EVA UNDERGROUND

TAKEAWAYS

 

Coping with loss can be difficult.

 

Two years before Eva’s dad decided to move to Poland, Eva’s mom died of cancer. Throughout the book, Eva experiences pangs of sadness as little things remind her of her mother.

 

• When Eva sees a photograph of her mother, she notices her resemblance to her.

 

• When Eva sees her mother’s old dangly earrings, she remembers how her mother once danced in them.

 

• When Eva sees a fan, she remembers how her mother used to sing into fans to make her voice sound distorted.

 

• When Eva shoplifts gum, she remembers how her mother once made Eva return a candybar and apologize to a cashier.

 

• When Eva notices her father’s bald spot, she remembers how her mother’s hair began falling out during chemo treatments.

 

• When Eva’s dad unexpectedly gets escorted to the Polish border and leaves many of his belongings behind, she remembers how her mom left behind all her clothes after she died.

 

Because Eva’s mother was the glue that held the family together, Eva’s relationship to her dad has never been quite the same since.

 

“Eva knew her father had as much trouble talking to her as she did to him. …Eva’s mom had been their path to each other. She’d forged tiny trails to keep their lives intersecting -- meals, vacations, conversation starters. When she died, the path got overgrown. Neither of them seemed to have the vision to see the old path or the energy to plow a new one” (21).

 

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Things don’t always go according to our plans, but sometimes we need a push out of our comfort zones for an even better future.

 

Eva had just made the varsity swim team when she found out that her dad was making her move to a country that she didn’t know much about (despite having a great-grandma from there). So instead of spending her senior year of high school with her best friend (Melanie) and boyfriend (Matt), she has to take correspondence classes in a land with fewer luxuries (including less heat, strange foods, outdated kitchen appliances, a cramped bedroom, unpaved roads, and no streetlamps in rural areas).

 

“Eva was starving. For the five days she and her father had been in Poland, she hadn’t seen meat or ice cream or even popcorn. The few stores in Zakopane were a joke. Shelves in the butcher shop were totally empty, except for the rows of tins without labels, stacked behind the barren meat counter. …So here she was, trapped in this place with no friends, no phone, no TV, and nothing to eat” (31-32).

 

For the first half of the book, Eva constantly can’t wait to go back to Chicago. Her original escape plan falls through, but at the end of the book, she gets another (dad-approved) opportunity to leave. By this point, she realizes how much of a connection she’s developed to Poland, its people, and its mission for freedom, so she willingly stays.

 

“After her mother died, Eva had tried to get that normal feeling back. She’d yearned to be part of a normal family again. Since she couldn’t, she’d tried everything else. She’d thrown herself into swim practice, into parties, and into her boyfriend. Until this minute, Eva hadn’t realized that she’d been searching for a way to feel normal. If her dad had tried to point it out, she wouldn’t have listened. But Poland had a way of stripping away the makeup and forcing you to see yourself under it” (105).

 

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Curtains (both literal and figurative) can be undesirable barriers.

 

• Eva’s mom used to not like literal curtains.

 

“Her mom hated curtains. ‘Curtains ruin sunlight, Eva,’ she’d said more than once. ‘They make us miss what’s going on in our own neighborhoods’” (2).

 

• Eva and her dad get intimidated by the armed guards who aggressively check their visas and search their car/luggage.

 

“Instead of starting her senior year in Chicago with her boyfriend, Matt, she was headed toward the Iron Curtain. She’d half expected an actual curtain made of iron. But the barbed wire, separating the free world from Communism, seemed even more threatening” (2).

 

“Few Americans ventured behind the Iron Curtain. And if they did, they stuck with guided tours in Warsaw. The lone American would stand out like Aididas in a Polish shoe shop” (25).

 

“‘In school we read about the Iron Curtain, but it just sounded like a make-believe, spy thing,’ Eva admitted. // ‘On trips to Germany, Father B. has seen the Berlin Wall,’ Tomek said. ‘It is built of concrete and barbed wire, stretching between East and West, guarded on both sides. Two of his friends were shot trying to flee to West Berlin. The wall of Poland is not iron, or concrete, but it is just as strong’” (201-202).

 

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Communism can be unfair on many levels.

 

• While Tomek’s dad shows Eva how to make plum pierogi, he explains to her how the Holocaust didn’t only have Jewish victims.

 

“‘When I was a young boy,’ Papa began, his fists punching into a bowl of dough, ‘Hitler marched through Europe and took our country. Many Poles, like my father and Father Blachnicki, refused the Germans and fought in the Polish Underground resistance. Both my father and Father B. were arrested and sent to Auschwitz concentration camp.’

