What does it take to understand a parent who hurt you?
Not excuse them. Not justify what happened. Simply understand them in a way that helps make sense of wounds that have been carried for years.
In this episode, KL Wells sits down with Jason Prokowiew, author of War Boys, to explore the lasting impact of addiction, generational trauma, and the possibility of finding healing through understanding.
Episode Summary
Jason Prokowiew grew up as the youngest of thirteen children in a Massachusetts family shaped by alcoholism, silence, and the lingering effects of war. His father survived extraordinary hardship as a child during World War II, carrying experiences of loss, displacement, and trauma that would continue to influence his family for decades.
Together, KL and Jason explore what it was like to grow up in an alcoholic home, how childhood survival strategies followed him into adulthood, and the journey that eventually led him to record more than fifty hours of conversations with his father. Through those conversations, Jason gained a deeper understanding of both his father's story and his own.
Key Discussion Points
- Growing up in a household affected by alcoholism and unprocessed trauma
- The impact of wartime experiences across multiple generations
- The lasting effects of emotional messages received during childhood
- The concept of the "dry drunk" and what happens when drinking stops but healing does not
- Finding your voice after years of learning to stay invisible
- The influence of teachers, mentors, and supportive communities
- Panic attacks, emotional overwhelm, and the body's response to unresolved pain
- The role of Al-Anon in providing language and understanding
- Curiosity as a pathway toward healing and understanding
- Understanding a parent's history without minimizing its impact
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Watch The Interview on Video
In This Episode, You Will Learn
The Questions That Found Me...
KL Wells 00:00:03 Well, I just have to say that I am super excited, super blessed, very honored to have this gentleman with us today. You are going to have a really sweet experience. This is Jason Brock of you and I watched him do let's see stories from the stage and he had me there. And so I am again, super honored and super blessed to have him with us today. He has a big story. And I'm just going to say welcome.
Jason Prokowiew 00:00:36 Thank you KL Thanks for having me. I'm honored as well to be here.
KL Wells 00:00:39 Great. So if you would, Jason, I'd like you to give our audience the context. You know, you you have written a book called War Boys, and it's a memoir of you and your dad, which I think is very sweet, but I want the context of what happened with your dad when he was growing up, which led to, you know, obviously impacting your journey as a child?
Jason Prokowiew 00:01:01 Yeah, sure. So I think the elevator pitch that I've used for the book sums up a lot of what the story contains.
Jason Prokowiew 00:01:08 And, the tagline for Warboys is that it's a father and son memoir. So the way I've pitched it is it's the story of my Russian father's adoption by the Nazis who murdered his family at the start of World War two, and all of the wartime trauma that he carried into parenthood.
KL Wells 00:01:27 And so how did he get to the United States?
Jason Prokowiew 00:01:32 He got to the United States through the United States, the U.N. displaced persons program. So the war came to my father in Belarus in 1941, when he was ten years old, when he was at summer camp. He was walking in a field and a Nazi plane came out of the sky and started shooting at my dad, and he ran back to the cabin and survived that first round of gunfire. It was a surprise to him and the campers and counselors that there was an invasion. They walked home for two weeks back to the Belarusian capital of Minsk, and my father learned that he was alone in the world. At ten years old, his apartment was gone.
Jason Prokowiew 00:02:17 My grandma was gone. And long story short, he ended up connecting with some of the Nazis who were occupying, Minsk and working and living with them through the occupation and then retreating with them to Germany around 1944. And what? Yeah, was first declared, basically, they found a way to keep to not kill him. They gave him a designation known as Volksdeutsche, which was, basically a made up, this lie that my family had been displaced from Germany into Russia at some point in the past, and now they were bringing him back into the folds. He eventually escaped the Nazis while he was in Germany because the UN was now there. He was declared a displaced person. Stayed with the UN there for about five years, and then the UN gave him options of where to go. Around 1949, he chose the United States and immigrated here.
KL Wells 00:03:17 So in 1949, he would have been about 18 years old.
Jason Prokowiew 00:03:20 That's about right. Yep.
KL Wells 00:03:22 Okay, so just to kind of absorb just.
Jason Prokowiew 00:03:26 I know it's a lot to absorb.
KL Wells 00:03:27 It is amazing, honestly. And so then he comes to the United States and he meets your mom.
Jason Prokowiew 00:03:37 My mom. Yeah. He met my mom at a Saint Patrick's Day dance, I think, in 1950, about all of the English that he knew was. Would you like to dance? And, they. My mom ditched her date dance with my dad all night, and they eventually became a couple and married. This was all happening in Chicago, where my dad emigrated initially and where my mom grew up. And then my dad went, he was an engineer. He applied to colleges and ended up going to MIT, which is how my family ended up in Massachusetts, where we've been about since 1955.
