It was after my father died, after I'd been forced to put Mama in a nursing home that I found the box that changed my life.

Looking back, it is a wonder that I ever found it at all. My childhood home was jammed full of things Mama refused to throw away. "One day we might need it," she'd say, and nothing could change her mind.

And so it became my responsibility to clean out fifty years of necessities before I could put my parents' house up for sale. It was no small task. I needed to take a week off work to handle the project.

I understood the obsessive hoarding. My parents were immigrants who gave up everything, their possessions, their extended family and even their nationality in order to survive. It never bothered me until I was the one who had to deal with the mess.

I started the task while Mama was still living in the house, but with every box I took to the curb, I had to endure my mother's tears. Although she was suffering from dementia, she had a deep relationship with her things.

"You don't need hundreds of sour cream and cottage cheese containers" I said, but Mama cried like I was throwing out something precious.

My father was gone, dead for two years, but when I opened the over-sized, chest freezer, I found stacked orange juice containers, filled with water and frozen.

"What for? I asked, exasperated by the waste of electricity to freeze blocks of ice.

"When we go on a picnic," she whimpered.

Neither she nor my father had been on a picnic in years, but true to her frugal nature, Mama had home-made ice-packs--just in case.

The rafters were filled with boxes. I found dresses that I wore in high school, yellowed and mouldy from being stored in the garage. Between my mother's despair and my anger at the worthless trash, I postponed the purge until I no longer had my mother's watery, blue eyes accusing me, staring at me as if I was a thief.

Being an only child, made the stress of having to make difficult decisions, hard to bear. I had no aunts, uncles and if I ever had grandparents, they were never mentioned. As a child, I had many questions, but answers were never forthcoming and after a while, I stopped asking. My parents would talk lovingly about their new country, but they acted as if life began when they stepped on Ellis Island. Nothing was ever said about their lives in Poland before they fled. Yet, every lesson reverted back to the days when there was barely enough food for my parents to survive.

My mother was always flighty. Except when she became determined, running after me with a wooden spoon for some transgression only she took seriously, she seemed to live in her own world. She never adjusted to modern conveniences or technology. I didn't have the heart to dispose of her record player or boxes of long-playing records. Each Sunday morning she would put on her favourite composer and wake me up to cranked up Mozart or Beethoven--never Wagner. She would dance around the living room like she was performing a ballet, not the least bit perturbed by my father's guffaws.

After he died, I had no idea she would deteriorate so quickly. It's as if she surrendered to her fantasy world, living in a dream world, talking to people who weren't there, using names I'd never heard. Though Polish was only spoken in the house when some dire emergency made it necessary to speak so that I would not understand, suddenly my mother would initiate conversations I didn't comprehend.

"Mama, speak English. What are you saying to me?

She seemed to snap out of it, as if she suddenly recognized me, but when the doctor confirmed Alzheimer's at her last physical, I realized that she could no longer live alone. She'd settled into the nursing home better than I expected. The horrendous task of cleaning out her personal belongings from the house remained with me and me alone.

By the second day, I'd given up opening the boxes. I ordered a dumpster and hauled things out without looking, figuring out that I didn't need anything and doubting anything of value would be stored in the garage or basement. By the fourth day, the dumpster was removed and an empty one was delivered as a replacement. It was exhausting work, but I started to feel like I was succeeding. It was only on the fifth day that I remembered the attic.

The fold-down ladder to the attic was in the laundry room. I stood there staring, trying to convince myself that nothing was stored up there. When I was small, that's where my parents stored Christmas presents. The year I discovered there was no Santa, was the first time I'd gone up to the attic. There was my brand new bike, complete with a bell and streamers that would fly in the wind when I rode. I was so excited, but I had to keep it hidden with two days left before Christmas.

My parents couldn't believe it. For those two days I was the perfect little girl. But I didn't get the bike on Christmas Eve when we traditionally opened our gifts. When I pouted, my father chuckled. "Christmas isn't over. Maybe you'll get that fancy bike from Saint Nicholas."

Sure enough, it was propped up beside the Christmas tree the next morning with a big tag tied to the handle bars; 'Love Santa.'

As I remembered my discovery, I also recalled there were boxes up there all those years ago. I wanted to pretend the attic was empty, walk away and end my big clean-up, put the house up for sale and get on with my life. I allowed my sense of responsibility to win the argument.