 

Eva had studied the Holocaust in her world history class. She remembered the pictures of the barbed-wire death camps, the skeletons in striped clothing, walking and being carried out of Auschwitz. But the prisoners were all Jewish. ‘I… I don’t understand. …Why would the Nazis arrest them? They weren’t Jewish.’

 

He smiled at her as he would have at a little girl. ‘The Jews suffered total destruction in Poland, but they were not alone. Our German captors had more cruelty in them. Eleven million people were killed during the Holocaust. Six million were Polish citizens -- half Polish Jews, half Polish Christians. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Nazi police forces, issued a proclamation: “All Poles will disappear from the world… It is essential that the great German people should consider it as its major task to destroy all Poles”’” (140).

 

Holocaust Victims: Five Million Forgotten - Non Jewish Victims of the Shoah (remember.org)

 

• Owning a Bible became outlawed in Communist-occupied Poland, so Eva’s dad aroused suspicion when the guards at the Iron Curtain noticed his Bible (on page 18). 

 

• The government prohibited or delayed the construction of Churches.

 

“She’d expected a stone cathedral like the ones in Krakow. This one looked like a tremendous boat… ‘Do you not know about the ark church of Nowa Huta? …The Soviet Union built steel mills here to dilute Krakow’s student and professional population. Nowa Huta was to be a model of Communism, a churchless “worker’s paradise.” The government did not allow a church built in this suburb. They wanted the Communist laborers to clash with traditional and religious Krakow. Instead, labor and religion united. All the townspeople -- rich, poor, doctors, steelworkers -- waged a twenty-year battle for a church. Across Poland, people took up this battle. Peasants sent what they could from harvest. Village churches sent altars and chalices. Visitors left their jewelry. And out of this gray concrete desert was built the Church of Our Lady of Poland, the Arka’” (89-90).

 

• Tomek had a hard time enrolling in the classes he wanted despite his hard work (and another Pole who had a receipt for enrollment was denied any classes), but the son of a Communist leader had no problem at all.

 

“Communist party members reaped daily privileges, but no one complained. Poles knew better. This man’s son might have had failing grades, but he’d find a choice place reserved for him at the university, and all his expenses would be paid” (10).

 

• Large gatherings were outlawed (with the exception of funerals), so people seemed excited when they were going to a priest’s funeral.

 

“You have to understand funerals in context here. They provide the only opportunity for large numbers of Poles to gather legally under one roof. There’s a very good chance that Cardinal Wyszynski might attend, along with Wojtyla, Archbishop of Krakow” (60).

 

• Movie showings at the local cinema were censored.

 

“Eva saw the billboard outside the only cinema in Zakopane. So far, the movies shown there had been Polish or Russian propaganda films, with a few American psycho-killers-on-rampage movies tossed in. Tomek had explained that the only American movies allowed behind the Iron Curtain were the ones that showed the USA in the worst possible light” (109).

 

• Literature was censored. The government owned almost all printing presses, so it was difficult for the average Pole to get a message out to the public.

 

• The economy was out-of-whack. It was common for drunk men to be walking alone in the middle of the road at night due to the frustratingly high food prices and the low alcohol prices.

 

“Our Communist government raises prices on meat, bread, eggs, all things. Yet they lower the price of vodka. They want to keep us weak, with this false contentment from the bottle. Men who do not feel like men because they cannot afford to feed their families numb themselves with alcohol they can afford” (201).

 

• The militia was overly abusive. They punished Tomek’s father (who was supposedly supposed to hand over twelve pigs to support the state’s cause, even though he doesn’t raise pigs) with the charge of half the plums from his orchard (even though the frost destroyed the other half). The militia then said that they would take away his family’s already-meager allotment of coal for one winter (even though it’s illegal to chop firewood and they need heat to survive). Then, when the militia took Tomek in for questioning about Professor Lott’s business, they hit him and tortured him. 

 

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How do you deal with an unjust government?

 

• Some citizens expressed their desire for religious freedom by planting crosses in the ground. There is a site today called the “Hill of Crosses” in Lithuania, but the book made it sound like Tomek’s brother (Tadeusz) was doing something similar on one of the snow-capped mountain peaks in the Tatras.

 

“Tadeusz and his cousins, like many other teens in Poland, then and now, enjoyed doing what they could to defy the militia. They climbed to the high hills and planted crosses, a thing forbidden by our atheist government. Most of the crosses remained there because our fat militia officers were too lazy and out of shape to climb up and take them down” (142).

 

• Some citizens (like Tomek’s childhood classmate, Jurek) joined the militia. Jurek didn’t have it in him to shoot Tomek, but he hit Tomek to make sure he didn’t look like a softie to the other officers.

