We drove from Zawiercie to Kraków, and without a radio in the car I spent time listening to my mother as she tried to recall a world that seemed so alien to her. Though my mother had grown up less than an hour away, her family had never visited, another reminder of the isolation of life in small-town Poland. As we walked in the late afternoon light my mother seemed anxious, and it became evident that it was impossible not to feel the thrust of her history pushing at our backs.