KL Wells 00:04:19 Okay. All right. Awesome. And so then given that backdrop, let's fast forward a little bit because you tell us an incredibly powerful story. You know, when you're a kid and what I love about your story is the podcast is voices and courage. You know, all of it.
KL Wells 00:04:38 I mean, so you found your voice, and if you would, again, the context of your dad's alcoholism and then you found your voice.
Jason Prokowiew 00:04:50 Yeah. I think it's important to note. I think my father was an alcoholic and actively drinking long before I was born. I am the youngest of 13 children, so I came along last in 1976. My oldest sister was 22 years older than me, so there is a whole history that I don't. I was not around for his alcoholism, so I try to be really clear that I am speaking largely about my experience, my father's alcoholism. By the time I, by the time I came along, you know, 1976 to 1986, my father was actively drinking. So the home world that I grew up in was one where 5 p.m. every day was a cut off point for me having any amount of freedom in the house. That's when my father got home. That's when he started pouring his glasses of Jack Daniels and whatever freedom I had before that, between school and him coming home and freedom to be in the rest of the house and be with my mom disappeared, and I kind of mostly locked myself away in some amount of safety in my bedroom.
Jason Prokowiew 00:06:06 and that was the first ten years. And as I write about in the book, it wasn't an ideal safety situation. Sometimes I would get caught and, sometimes I would have to have an interaction with my father where he was verbally abusive to me. I was a fat kid. As I write about in A War Boys, I was the fattest kid in school from basically fourth grade to ninth grade. And, there was a lot of community abuse around that fact, and there was abuse at home around that fact as well. So I just grew up with these messages from my dad that I was fat. He constantly, when he was drunk, would, kind of say he wished that his children had his brain very intelligent. And having gone to MIT, there's probably some truth to that, and that he wished we had his brains and my mother's looks because my mom was, you know, training to be a model when they met and was a physically beautiful woman. But he also used to say, all of my kids instead got the opposite.
Jason Prokowiew 00:07:15 They got my looks and her brains, and he would insult her intelligence and compliment her beauty. So we were always basically the message was we are ugly and we are stupid. And also I was fat. So these are the messages that I grew up with for the first ten years of my life from my father when he would catch me. Yeah, thankfully I had time with my mother, and particularly with one older sister who was about 16 years older than me. That provided a lot of safety. That provided me with an alternative to that. They took me on trips to Cape Cod, just my mom and my sister and I sometimes miss my sister. They gave me inklings of a world outside of my dad. And then when I was ten. So around 1986, my father went into the hospital with cirrhosis and was told, okay, if you have one more drink, sir, you are going to die. And my father quit drinking cold turkey and never drank again, never sought any help which we can get into.
Jason Prokowiew 00:08:26 My relationship with Al-Anon, which was very helpful in my later years, but he never did any Alcoholics Anonymous. He just quit drinking. So now you had not an active drinker, but you had a dry drunk who still had some of those rage issues, some of that unprocessed trauma that he still brought into the house. But while he was not drinking. Yeah.
KL Wells 00:08:50 Wow. Okay, so when did the singing come into play?
Jason Prokowiew 00:08:56 Yeah. Thank God for singing for me. I think, you know, when I was younger, I learned to be quiet as a means of survival. As a means of safety. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I know this is, you know, not a unique story to people who grew up in alcoholic homes. but my quietness was a big part of my safety system for a long time. And when I was about 16, a lot started to shift for me. I was just in high school. I wasn't really because I truly believed I was stupid.
Jason Prokowiew 00:09:34 I was not trying. I was not trying academically, and I just needed to do something with myself in school. And I joined the chorus and this for me, was a turning point in my life, my trajectory. And as I talk about in the stories from the stage piece, largely it was this relationship with my choral instructor, Debbie Smith, who heard me practicing some songs one day in the music room and came out of her office, which was adjoining the room, and I know I was I was practicing using a tape that had all the other parts, minus my bass part, and B made me rewind the tape and sing it again. And she did that maybe like 5 or 6 times. Just made me rewind the tape and sing again and sing louder until it reached the point that she was on the other side of the room, up on the coral risers. just going, saying, do you hear yourself? You can sing. And as I talk about in that story from the stage piece and also in Warboys, my skin felt this new sensation of somebody saying something positive about me.
Jason Prokowiew 00:10:49 After 16 years of not having that experience and whatever that experience was, whatever I felt in my skin, I was like, I would like more of that, please. So yeah, yeah, I just started using my voice literally through the chorus, to start pulling myself out of the circumstances I've lived in up to that point.
KL Wells 00:11:14 Yeah. And so that, I mean, there's almost a before and after for sure on this show and I, I, it illuminates for me the power of teachers. and, and and she basically, like, required you to use your voice when you had been very much blending into the wall and I could. Yeah. As silent as you possibly could. And so the shift of that for you had to be like almost mind bending.