 

• Some citizens (like Tadeusz’s friend Grazyna) became watchers/ spies (so she eavesdropped on Professor Lott’s lectures while scrubbing the floor and reported information to the government). 

 

• Some citizens (like Tomek) refused to give the militia any information that could harm others (even information the militia already knew) when brutally interrogated. Tomek was also willing to risk his life to transport the Oasis’s only printing press and to protect his friends from the wrath of the militia (thereby doing what Tadeusz would do, which was whatever was best for God and Poland).

 

“In the past few weeks, [Tomek had] come to realize that Poland was worth risking his life for. Tadeusz had known this, and understanding his brother’s sacrifice at last had brought Tomek a kind of peace. He wanted his country to be free. He wanted to live in a Poland where he could write the poems he desired and people could read them freely. He was willing to sacrifice for this -- but not to sacrifice Eva” (194).

 

• Some citizens (like Janek) were in favor of outright destroying Stalin statues to show defiance. Other citizens (like sweet Andrzej) instead painted a Stalin statue pink.

 

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Aside from politics, the culture shock between America and Poland took place in other forms.

 

• Polish zloty looks different from the American dollar. And because the value of each isn’t a 1:1 ratio, it’s difficult to know what reasonable prices are.

 

“She reached into her pocket, took out a handful of bills, and smoothed them out on the table. They looked less real than Monopoly money” (80).

 

• Polish people tend to believe in more superstition.

 

“‘The rings around the moon last night, Eva. Did you not see them? …That means rain in two days, or an ice storm on the way.’ …Eva didn’t buy into this rings-around-the-moon theory. It sounded too much like the time Krystyna was so afraid for Eva’s father because a spider had crawled across his wallet” (119).

 

• Americans tend to be more spoiled and materialistic, so Eva and her dad each brought two suitcases (and planned to mail in more of their belongings), but they actually had to each send one suitcase back due to the small living space.

 

• Americans tend to waste more. When Eva was drafting a letter to Matt, she kept restarting on different sheets of paper.

 

“She retrieved the wads of paper and dropped them into the tiny wastebasket. One of Pani Kurczak’s chief complaints -- and she had a long list -- was that the Americans created too much trash. Looking at the overflowing wastebasket, Eva had to admit Pani K. had a point” (104).

 

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Sometimes (especially when we’re growing up), we can think that we “love” our crush but realize later what true love is like.

 

Eva was thrilled when Matt finally paid attention to her (instead of the popular girls he used to date). He’s handsome, rich, and athletic. But he wasn’t the best influence on her (since they would get drunk and return after curfew), and Eva always felt uncomfortable if there were awkward silences during long car rides (to which she would default to having him talk about himself). In Poland, Eva had a much harder time thinking of what to write to him as opposed to Melanie, and when he signed a letter with “Love, Matt”, she questioned if they actually loved each other.

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When Tomek saw a picture of Matt, he thought that he couldn’t compete. But Eva felt a deeper connection with the braver, more genuine, and smarter Tomek (who she can be more relaxed around and have comfortable silences). So she ultimately chooses Tomek.

 

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A strong sense of community is critical for getting through hard times.

 

• When Tomek’s neighbors heard that Tomek’s family had been denied their allotment of coal for one year, they each donated some of their supply.

 

• When Eva decides to stay in Poland, her voice isn’t loud enough for Tomek to hear her calling him, and she doesn’t want him to leave the train station without her. Other people around her understand her predicament, so they start yelling Tomek’s name too (so that their collective voices could be heard above the noise of the trains).

 

• At the end, when it was declared that JP2 was elected as the first Polish Pope (and hope thus found its way to Poland), it was nice to have a group to celebrate with.

 

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BONUS: I loved the humor that the author added to lighten up the story.

 

Lard on bread is "smalec" -- NOT cheese!

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“Eva’s feet came out, but one shoe didn’t. The mud slurped, as if satisfied with the great tennis-shoe meal, then it burped up the leftovers. Tomek retrieved the shoe and knelt to slip it on Eva’s foot. Krystyna offered her shoulder for balance. It seemed like a weird Polish version of ‘Cinderella’” (41).

 

“Tomek would probably dance the polka when he found out she was gone” (62).

 

“[Tomek] reached over and put his hand on her arm. ‘Eva, when you were angry with me… I felt empty… as empty as…’ He struggled for the right word, the hollowness in his soul. // ‘...As a Polish meat shop!’ She grinned at him. They laughed, draining the tension from the car. // ‘And I thought I was the poet around here’” (197).

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