Still in Tarnow that Wednesday, we found a sign that said
Rzeszow, near where we'd parked the car. So instead of retracing our route, we followed its arrow, driving east on a smaller road parallel to the A4 highway we'd come on. With
the sun setting behind us, the hills brightly lit green, we passed Dembica, the
ancestral home of the Jewish half of the family of my friend Pat, who grew up
on Long Island.
Old Rzeszow hands by now, we made no wrong turns, pulling into
the Hotel Bristol's underground garage just as night fell. We took a last walk
around Rzeszow's cobbled rynek, full of echoing chatter from around the outdoor
restaurant tables. In the tourist office, under the rynek one floor below ground level, a
roomful of townspeople were taking dance lessons. I asked a young woman who was
also watching the class from above if she spoke English and if she was local. She did speak English but she was from
Warsaw, here on business. I explained
that I was visiting my grandmother's ancestral area and she said that yes, many
people from America were visiting now.
She didn't say Jews, but I'm sure that's what she meant.
On the other hand, when the tourist office had been open to the public during the day, and
someone who was obviously a working student was behind the counter, I casually
mentioned that we were particularly interested in remnants of Jewish presence,
and it didn't elicit any unease at all. She told me about Jewish lectures and
events in Rzeszow that we could no longer attend; our regular guided tour was
starting in Warsaw the following evening. (Rzeszow's underground tourism office was also the entry point to the town's historic underground storerooms, which tunneled together, far around under the plaza. Had we had more time...)
The next morning, we drove our rental car with the schizo
GPS to the airport, stopping at a gas station to top up en route, just like we
do in Florida. We couldn't figure out
how to open the gas cap, and neither could the nice young man who worked
there. An anxious, wordless comedy
ensued, with us searching the dashboard and the floor around the driver's seat
while the time cushion before our flight ran out. Finally, he motioned for our key; it was
remote controlled. An age, not a language gap.
We thanked him, parked the car in front of Rzeszow's airport,
dropped the keys at the counter, and hopped
the ridiculously cheap flight to Warsaw. We were probably the only foreigners
in that little plane, flying over the green-blanketed landscape with the houses
nestled in the creases.
Warsaw's Chopin Airport looked new and world-class. It was
also cosmopolitan enough for a Chasid to walk through without looking
particularly self-conscious, if they ever do. We hopped a cab to the Radisson,
where our guided tour would begin at a welcome dinner. After leaving our bags with the concierge --
it was still only late morning -- our
first destination was the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute, to
meet Anna Przybyszewska, the researcher I'd met over the web, the one who'd
helped me discover some new surviving distant relatives.
We were half an hour late, we thought, but we'd sent a
message through to her that we would be.
We strode off from the hotel briskly, passing a synagogue and through a courtyard
with Yiddish written on the exterior walls.
My husband had picked this direction, so I was pretty irritated with him
15 minutes later when we figured out we'd struck out in the wrong direction. We
had to retrace our steps and be even later; by the time I got to the JHI, I was
pretty flushed and edgy.
Anna's office was shared with two others in a library room just
off the main floor lobby of this historically Jewish, rare surviving building. We walked in and introduced ourselves, and it
turned out she'd been expecting us hours before. A pale, slender woman, perhaps 50, with
straight light hair that framed her face.
A delicate librarian look, but a piercing gaze.
I really didn't have
anything prepared to say or work on; the moment was too fraught, somehow. And
anything on a screen can be done long-distance.
But my husband started talking with her at length, making me more edgy
still. Finally I blurted out, "Are
you going to take all my time with her, too?"
Anna was a little appalled at this outburst. She looked at
me rather sternly. "These stories
are important," she said. "We
have to hear this, too." I don't remember what the subject of their
conversation had been, exactly; I just felt ashamed. And by this Polish researcher, who had made
it her mission to gather every possible detail about my murdered people.
Obviously, this work could have occupied far more people. It
looked pretty wearing on her, and was not about catering to the impatience of
any particular Jewish visitor, even if that impatience had
been directed at a husband, and not at her.
We didn't make much more of the visit. I had basically just wanted to say hello, and
find out what would be involved in trying to track down distant relatives in
Israel, the last evidence for which dated to the fifties. She quickly brought
up our email correspondence and all the other material relating to my relatives
that she had sent me.
The only other thing I remember her saying was that one had
to be careful in teaching kids about the Holocaust, and not to overwhelm them with
too much information at once; it could cause psychological harm. It had to be appropriate to one's age and resistance
to despair. We left and another couple took
our place. Other people were sitting
with her Israeli assistant, and the third worker. Each specialized in different languages
relevant to the documents they retrieved, were brought, and searched through.
My husband went to look over the historical exhibits on the
upper floors, which dealt with the surviving ten percent of Polish Jews; the
attempts at resettling and restoring the mental health of traumatized orphans (many
understandably wanted absolutely no part of being Jewish), the role of surviving
and survivor Jewish organizations.
While he did that I went next door to visit Helise
Lieberman, the executive director of the foundation for Jewish Life in
Poland. Helise
for 20 years has been nourishing the seedlings of Jewish community in Poland
with her energy, humanism, positivity and humor. We too had been corresponding for months
before my trip. She gave me a hug and she updated me on the people we had had
in common; some dating to 1970, others, Yiddishists in 2015.
Helise has represented the vestigial and replanted Jewish community
to Polish prime ministers and visiting Americans for years now. She can be seen
at all commemorative and holiday events, and was among those getting the
enormous Polin museum project off the ground over the past decade.
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