Visiting ancestors’ homeland is a trip to remember

Forty-one years ago I traveled to the birthplaces of my grandparents and the capital city in Slovakia, which was still part of both Czechoslovakia and the Soviet bloc. Reducing the risk of a journey behind the Iron Curtain, my maternal grandmother arranged for me to stay with my grandfather’s relatives in Bratislava, the capital, and with her relatives in the Liptov region.

No one in Liptovský spoke English, and I knew no Slovak, but that didn’t stop us from talking and laughing. We used translation books, although Grandma’s nephew’s wife spoke at length to me as if I understood every word. At times I somehow understood her.

Last week my sister Nancy, her husband, Bob, and their daughters Alex and Ashley retraced my trip, with a few differences. The Iron Curtain is no more, of course. They stayed in hotels and saw relatives only in Liptovský. They were able to have conversations because two cousins in their 40s speak English. 

Martin, who arranged the get-together on the Slovak end, was a newborn baby in his mother’s arms in my photos. He now lives in Austria but drove back to his hometown to meet Nancy’s family. 

“I heard so many times about your visit to Liptovský Mikuláš, both from my mom and grandparents,” Martin replied after I emailed him a hi and thanks for welcoming Nancy and her family. 

Martin’s grandparents, with whom I stayed in Liptovský Mikuláš, are gone now, but his parents and brother Peter and another cousin are still there. They spent two days with Nancy, Bob, Alex, and Ashley, chatting over dinner as Martin and Peter translated and accompanying them to the villages where Nancy's and my grandparents grew up. 

As the vacationers sent me photos and text messages, I traveled vicariously and was almost as excited as if I were there again. They gushed about how warm and welcoming our relatives were — reinforcing my main memory from 1983.

“Danka, Palo, and Sonya say hi,” Alex texted me. “They remember you well.” Tears welled up in my eyes.

I’d regretted that I didn’t stay in touch with relatives after the visit. Grandma wrote them until she died in 1996. Mom, perhaps thinking that her Slovak wasn’t up to par, didn’t keep up the correspondence. It’s not a good excuse that I didn’t communicate because of the language barrier. Nancy’s visit told them that they were not forgotten. I not only remember them, I remember them with affection.

Nancy wanted to take Mom to Slovakia, but the time was never right. For Nancy’s 60th birthday this year, Alex had the idea of making the trip that Nancy had proposed doing with Mom. I think it’s valuable that Alex and Ashley, raised in an affluent US suburb, saw what they came from, even though the villages are no longer the impoverished places their great-grandparents left.

The timing of this post is ironic because I recently drafted one criticizing elitist messages that elevate travel to a sine qua non of a fulfilled life. If you choose to travel, do it for fun, I wrote, not for significance and meaning. I’ve held off publishing that post because I’m not sure it’s completely honest, and now I’m publishing one that contradicts it. Maybe I’ll never have my feelings about travel sorted out, but I can honestly say that visiting one’s ancestral roots is meaningful, and meeting relatives who live there makes it more so. If anything qualifies as a trip of a lifetime for me, that does.