Boy Takes Road From Poland to West Point

Thirteen years ago, 8-year-old Jakub Potemski stepped off a plane at Los Angeles International Airport straight from behind the Iron Curtain and into the arms of a mother he didn’t remember.

Lights flashed, TV cameras rolled and his mother--who had not seen him since he was 3 months old--scooped the stunned, scared boy into her arms.

Their eight-year separation was caused by Cold War politics, and their reunification was a human example of the glasnost slowly spreading across Russia and Eastern Europe in the 1980s.

Today, Jakub, now 22 and an American citizen, will graduate from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. In six months, the Army will send him to Armor School in Germany as a tank platoon leader.

Jakub’s mother, Aleksandra Andrews of Calabasas, said she is proud of her strapping American son. But his graduation brings sad feelings, too, reminding her of when he was accepted to West Point as a cadet.

“I missed the first eight years of his life, and then he was leaving for West Point for another four years,” she said by telephone this week from a New York hotel. “He’s graduating, and now he’s going to Germany for another three years. It’s always hard for any mother to see her son grow up and leave home. But for me, it’s even harder.”

The former Aleksandra Potemski had last seen her son in 1977, the year he was born, when she left her home in Poland to visit her husband, a jazz musician playing in Chicago on a two-year work permit. She decided to remain in America with him.

The couple intended to send for their son, whom they had left with Aleksandra’s parents in Lodz, about 75 miles southwest of Warsaw. But the Polish government refused.

“We’ll send you your son, but your wife has to come back,” Aleksandra Potemski said in a 1986 Times interview, recalling what officials told her husband.

So Jakub remained with his grandparents.

Soon afterward, Aleksandra’s husband died suddenly. Immigration papers, along with those requesting permission for Jakub to be sent to her, were lost by the U.S. government, she told The Times in 1986.

Without the money and connections to fight for her son’s emigration, she settled for trying to keep their relationship alive through letters, photographs and monthly phone calls.

An American, Ralph Andrews, who helped get Jakub out of Poland and married Aleksandra soon afterward, said her Playa del Rey apartment was plastered with photos of her faraway son and filled with photo albums documenting his life without her.

“She never lost her guilt about the fact that she missed those years,” Andrews said. “He brightened up her life. She doted on him. They had a great relationship right from the get-go. There was no awkwardness.”

Andrews, a TV producer who was working on a film about Lech Walesa, leader of the Polish workers’ Solidarity movement, helped gain political asylum for Aleksandra, who had been living illegally in the United States since her first husband’s work permit had expired. He was also influential in obtaining a visa for Jakub and adopted him soon after the boy arrived.

In 1986, Jakub could not speak for himself--in English.

Today, he can, and his first trip to the United States to be reunited with his mother stands vividly in his mind, he said by telephone this week from his West Point barracks.

“I remember the night before the flight I didn’t sleep very much,” he said. “My uncle and I stayed up talking. I was scared. I had never met her, so it was kind of like meeting a new person.”

He flew via Paris to Los Angeles, accompanied by the grandmother whom he thought of as his mother. But when he got off the plane, he felt completely alone.

“All we saw were the cameras,” he said. “And then my mom standing there in the middle.”

It was overwhelming.

“It was like cameras, action,” he said of his dramatic entry into American life. “Everything was so huge here. I grew up in apartment buildings. Here everything was so huge, spread out and wide open.”

He arrived speaking only Polish, but was thrown into American schools and slowly learned English. His immersion was so complete his parents worried he was losing his Polish. They began sending him back to Poland for summers with his grandparents. He graduated from Calabasas High School in 1995 with a coveted congressional appointment to West Point.

Today Jakub Andrews--who speaks with no trace of an accent and looks wholesome and all-American with his broad, dimpled smile and trim Army haircut--said he feels more American than Polish.

He joined the Army less to stamp out communism, he said, than to get a free education and see the world. Last summer the Army sent him to work at the Polish Ministry of Defense.

As he reflects on his life Jakub said he feels no bitterness toward the mother who left him behind in Poland. He always knew they would be reunited, he said. He actually feels lucky to have led the life he has.

“It gives me a different perspective on things,” he said. “I grew up in a different system. I remember standing in bread lines every once in a while. Most people had a pretty normal life. My life was more of an adventure.”