Jason Prokowiew 00:11:48 It was mind bending and it was difficult to adjust, and took a long time for me to adjust to the fact that suddenly I was allowed to speak. I was allowed to sing, I was allowed to be a presence in places I had always worked under the assumption that I was shy.
Jason Prokowiew 00:12:09 And as I say in the stories from the stage piece, any friend or my husband now who heard me describe myself as shy would be like, are you not a thing? And I had to adjust away from that understanding of myself, that belief that I was shy because developing and using my voice took a process and took time to start doing.
KL Wells 00:12:35 Yeah, yeah. And so I want to kind of put an exclamation point on the power of gifts like this, that kind of really rewire our story about ourselves and our story about our power, our story about that. We deserve, you know, a place in the world. and so you're rewriting your family story in real time as a teenager.
Jason Prokowiew 00:13:02 I think that's fair to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
KL Wells 00:13:05 And so did you. What kept you continuing to rewrite the story? Because some people will have that opening and then they will close it up. But you kept going.
Jason Prokowiew 00:13:20 Yeah. You just made my brain go off in another direction, I'm curious about people who have that moment and then stop.
Jason Prokowiew 00:13:28 Now I'm curious about those people. I will, but to not go off on that tangent, I will go back to what you brought up earlier about teachers. Debbie Smith, as I mentioned, the music teacher was one source of this change at the same time that the music was happening. I was also writing in my English classes, and I had an English teacher who, first of all, assigned us the book The Awakening by Kate Chopin, which I related so much to this character, who is a woman who has to live under the societal expectations of what a woman could be. I think it's like, you know, maybe I think it was the late 1800s or early 1900s, and he was fighting against all of those expectations. And that character really spoke to me where I was in my life at that moment. So I wrote this English paper about it and was tying it into my familial expectations. It was a safe environment to do that. This was a teacher I already got along with, and I was expressing to her in that particular book, the main character ends her life by walking into the walks into the ocean, essentially.
Jason Prokowiew 00:14:43 Yeah. And there's some question of whether she actually ended her life. But that's not what this is about. But I wrote in this piece, like I've considered doing that too. Like, how do I go on from what I've known? Like, maybe it's just easier to find an end now. And that particular teacher called me into her office out of concern. and mixed in with that concern was also, comment like this is a really good paper. Like, you know how to write. So what a gift that Annalisa notes Notaro was. Her name was to me at that moment. She gave me something else that I was good at, that she was saying, like, let's work on this, let's foster this. And she encouraged me to write more. And I wrote a lot in the last two years of my high school experience, a lot of really bad angsty teen poetry. Yeah, but still, it was another tool that I was being encouraged to sharpen and use as a way to pull myself out of where I had come from.
Jason Prokowiew 00:15:52 And thankfully, I had those two people for the rest of my college high school experience who kept encouraging me. So. And also, Debbie Smith was relentless in making me sing in every possible group there was to sing in. So as much as there could have been stuff at home that, I always say, you know, my dad stopped drinking and then we were all supposed to forget everything that came before it happened. Sure. So there was still a lot of emotional, mental baggage that I needed to wade through. But these teachers gave me tools that I just kept using to propel myself forward.
KL Wells 00:16:32 Well, I mean, music is an incredible, valuable tool to rewire and give you voice and then you. And then you're writing. And so again another super valuable tool because you get to rewrite your story in real time and reflect and kind of work your way through your own story and then create the story that's, that started to move into. so, I kind of highlight those things as a way for people to grab ahold of tools that can help you rewrite your own story.
Jason Prokowiew 00:17:05 Yeah.
KL Wells 00:17:06 And then the power of teachers or a mentor or, you know, just really good people. My story would be that, you know, 95, 95% of our success has to do with the people that we surround ourselves with. Yes. So paying attention to all of those things, as you are in the midst of kind of rounding out your teenage years. Super, super valuable. And so then I'm curious, then you go on to college.
Jason Prokowiew 00:17:32 I went on to college. Yes. Yeah. Just to comment on what you just said about, you know, essentially the community around you. One thing that really kind of came about in high school, through the music and the writing communities that I had at that that early stage of both of those, both of those things that I was engaging in, even my parents, when they would come to floral events or, you know, reading events that I was doing for my writing, they would meet all of my friends, they would meet the kids in these programs.
