The Foreign Service Journal, December 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2014 101 Douglas E. Morris is the partner of a Foreign Service o cer. He has published eight travel guides, including the latest revi- sion to his book, Open Road’s Best of Italy . Unpacking Memories BY DOUGLAS E . MORR I S REFLECTIONS P acking up, moving, then unpack- ing and settling into a new place are all part of the globally nomadic life. is time, however, while unpacking boxes in our apartment in Washington, D.C., I ended up uncover- ing more than just stu . Lurking in the crumpled paper, hiding behind the bubble wrap, were some things I had not been expecting: memories. When I opened the boxes labeled “Polish Pottery” I thought I was simply unwrapping a set of dinnerware we picked up in Brussels. But once I started peeling the paper o each plate, tea cup, saucer, bowl and serving platter, I was reminded of the afternoon my partner and I shared at the Place du Jeu de Balle, an eclectically rustic daily ea market made famous in the Tintin books, as well as the recent lm “ e Secret of the Unicorn” (directed by Steven Spielberg). Kelly and I had been look- ing for formal dinnerware for a number of years, but nothing seemed to catch her eye. at weekend, however, in the middle of this bustling square, on a blanket spread out on the ground, a dinner set captured her interest. e seller clearly thought we were wide-eyed novices, and the price he quoted was ridiculous. Little did he know that Kelly was one of the United States’ key negotiators at NATO. e poor guy did not knowwhat hit him and, as a result, the price started drop- ping dramatically. Eventually we got this lovely set of Polish porcelain dinnerware for less than half of the initial o ering. In and of itself, that makes for a ne memory—Kelly bargaining a professional market seller into submission. But that’s not the end of the story. In this age of the Internet, once we got home, we decided to check out what it was we had actually purchased. Noting the maker’s mark at the bottom of each piece, we popped it into a search engine and, after sifting through some Web-based detritus, eventually stumbled on some informative sites that lled us in on the provenance of our pottery. e mark on our dinnerware (Tielsch Walbrzych—Made in Poland) indicated that it had been crafted in the seven- year period between 1945 and 1952 in a factory town in Poland (Walbrzych). But during World War II, it turns out, that town had had a di erent name (Altwas- ser) and was a part of a di erent country (Germany). More startling was the discovery that the factory in question had been run by slave labor during the war. At that time they put out porcelain with a completely di erent mark (Tielsch Altwasser—Ger- many). ankfully, that was not the mark on the bottom of our porcelain. e tale then took another interesting twist when we found out that at the end of the war, as part of what they perceived as their rightful reparations, the Rus- sians had forcibly removed much of the factory equipment and carted it back home. However, showing incred- ible initiative, some of the former German slave labor- ers, working in concert with the Polish owners, were able to cobble together enough resources to keep the factory running. It seems that the pottery we picked in the Place du Jeu de Balle is the product of that creative and enterprising ingenuity. ough moving from place to place can get tedious at times, periodically we uncover something much more important than the objects we cart around the world: the precious memo- ries with which they are imbued. n Douglas E. Morris A good find at the Place du Jeu de Balle in Brussels.