By Stephen Chmelewski

Every great pilgrimage-to-the-family-motherland movie has a scene where the protagonist reunites with a long-lost relative, or stumbles upon the quaint family homestead once inhabited by great-grandparents. These moments, while moving and cinematic, imply that one’s story of reconnecting with family heritage during a homecoming trip is not complete or compelling until they come face-to-face with the exact people or places that defined their family’s past.

Last month, during my dad’s and my first-ever visit to Poland—the Chmelewski ancestral homeland—we had no such moments. There were no long lunches over pierogi and Perła with distant cousins while exchanging stories. There was no address to a family home where we could knock on the front door to ask for a tour. Despite a strong genealogical connection to the country, my dad and I knew little about the specifics of our forebears' lives there.

With only a loose idea of where our family once lived (“somewhere around Kraków,” according to my dad) and no known relatives in the country, we ended up arranging a somewhat touristy, cookie-cutter Polish itinerary: a few days in Warsaw, followed by a train ride through the countryside to Kraków, where we spent an additional three days. We would meander through museums, check out cathedrals, and tour a salt mine—all of which would undoubtedly be interesting, but not terribly relevant to the story of our family.

Sitting in New York before I left, I wondered if this homecoming would feel complete without more context about our Polish past. Isn’t the whole point of these trips to walk where one’s predecessors walked, to eat where they ate? Would a week in the country carry the same significance if we didn’t meet any relatives or visit the towns that shaped the Chmelewskis before us? I was unsure whether my dad’s and my ability to connect with our family heritage would be diminished by our limited knowledge of how our ancestors lived.

As soon as my dad and I met at Warsaw Chopin Airport after our respective flights from the U.S., however, it became clear that we would spend the forthcoming week creating our Polish heritage as much as we would be reconnecting with it. We didn’t know every detail of the Chmelewskis’ relationship with Poland, but we had an opportunity in front of us to add a new, seven-day chapter to that generations-long story.

Over the ensuing week, my dad and I formed our own bond with the country. We spent an afternoon tearing through Kraków on electric scooters, soaking in the sights of the stunningly beautiful city. We housed Polish McDonald’s in the Warsaw train station after every other restaurant had closed for the night. We drank vodka. A considerable amount of vodka. None of these experiences brought us any closer to our Chmelewski heritage per se, yet with each father-son adventure, I felt my connection to the country of our people deepen.

Do I wish that we could have retraced the steps of my coal-miner great-grandfathers while we were in Poland? Absolutely. Would I have liked to exchange bits of family lore with a third cousin twice removed whom we just met? Of course. But even without those scripted-for-Hollywood moments, my and my dad’s adventures that week tethered us, in an indescribable way, to the Chmelewskis’ intergenerational Polish experience.

If I have children of my own someday who feel the urge to explore the country of their ancestors, I’ll gladly go back to Poland with them. I might not be able to take them to the hamlets where their great-great-grandparents used to live or introduce them to distant relatives, but I will be able to show them where their father and grandfather once spent a Tuesday gleefully forging their own version of Polish heritage at 20 kilometers per hour on Kraków’s finest electric scooters. Na zdrowie to that.

Meditations on Polish Heritage from the Back of an E-Scooter