Dave Moczulski

419 Hill Street, Our Lady of Czestochowa Church

My name is Dave Moczulski. I’m standing here in front of Lady Czestochowa Church, on Hill Street in London. Those years that I was an altar boy there, again it was in the 50’s, was not too far separated from the end of World War II, where Poland had been invaded by the Germans and many of our community still had family members back home struggling with conditions in that occupied Polish community. As a measure, everyone tried to want to help them out as best they could, and as much as they could afford. They would try to send care packages and those care packages that they would send out would include items that, at that time, were seen valuable back in Poland. Those items like U.S. dollars, cash, but U.S. dollars only. Other items would include salt, pepper, soap, and used clothes. The clothes was interesting because you could use the clothes to wear as part of the family, or to trade, to barter with, to sell. One of my aunts, or ciocia as we call it in Poland, used to roll up U.S. dollar bills and stick them into pepper shakers and try to fool the inspectors who intercepted all of these packages that came in from Canada and the U.S.

After, I guess, months of frustration at the family members not receiving the packages or the goods that they had sent, there was a sort of I guess you’d call it an underground system within the community. There were people in the community, they had training, they had knowledge, they had contacts, and these people were the ones that basically had an underground transportation system that would guarantee that you could send a package from London, Ontario and go to Poland and get it there to the family members unopened.