It was obvious no one had been up there in years. A row of boxes against the eaves was covered in a layer of dust. I wrestled with the first box and found it jammed full of ornaments. I got sentimental as I sorted through the box, wanting to save some that I remembered. Setting the special ones aside, I blocked off the memories and transferred the rest to garbage bags to help get the junk down the ladder.

Every box evoked a memory. Mama saved all my tutus from my years as a budding ballerina. Another box contained Halloween costumes and yet another, report cards and exercise books filled with my childish handwriting from elementary school. My progress continued to be halted by nostalgia as I relived, remembered and shed a few tears.

One box was heavier than the others. I struggled to pull it closer to the light and was astounded to find it contained photo albums I'd never seen before. The first was filled with old people in formal poses; the names were faded, but still legible. There were pictures of people in caskets; dates that I immediately knew were recorded to signify the date of death. Somehow I knew I was looking at pictures of my ancestry. I was fascinated and angry at the same time. Why had my parents not shown me the pictures of my relatives? I felt a chill run down my spine as I opened the cover of the second album and immediately recognized my mother as a younger woman, leaning against an apple tree in full bloom. I looked for resemblances, something that might look like my face when I was her age, but could find no similarities.

There were pictures of Mama with other young women, in party gowns, laughing as if they were having a good time. Then more pictures of my mother with a single blonde woman. I could tell right away, they were best friends. She looked so familiar and I knew she had to be a relative. There was a look about her that seemed familiar, yet I'd never seen the picture before. I flipped pages and photographs, looking for information and came across two couples, posing in old-fashioned bathing suits. On the back: the date 1939-- Baltic Sea--Arvides, Rita and us. I laughed when I recognized my father's eyes. He was so skinny and so handsome. I'd never known my papa without his paunch, a jolly roll of fat that he wore as a testament to Mama's baking.

There were a few more pictures of both couples, and one that was obviously the baby's christening. The infant was wearing a flowing gown with a minister wedged between the two couples looking angry and foreboding.

The blonde, Rita was clutching the baby. Her face was so sad that I could feel her sorrow ooze off the old celluloid photograph. I turned the picture over and there in my mother's handwriting were the words that changed everything I ever knew to be true about my life--Ruta--chrezsniaczka.

My name is Ruth--my understanding of Polish wasn't completely a vacuum. My mother wrote--God daughter. Ruta-Rita, it all suddenly became clear. Rita and Arvides were my biological parents. I was glued to my cross-legged squat in the attic. I felt as if someone had poured an ice bucket over my head, my brain frozen, my senses numbed, my eyes transfixed on the face of my sad, biological mother.

Why? The question pounded in my brain. Why? Why had Rita given me up? Why had my parents never told me I was adopted?

On the back of the last picture--Nasza rodzina--our family. My parents were standing in front of an ocean liner, holding the baby. Was it the ship that brought us to America? I always thought I was born in America. How is it possible that I have a US passport?

I was done for the day. Emotionally exhausted, my confusion was merging with frustration. I had no one to ask. My mother's mental capacity was limited. Was I to live with these questions for the rest of my life?

It was as I was putting the albums back into the box that I saw the velvet pouch. I pulled the drawstring and a silver necklace tumbled into the palm of my hand. Carved from amber, I held a star--The Star of David attached to a silver chain. A piece of paper peeked out from the bag. I pulled it out and recognized my father's handwriting. Simple words--a place and a year--Auschwitz--1943.

Sitting in the attic as decades of dust floated in the air, I remembered studying the book, 'The Diary of Anne Frank' while in school. How painful it must have been to my parents as I waxed on, carrying on over repeated dinners about how romantic it was to be hiding from the Nazis.

No one interrupted my diatribes, both parents listening as if every word I spoke was gold or magical. When I finished the book, and my English class moved on to other novels, my father told me the lucky children were the ones not born to Jewish mothers. As only a teenage girl can be, I remembered slamming down my glass at the table. "You're anti-Semitic." I stormed to my room in disgust.

"I didn't know," I whispered in case, by God's grace, my father could hear me.

Ever so thoughtfully, I opened the clasp of the chain and smiled, it still functioned. I put it around my neck and went back down the ladder, back to the life I knew.