By MICHELE MANDEL
She finally held him in her frail arms, the son she has not seen since he was but 9 months old, and their long, 63 years apart simply evaporated into the air of the bustling airport terminal.
'That's my baby,' whispered Anna Rogers, such wonder in her voice.
For that is the baby she never thought she would see again.
Her son, Andrzej Piekarski, was ripped from her arms during World War II when the Germans invaded Poland and forced her into a labour camp in Austria. She was already a young widow, her husband killed by the Nazis for his role as a partisan in the Polish underground, and so their baby was left to be raised by her mother-in-law.
She never imagined that she would have to wait more than 60 years to see him again.
When her mother-in-law died, Piekarski was taken in by two women eager to enjoy his paternal inheritance. After the war, when Rogers had managed to make her way to London, she sent for her son.
But they refused to give up their meal ticket. 'He was the heir to real estate,' Rogers explained as she waited anxiously for his flight.
ENDLESS LETTERS
Over the years, she wrote him endless letters but never heard anything in return."
She remarried and came to Canada in 1954, but never had more children. She just believed that one day she would meet her son again.
"I never gave up hope because things happen in life. You have to hope for the best and be prepared for the worst, that's what my father taught me."
Meanwhile, Piekarski was growing up in Poland with the same hope. For more than 50 years, he tried to find his mother, sending off inquiries to every agency and government he could think of. The women who raised him offered no clues at all -- they even hid her letters. It was only once one of them was on her death bed that he learned of his mom's undying love.
He contacted the Polish Red Cross and asked for their help. They turned to the international tracing agency in Germany and discovered she'd been in a forced labour camp in Austria and fled to England after the war.
The British Red Cross took over and learned she'd emigrated, but didn't know if it was to Canada or the United States. Enquiries were made to both.
Meanwhile, the father of two was slowly losing faith. "I thought maybe she wasn't alive," he said through a translator. "I lost hope of ever seeing her again."
But the Canadian Red Cross' Radmila Rokvic-Pilipovic had been doing some successful detective work. She discovered that his mother and her new husband had anglicized their surname to Rogers and moved to Sunderland, Ont. Last October, she called the elderly woman and told her that her son was looking for her.
"It was really emotional," Rokvic-Pilipovic recalled yesterday, holding Rogers' hand. "It's her only child. You don't have a child for all your life and now that you're about to enter your nineties, you hear that he wants to see you."Her hands shaking, Rogers dialled his number in Slupks.
"Andrzej," she said, "do you know who this is?"
And suddenly her son knew his search was over. It was the eve of his names day, the date in Poland dedicated to the saint he was named after. "It was the best gift for names day I've ever received," he said.
TAUGHT HER SOME POLISH
Over the last three months, he has called her every second day and taught her some of the Polish she's forgotten so they will be able to communicate. He told her about his life, his wife and two children. "I don't feel like a grandma, I feel 100 years old," she laughed as she waited for his flight from Warsaw.
"I don't even know what he'll look like," she worried. "Where is he already? Is he a missing person? I thought I'd found him."
But Rogers insisted she wasn't anxious. "I'm too old to be excite
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