Little Elephant - by Donna Urbikas. A Story from "Object that Speak" Project

This little elephant traveled with me from England where I was born to America in the early 1950's and has remained with me ever since as a reminder of the ordeals that my parents and sister endured during World War II.  Its origin began in the early 1940's in the Middle East where my father had been stationed with the newly formed Polish Army under General Władysław Anders.  In England, my mother sewed it by hand from my father's woolen army coat that the British had supplied to the newly forming Polish army.

After getting out of the USSR--the labor camp, the tortuous back and forth journey across the southern USSR, my mother and sister found temporary refuge in Tehran.  They had met my Polish Army officer father during that whole turmoil, first at the Polish Army camp in Tatishchevo in 1941, then in Dzhalal-Abad, and eventually in England.

My mother, Janina Ślarzyńska Zimmerman Solecka, and my sister, Mira Zimmerman, spent the remainder of the war in India so elephants were a daily presence in their lives.  In 1947, they left India for England as going back to Poland was not a good option for them.  Life in England was difficult for Poles like us with few material resources, but my mother was very resourceful and a talented seamstress, so she took my father's old army wool coat and a toy elephant pattern published in the local newspaper and made this toy elephant for me.  My father mounted it on a wooden platform with wooden wheels that he had made and tied a straw basket to the top, which he filled with colorful M&M candy.  I remember strolling with the elephant pulling it along and sneaking candy when I visited my mother in the hospital where she was recovering from pneumonia, shortly before we came to America.  The elephant was packed up for me but without the wheels.  

I didn't really like it at first since the material was very course so the elephant was mostly on display in my bedroom, but it survived all these years and it has been on display in my home ever since.  It reminds me of my mother and her frugality and all the sacrifices she made for me after surviving such a brutal journey and having been forced to leave her home in Poland, which today is Belarus.