Mr. America

Breslau was the largest city the boy had ever seen and it was full of Communist cops.

"And you, youngster," one asked him, "what are you doing here?"

The boy lied: "I want to see all I can of my beautiful homeland."

For the next ten days all Mieczyslaw saw were the four walls of a Breslau jail. Then the cops sent him home to the farm where his mother lived with his stepfather. This was .last spring. The farmers and villagers greeted him with amusement.

"Oh, ho," they smiled. "You wanted to leave us, eh? Wanted to leave Poland, did you? Where were you going to? To America? You are Mr. America, now, eh?"

The name stuck. So did Mieczyslaw's determination to find his real father. Before the war they had all lived together on a farm in eastern Poland. Then the Russians marched in, split Poland with the Nazis, captured Mieczyslaw's father, and moved mother & child, along with tens of thousands of other Poles, to Kazakhstan, where they were put to work on a Soviet collective farm. Mieczyslaw's father wrote later that he had joined General Anders' Polish army. Years went by. The war ended and Mieczyslaw and his mother were moved to a village near Breslau, in the German lands east of the Oder-Neisse which the Russians had added to Communist Poland.

One day Mieczyslaw's mother had a letter from her husband. He was in England. He hoped to be able to visit her. But Mieczyslaw's mother knew that this was not possible; Anders' men were no longer in Stalin's favor. Moreover, her husband was an antiCommunist. She gave up hope of seeing him and remarried. But young Mieczyslaw, who did not even remember what his father looked like, could not get the idea of his father out of his head.

"Mr. America," his mother said one day, "will you leave us again?"

"Yes," answered the boy.

"You might as well forget your plans," his mother advised. "They will get you and bring you back, wherever you go."

Bell on the Border. One morning last August, Mieczyslaw, just past his 13th birthday, left home again. He carried an old briefcase containing a pair of sneakers, a box of matches and four pounds of bread. He had 200 zlotys ($50) in his pocket. He took a train to a town near the Oder, crossed the river on a ferry, and headed for the Polish-German border. He got lost in the forests, ate the last of his bread, dug potatoes out of a field and baked them. Near the border he found coils of barbed wire looped along the ground. He followed the wire, detouring a guard tower, followed a set of footprints into the wire, found a pair of wire-snippers dropped by a guard. Mieczyslaw cut the wire and tiptoed across a ten-meter band of smooth sand toward the next barrier, a low stake fence draped with barbed wire. He snipped his way through that, hurried across another stretch of smooth sand toward the third barrier, a higher fence. Suddenly he stopped. He had stepped on a wire concealed in the sand. Somewhere nearby a bell began to ring. Quickly he bent down and cut the electric wire, raced to the last fence and crawled under. "Then I ran as long as I could, through fields and marshes," he said. "I ran until dark. Then I dried myself, climbed into a tree, strapped myself to the tree, and slept."

For days he wandered south through East Germany. Unable to speak German, he could not ask for food. He dug more potatoes. Once he decided to return home, then changed his mind in favor of one more day's walking. The next morning he walked into East Berlin.

Meeting in Berlin. Walking along East Berlin's Friedrichstrasse, looking for an American or a British flag, Mieczyslaw was stopped by a jack-booted young Volkspolizist: "Wo gehst du hin?" Mieczyslaw did not understand the words, but he understood the tone. He planted his sneaker-clad feet wide apart and looked coldly into the officer's eyes. "I am the son of a Russian officer," he said in Polish. "Do not stop me. You cannot stop me." The Volkspolizist stepped back. Mieczyslaw strode on, into West Berlin.

In a few minutes he was on Mehring Damm. A short time later he sighted an American flag flapping over Tempelhof airdrome and knew he was near his journey's end. Last week, perched on the edge of his chair, blond, stringy Mieczyslaw told his story. And the father he had run so many risks to find? A call to England located him: a textile worker in Blackburn, Lancashire. The boy smiled a small, trembling smile. He had made it.

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