Niwiska December 1, 1998

Dear Cousin and Family,

I thank you very much for the nice and sincere letter. I am very glad that there is still somebody who cares about the family. I am so glad that there so far away is someone thinking about us. As for us, we are healthy, my daughter, Marysia and her husband Marek, go to work far away in Mielec and in Rzeszow, but what can you do? I am retired here with two little ones. Matthis is going to second grade and will be making his First Communion that year. I am taking care of the children at home. I cook and do whatever I can do around the house.

I want to help if there is to a book coming out. Whoever picks up the book will have some image of where all this more or less took place. I wrote up what I could about the location of the village, about the setting of the church, beginning with the first wooden one and then the stone church, how it all took shape. I wrote a few words about our patron saint of the parish of St. Nicholas who had taken care of our parish, village and children from the very outset. Of course, I could write a lot more, but in consideration of the need to be translated, I summarized a bit, but the essentials are there. You write to me Cousin, that you are interested in many things connected with the village and the family in Poland and about the awful war in 1939. Of course, in subsequent letters I can write about all of that. I lived through the war when I was young, along with my whole family and all the relatives. There were terrible things that we lived through in the war. In the next letters, I would like to underscore many things about the customs and traditions little by little and cover everything.

There will be a bit of trouble with the translations, but you like to write a lot and I like to write a lot! I conclude these few words and I include my sincere greetings. I’m happy that with God’s permission, we may get to see one another. Greeting for Clementine, too!

Cousin Anna Grabiec