of Sealright and A.L. Lee Memorial Hospital. She was proud of her association with the Fulton Polish Home. She talked about going to night school to learn English and then relying on her two sons to help her better communicate. But sharing details of her early life, before becoming a Fultonian? Alex politely said she’d rather not.
I was only able to learn a little about Alex’s childhood and young adulthood through June R. Holden, a Fulton historian who had somehow convinced Alex to talk about her early life. Several years ago, June wrote an essay about Alex for the Fulton First Baptist Church, which they both attended, and here’s some of what she shared, as told by June:
“Alexandra Szwec remembers her native Ukraine as very beautiful and clean: ‘No trash lying around and everyone had a little garden.’ When she was three years old, her father died and her mother went to work in a fabric factory to support Alex and her four-year-old brother. She remembers that ‘times were very hard’ when she was growing up; it was all part of the great depression that was gripping the western world between the two world wars.
“Nevertheless, Alex finished school and attended a technical college, where she learned the trade of milk inspector. But before she could apply her training, World War II broke out and Alex was transported by train, along with other young girls; forced to work on German potato farms. After the war ended, American soldiers took Alex’s family to one of the camps run by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.
“Alex and her family became ‘displaced persons,’ the official international designation for citizens of the countries that had been occupied by Nazi Germany and who found themselves outside their homelands. The Szwec family did not wish to return to their home, since their native country had suffered much during World War II and would endure even worse treatment from the Soviet government, including the possibility of retaliation.”
Luckily, Alex told June, her husband John and she received permission to enter the United States. However, all those arrangements took so much time that their firstborn, Michael, was five years old and she was seven months pregnant with their second child, Norman, by the time the family reached their new home. They were welcomed into Fulton, brought here through the kindness of a special group from the city’s First Baptist Church.
When I interviewed Alex for her memoir, she talked about those early years in Fulton, when she took whatever employment she could. “I started to work for people doing housework,” she said. “I used to take Norman, who was still a baby, in a basket and he would be with me, sleeping in the basket, while I worked. I did housework for four years. Some people paid me pretty well, some not so good.”
Though a hard worker, life wasn’t just spent on the job for Alex. “I used to love to walk around the different parts of Fulton,” she said. “For many years, my friend, Frieda Vasho, who lived in my neighborhood, and I would walk around Lake Neatahwanta, which would take around three hours.”
And Alex loved gardening. I had the privilege of visiting her backyard garden over the years. Once she knew I also loved tending plants, she was eager to share a cutting or a root from something she’d been growing in hers. Those gifts now thrive in my garden, a seasonal reminder of how much life Alex got out of being alive.
As I read Alex’s obituary, with just that one sentence about her life starting in Ukraine, I thought about the century she spent between her “little garden” in Kyiv and her beautiful garden in Fulton. I understood the cruel irony for a woman who remembered her place of birth as beautiful and clean, now seeing it as a targeted city from which to flee. How must Alex have felt, in her last days on earth, to know of the trouble closing in on her first home?
There’s no quick fix for the despair I feel about the war in Ukraine and I continue to wrestle with how I can be truly helpful to those suffering there. But after learning of Alex’s passing, my concern shifted from the unknown masses to each individual soul entrapped by that war. Now, when I think of those in distress, I see Alex Szwec’s face and I hear her voice, in the broken English she worked so hard to perfect, talking about the beauty in this world she first found in that little garden in Ukraine.
Gardens like this one, found in Ukraine, once inspired a longtime Fulton resident.