Jason Prokowiew 00:18:05 And I remember my mom saying to me and my dad co-signing it, that I always found the best people in a room to be friends with. Wow. I was sort of shocked that they saw that, given our history, our familial history, but I really think that comment still holds true. I feel blessed all the time in my writing community now, especially where I'm more heavily involved with the people that I meet who are always giving me a hand up, a helping hand when I feel lost or confused. So I just want to speak to that. but yes. Then I went to college. I was, what I would say was a mess. When I got to college, I went to college first, only an hour away from home, because I just don't think I had the skill set yet to be any farther away from my family. I think there was still all of this attachment to the alcoholic system and the dysfunctional system. That made me feel comforted that on a weekend, I could go back there and be in this familiar territory.
Jason Prokowiew 00:19:21 Right. I was at this college in Massachusetts called Bradford College, which is now closed for the first two years of my college experience And I was doing everything like I was a resident advisor. I was in 5 or 6 shows a semester. I was in the, you know, still thriving in the music program. And I think at that young age, I thought the answer to all the stuff that I had gone through when I was younger was to just do as much as I could, and as long as it was positive stuff, that was everything would work out. But I think my body was a little bit wiser than I was and delivered to me my second year of college. Just lovely stabbing pain, which turned out to be kidney stones. and I went to the hospital for these kidney stones, having no idea what they were, and to me I took it as a call. You're doing everything but doing everything and doesn't necessarily mean you're healthy or you're happy. And I ended up taking a year off of college because I had that realization like, wow, yeah, I'm on this trajectory where I'm doing all of this theater and doing this music, and I'm doing writing, and I'm starting to figure out I'm not a total idiot, and I'm doing well in school.
Jason Prokowiew 00:20:48 And I thought smooth sailing for the rest of life. And, my body was just like, no, that's not actually what's happening here. So I took this year off and I am again, community. I'm very thankful for my friend from college, Rachel Scott, who also took a year off the same year that I took off from the same college and moved back to Pennsylvania. And I, I credit Rachel in the book for while I was going to spend that year off in Massachusetts, the had known a little bit of my history with my family, I was not very good about explaining where had come from, what I had been through in that family yet, but I told Rachel some of it and she did not like my father did not like the stories that I was delivering to her. And, you know, from Pennsylvania. She called and said, come here. Like, come to Pennsylvania. Don't spend this year there. And that August of that year that I took off, I drove to Pennsylvania and lived with Rachel and her family for about 5 or 6 months.
Jason Prokowiew 00:22:06 Wow. And that was another big turning point, because I was now a distance from my family in a way that I hadn't been before, and my body started to do things that it had never done before. I started having panic attacks, panic attacks that had me stuck in a parking lot in my car for an hour, just unable to move. Yeah, I hid most of this from Rachel, so I would go back to her family's house and go to the room that they had set up for me, and just have these panic attacks and ruminations that I had never had before, and didn't understand what was going on with me. And that was, again, the start of a process that really lasted for a period of years because I was in Pennsylvania. But I would still go home and I would leave home to go back to Pennsylvania. And there was this real anger about my parents that was seeping in that I didn't understand because, again, we were taught, okay, dad doesn't drink anymore, everything's fine.
Jason Prokowiew 00:23:17 We just move forward. We don't need to process any of that. Apparently, my whole body was like, you're going to need to process this. Yeah, yeah.
KL Wells 00:23:26 And so when did you, like, realize that? What was what was happening for you?
Jason Prokowiew 00:23:31 I think it took a long time to realize that because after I. And if it's okay, can I go back to your question and just talk about one thing that happened at Rachel's house?
KL Wells 00:23:43 Absolutely.
Jason Prokowiew 00:23:45 There was a there because Rachel, you know, was my age. And we were both at the moment, you know, kind of college dropouts, living at her house with her parents and her two younger sisters who were in high school. And there was a moment where her younger sister, I think maybe it was a freshman, and I read about this moment in Warboys. Her sister came home from school having had a bad day and her mom was cooking dinner. I was at this dining table off the kitchen, kind of watching this happen.
Jason Prokowiew 00:24:17 The sister came in and had, you know, a sad face and wanted to talk about her bad day. And her mom stopped making dinner to converse with her about Bad Day. And I watched it like I was watching a play, and I saw this family interaction that I had never seen in my whole life. Wow. Wow wow. I was kind of stunned by it. But in retrospect, I'm so grateful to Rachel for making me go there and making me and giving me some exposure to an alternative version of a family. What it can be when somebody is in pain, and what somebody else can do in reaction to that pain, rather than telling them to stifle it or ignoring it. It was a real game changer for me.
KL Wells 00:25:09 wow.
Jason Prokowiew 00:25:11 So after I left Rachel's house, I went back home for a six month period, and I didn't want to go back to the same college that Rachel and I had left, so I was looking for a better fit. I ended up applying and getting into Oberlin College in Ohio, which is where I went the next year.
