Getting to Istanbul

I remember one thing about the flight taking me from my birthplace of Gdansk, Poland on the first steps on the journey to what would eventually be a new home (Canada), and that is that me ears really hurt on the decent of the LOT IL-62 into Istanbul. I remember the pain was so bad that I was crying. I was 9 years old and the jet which was descending too fast for the pressure of my head made it hurt. The next thing I remember about getting to Istanbul is the bus ride from the airport to the hotel. I remember a stark warning from what I realise now was a xenophobic and racist man telling our tourist group on vacation from behind the “Iron Curtain” how savage the Turkish men were. How they just ‘steal kids and rape them, and how if they couldn’t steal a child they’d rape a goat’. Not sure if it was the tour guide meant to scare the tourist group from going astray, or islamophobia and general xenophobia playing out constructed by the racism ingrained by the homogenous culture and propaganda of Poland, but it is definitely something that stuck with me all this time. Definitely something that shows my mother’s courage in what happens next while we were in Istanbul. Regardless I clearly remember my mother’s grip on my hand being extremely tight during the whole time we were there before we would defect from the group to start a new life in the West.