Jason Prokowiew 00:25:27 But the summer before I went to Oberlin, I lived with another friend in Massachusetts. We got a place for the summer, and I was just journaling that whole summer about all of these now angry, angry thoughts about me. And I'm still going through panic attacks and these sweats that I would have in these moments of chaos in my mind. I don't know if I had realized that maybe it had something to do with my dad's drinking, or if my friend had said it to me, that I was suffering. But I looked up and found Al-Anon, and I went to my first Al-Anon meetings that summer before I went to Oberlin. Wow. And that relationship with Al-Anon started that summer and really continued very heavily for me over the next six years, I would say.
KL Wells 00:26:22 Right.
Jason Prokowiew 00:26:23 And that first Al-Anon meeting where you walk in. I had no words for what I had experienced as a child. And thankfully, it's an environment where you can just sit and listen, because that's really what I did that summer.
Jason Prokowiew 00:26:35 Yeah, and hearing people say out loud things that I thought were off limits to say out loud was another game changer. Yeah.
KL Wells 00:26:47 Wow. I just love the fact, Jason, that you just continued to step forward into these spaces that were like before and after experiences for you and just really catalytic in helping you move in the direction of your own healing.
Jason Prokowiew 00:27:09 Thank you, I appreciate that. I'm seeing this moment in my life where I am thinking about how hard it is to change from one environment where you've grown up and known life to be a certain way. And I see it sometimes in friendships where people are within a system, and the struggle to break out of that system is, I can attest, a struggle. And it is hard work, and it is a big leap to make those, like you said, kind of steps forward. So no shame on anybody who has a hard time doing that because it is hard and it is work.
KL Wells 00:27:51 Yes. Well, you're totally rewiring yourself.
Jason Prokowiew 00:27:56 Yeah.
KL Wells 00:27:57 You know, and you're saying that isn't working for me? That's an understatement. And then and then you don't know what you're moving towards until you start having some of these experiences that you're speaking to. And then the windows kind of start to open up as to what other life experiences are available, how other families orient, how they are with each other in ways that you have not experienced. And so like. You know, I think that's just such a beautiful story about witnessing the Robbins sister and mine. Yeah. And, and, and and really, I mean, until you have those moments, you're like. Yeah.
Jason Prokowiew 00:28:40 Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what something else could look like. And it was such, such a small moment for them. It was there every day. And I think a part of me was like, oh, could that be my every day to where? Home is a place where people are kind and there's love?
KL Wells 00:28:56 Yeah. Obviously our stories are pretty different.
KL Wells 00:28:59 However, there's so many threads that are the same, and one of them for me was the. It took me decades to rewrite the story because I kept attracting kind of uplevel, but attracting the same thing that I knew. I mean, I was like, this isn't working for me. You know, it's like it's I think it's the same thing as recovery. You just kind of go like this, you know, until you. And it takes persistence and it takes determination and it takes, you know, I was going to leave this planet with a healthy relationship kind of determination and persistence and, and, you.
Jason Prokowiew 00:29:35 Know, even though you might be like, I have no idea what that looks like, but I know that's what I want.
KL Wells 00:29:40 I know it's out there. I would read about it and I would have these glimpses of it like you did, but to have it in totality as a way of being and a way of living is a whole other experience that you still have to get comfortable with.
KL Wells 00:29:55 And so I'm so I'm super curious relative to the panic attacks and all that's kind of working its way up and out of you. When did you start to feel free enough to actually have a conversation with your dad that informed the book?
Jason Prokowiew 00:30:11 Yeah, I think part of my process of healing has been therapy. And the therapists that I have now, I've had for since 2021, so about five years. and I just brought him up at this moment because he knows the story of my interviewing my dad, and he often marvels at the fact that I did those. because what happened was I recorded my dad's history on an audio recording device starting my second semester at Oberlin. And he, my therapist, often marvels that I did that because I was essentially going to speak to my tormentor at a time where I was not yet aware. I didn't have the language to understand. How that might not be a bad idea might not be the greatest idea, but the reason that I did those tapes was because when I got to Oberlin, I started taking Russian history courses.
Jason Prokowiew 00:31:18 because I was curious about this land that my dad had come from that we didn't know much about. Right. and we watched a movie called Come and See, which is a very brutal Russian film about the invasion, the Nazi invasion of Belarus. And there are all these moments in the film that made me think about stories that I'd heard my dad say while I was growing up, and I went to I write in the book like I felt like a magnet pole to that professor's office where I just said to him, like, what I saw on that screen today reminds me of things my dad told me. And, this professor again, goes back to the community, right? Steve? This professor, Steve Crowley, who is still within my community, he just invited me back to read from my book at Oberlin this coming fall. He wrote a blurb for War Boys, but he was just curious. He was like, your dad's story sounds a little nuts. Like, what do you know about it? and he offered me academic credit.
Jason Prokowiew 00:32:26 At Oberlin, there's a winter term, which is a month-long session in January where they encourage you to do independent research. So I asked Steve if I could go interview my dad and answer some of the questions that Steve was asking that I didn't know the answer to. Like what exactly happened to my grandma, right? My dad told me she was a high ranking Communist Party member. Like, what did that mean? Where did she actually work? So there was this love that my dad had for academics. He was an advocate. He loved learning. He encouraged learning. As I've mentioned a number of times already, he went to MIT. He didn't understand why anybody would give me academic credit to talk to him about his history, but he allowed that space to happen. He had a, you know, a snowbird at that point. Living in Florida. So I went from Ohio to Florida that January and started asking my dad questions. And, I would ask these questions in the interviews and then go back to my room that was that I had at the condo and be so angry at my dad.
Jason Prokowiew 00:33:39 So I was still in this place where I wasn't able to vocalize the anger. Anger was off the table in my family. Yeah, but an academic connection with my dad, a history connection with my dad was acceptable. And there was something in my brain that, again, I didn't have the language for at the moment, but telling me that there was some connective tissue between my dad's history in the war and how he was as a parent. He didn't have the language. Didn't know what I was doing with that. But something internal led me to these interviews. and we ended up with 50 hours of interviews, and, we ended up with a real change in our dynamic because of the interview process. Where? Right. My dad was no longer telling these stories from a place of, I'm going to tell these stories the way that I want to tell these stories from a place of safety, that all these stories show me as, like, this little survivor. Little hero. I obviously was very interested in that time.
Jason Prokowiew 00:34:58 The more complicated story, because I was trying to understand the complicated story for myself. So, yeah, I was thinking of my childhood and already started, and I was seeing a different therapist at Oberlin. The moment I got to Oberlin. I got a therapist.
KL Wells 00:35:11 Good for.
Jason Prokowiew 00:35:11 You. and I was asking the question, like, what did I experience as a child have to do with panic attacks that I'm having now? The question I'm having now, how are those connected? So I was now bringing some of those therapy questions into my interviews with my dad and saying, how did it feel to go home and realize you were alone in the world at ten years old? And he hated that line of questioning. He resisted it, didn't want to go there, would just get up and make coffee and ignore my questions. And on the tapes, you just hear him stirring his coffee. He's spooning in his cup. but I just didn't budge. I just sat there and waited. I waited him out, essentially.
KL Wells 00:35:58 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jason Prokowiew 00:35:59 And I saw my dad cry through that process. I saw him in pain through that process, I saw this little boy suddenly emerge from this man that I'd always known as stoic, rolled, not emotional, not delving into the darkness that was within. Yeah. So suddenly in front of me.
KL Wells 00:36:27 Wow. Wow.
Jason Prokowiew 00:36:30 I don't know if I answered your question.
KL Wells 00:36:31 Well, I'm just struck by the courage of both of you.
Jason Prokowiew 00:36:35 Yeah.
KL Wells 00:36:36 And I can only imagine that everything shifted for both of you. And then you both find yourselves in this new iteration of who you are individually and as father and son.
Jason Prokowiew 00:36:53 Yeah. Gift is the word I use all the time for it. There was a gift for me as a person, I think, for him as a person. And there was a shift in our dynamic. and my father would pass away Three years after these interviews began, we did, you know, a month of interviews. And in that month he went from not wanting to have those conversations to every day.
Jason Prokowiew 00:37:19 This was probably three weeks into the difficult hurdles of getting him to talk. But three weeks in, three weeks in, I saw this shift where he was like, what time are we working today? What time are we taping today? And we didn't get to finish all of the work in that month. And when he was driving to the airport, I wrote about this in Warboys. He was like, I hope we get to finish. And when I graduated from Oberlin, I went home and we finished those tapes.
KL Wells 00:37:46 wow.
Jason Prokowiew 00:37:48 Over the next three months, after I got back from college, he actually passed away three months after we finished the tapes. But I think our dynamic was forever changed by that beginning point of our interviews.
KL Wells 00:38:03 Wow. What an extraordinary gift.
Jason Prokowiew 00:38:07 Right?
KL Wells 00:38:08 For him.
Jason Prokowiew 00:38:10 Yeah.
KL Wells 00:38:10 To be able to release those stories that had him hijacked for so many years. Yeah. and free him to move on.
Jason Prokowiew 00:38:22 Yeah. I think, you know, when I talk about the shift and when you say that word, I think another word that comes to mind is just a softening.
Jason Prokowiew 00:38:29 Yes. That I saw in him that I was glad to experience.
KL Wells 00:38:35 Were you. You gave him permission to express his humanity.
Jason Prokowiew 00:38:40 Thank you. It means a lot to hear it that way. I hope that's what he felt. I mean, thankfully, I was raised with a lot, you know, minus the terror of my childhood. I was also raised with a lot of love from my mom and my sister, especially. that allowed and again, teachers that allowed this softness in me to have some space to be that person in that conversation with my dad. yeah. You know, I.
KL Wells 00:39:12 Yeah, yeah. And so I again, I'm, I'm very much struck by you following your intuition and you being persistent and hanging in there with him until he unlocked. Yeah. and this immense curiosity that you have that has just served you so well. Yeah.
Jason Prokowiew 00:39:34 Thank you. Yeah, I think that's true. That's really what it was, is a curiosity. I the book pitch that I gave you at the beginning.
Jason Prokowiew 00:39:42 The other part of that pitch is in order to understand what was still hemorrhaging inside of me, I had to hear my dad's stories. And I didn't know what that hemorrhaging was. I again, I keep saying if I didn't have the language for these things, I was just driven by this internal thing of like, I need to hear what happened to him in order to understand what happened to me and my family.
KL Wells 00:40:07 Yeah. And it's fascinating to me that I think more and more people are connecting the dots from that perspective, you know, generational trauma and how people grow up informs and influences how they raise kids and all of these things. But you're still very young at that point and don't have that perspective, but you're still driving in that perspective from a curiosity place and a persistence place. And I want to know his story. And we forget how powerful it is for us to unlock ourselves by knowing their stories.
Jason Prokowiew 00:40:45 Yeah, yeah. And I think I wonder if you have a perspective on this too, Cale, because I have had a lot of people ask me about the interviewing process.
Jason Prokowiew 00:40:53 And one thing that I always want to say is, you know, my particular circumstance when a certain way, my dad was, you know, 11 years without drinking by the time that I sat down with him. So he wasn't actively drinking. But as I said, there was a dry drunk aspect to his personality that he always had. Right. Quick to ignite. Right? Right. In the book it was like walking. We were all walking around like this human landmine in my home. So I always just want to say to people like, maybe you don't want to do what I did, because I don't know that I would advise my the, the nearly 50 year old version of me may not advise the 21 year old version of me to do that work that I did without more resources. Like I did not. I wasn't probably far enough into my own healing to have really done that the way that I would have liked to, but it was what I had at the time, right? So I just always cautioned people like, tread carefully if you don't want to do this work.
Jason Prokowiew 00:41:57 Understandable.
KL Wells 00:41:59 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think what's what, what I love about doing the podcast is it is a reflection of each of our stories, and you can pick things out of people's stories that you want to try on, and you can let other things go. And so that's how I think about it. And it does give people examples of how this could potentially go. And what I most think about, because I didn't have that experience with my mom who was addicted to prescription medications, or my brother who was a cocaine addict, or but I do. I did have that experience, although we didn't record it with my ex-husband, who was a Vietnam vet, PTSD alcoholic, and I knew more about what he came from, from a generational trauma experience to be able to go the entire arc of our story, even though I divorced him after five years at the end of his life, I was able to thank him for what I had learned from him and who he was in shaping who I had become.
Jason Prokowiew 00:43:09 Yeah, that's a thank you for sharing that. And I did want to comment on what you were saying at the beginning there about people being able to pick from what they hear. Finding what might be useful. It just reminds me of the Al-Anon slogan of, you know, take what you need from this meeting and leave the rest, you know? Right. You may hear 1 or 2 sentences that may propel you forward, and sometimes that's good enough.
KL Wells 00:43:36 Yes, absolutely. And to be very clear. Not everything works. You know. Yeah. Right. So you have to have that little you have to pay attention to your intuition, and your discernment on some of this stuff. So.
Jason Prokowiew 00:43:53 Absolutely.
KL Wells 00:43:54 So before your dad passed and went through that experience of interviewing him. Did you? Did you have your own experience of forgiveness or was that or is has that happened or. Yeah, I'm kind of opening a big can of worms here.
Jason Prokowiew 00:44:10 Yeah. I think for me, over time I have come to think of forgiveness as.
Jason Prokowiew 00:44:21 A long process. I don't think of it as like, you know, jumping over the fence from not forgiveness to forgiveness. Right. So there are moments in my healing journey that I still think I'm going through, where I still find a well of anger that's still there towards my dad. I also think of forgiveness for me as being a two way street. My dad did not ask me to forgive him. He was not involved in the forgiveness conversation. there were some things that he that I, at the time of our recording, had known that he had done, especially to my brother's physical abuse, that I called him on in those interviews that he was unwilling to acknowledge or view from the same vantage point as I knew my brothers viewed them from, which was that they were really bad. Yeah. so my particular take on forgiveness is like, my dad was not engaged in a conversation where he was seeking forgiveness. for me, all of this has been a process of sense making. I needed to understand my family through the past and through his experience, and build a structure from which I could move forward in my life and understand what happened.
Jason Prokowiew 00:45:51 I think forgiveness. can kind of come along with that. But forgiveness for me was never the goal. It was more understanding and healing and moving forward in my own life that, I don't know, necessarily needed me to say, like, I forgive you, dad, for these things. because those memories are always still there. They are things that happened. Sure. And they always still exist. So for me, forgiveness is a very kind of gray topic.
KL Wells 00:46:28 Okay.
Jason Prokowiew 00:46:29 Yeah.
KL Wells 00:46:30 Well said. So we are coming up against the edge of our hour.
Jason Prokowiew 00:46:34 Okay.
KL Wells 00:46:36 that went like that? Yes.
Jason Prokowiew 00:46:38 That's the same on this side. It felt like we just started.
KL Wells 00:46:41 Yeah. So I. Oh, boy. So I'm gonna be a little bold here. I think there's more to do, have more to talk about with you. and I'm just wondering if you would be open to doing another podcast interview.
Jason Prokowiew 00:46:58 Of course I would love to. I think the, you know, the audience that you're trying to reach and your history is of great interest to me, given my history.
Jason Prokowiew 00:47:08 So anything I can do to support you and the work you're trying to do and this audience, I would be happy to partake.
KL Wells 00:47:15 Fantastic. Okay, so as we wrap this up, what's another part of the journey that you want to leave our audience with?
Jason Prokowiew 00:47:24 Another part of the journey that I want to leave the audience with. I don't know if it's another, completely different part of the journey, but I just want to kind of go back to maybe that moment where I witnessed Rachel's family, because I know what it's like to be in an environment where you think the whole world is this way, and I just want to encourage people, if they can, to look outside of that kind of tunnel that they're in and see what's. See what's on the edges and maybe move towards some of those things that they see.
KL Wells 00:47:57 Yeah. Yeah. And I just love that because we don't know until we know.
Jason Prokowiew 00:48:04 Yeah.
KL Wells 00:48:04 And then for me it was just continuous discovery. Just continuous discovery.
KL Wells 00:48:13 And it's why I do the work that I do now in terms of all the coaching and executive work that I do is because I'm totally fascinated by people. Yeah. And there's just a lot of landscape of possibilities. and so we and we don't ever arrive, you know.
Jason Prokowiew 00:48:34 And you can feel very much like a baby when you begin, right? Like, you can feel like you're just born into a new world when you just look outside the tunnel and all of those feelings of this is weird and it's a landscape that I don't know. And I feel like a little. No, nothing. Baby is pretty, is pretty normal, you know?
KL Wells 00:48:56 Yes yes. Yes. Absolutely. So let's leave them with that, because there's an exploration to coming out of the cocoon of trauma. And, and I think there's more to explore with you from your story, in my story that I think will serve our audience really, really well. so I want to say thank you. I love the way that you speak and the clarity of how you tell a story, which I, you know, is, you know, not all authors are as verbally crisp as you are.
Jason Prokowiew 00:49:32 Oh thank you kale.
KL Wells 00:49:33 Yes.
Jason Prokowiew 00:49:34 Very nice compliment. Thank you. I appreciate that.
KL Wells 00:49:37 Yeah. So we will talk again.
Jason Prokowiew 00:49:41 Sounds good.
KL Wells 00:49:42 All right.
Jason Prokowiew 00:49:42 Thanks for having.
KL Wells 00:49:43 Me. Take care and thank you.
Jason Prokowiew 00:49:45 Yeah.
More About Jason Prokowiew:
Jason Prokowiew is a writer, storyteller, and author of War Boys, a father-and-son memoir that explores the lasting impact of war, addiction, family trauma, and healing across generations.
Raised as the youngest of thirteen children in a Massachusetts household shaped by his father's alcoholism and unresolved wartime experiences, Jason spent years trying to understand the forces that shaped both his father and himself. In War Boys, he weaves together his own experiences growing up in fear, loneliness, and shame with his father's extraordinary story of survival as a child during the Nazi invasion of Belarus.
As a young adult, Jason found support through Al-Anon, where he discovered language for experiences he had never been able to name and a community that helped him begin making sense of life in an alcoholic family. Those experiences became an important part of his healing journey and influenced his decision to eventually record more than fifty hours of conversations with his father about his wartime past.
Through his writing and public speaking, Jason explores themes of generational trauma, resilience, identity, recovery, and the possibility of understanding family stories more fully. He has appeared on Stories from the Stage, and his work has been featured through literary and community organizations across the country.
Learn more about Jason and War Boys
https://www.jasonwprokowiew.com/
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https://www.instagram.com/jasonprokowiew/
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