It is now more than six months since our trip to my
grandmother's home town and environs in Poland, time to write some sort of
summation, and more than time to start working on the new leads it gave me.
I went there to prove that the towns my grandmother spoke of
-- Tarnow, Rzeszow, Przeworsk, Jaroslaw and Przemysl -- were places that exist
in real life, that you could visit. I went to get some sense of what Esther's
native country looked like, even close to a century later. To stand where she and her sisters and brothers must have stood. To travel the east-west road that links these towns together. And,
I guess, to affirm our place in eastern European history, in the minds of
people who live there now and in the minds of people here, too. To connect destroyed past to present. Not an original goal, to be sure.
In what way did my walking these old streets, visiting these
restorations and ruins respond to such thorough destruction? Because that thoroughness is one inescapable
takeaway of such a trip. It takes research
and some imagination to find the skinned and gouged-out traces of Jews in these towns.
My only answer is that in the end, we are all reduced to
pieces of history. And all you can do
for these relatives, in consolation or reparation, is recover and preserve their
lost histories, to endure alongside your own.
Rescuing relatives from historical oblivion is what Daniel Mendelsohn
had in mind in his riveting account, The
Lost: The Search for Six out of Six
Million. I didn't have the time or
resources to scour the world like he did, filling in my murdered relatives'
histories and settling vague theories in first-person testimony. In addition to visiting their towns and
interviewing still-living neighbors, Mendelsohn also got to the right survivors
in places like Australia, just in the nick of time in 2006, months before their
deaths.
What I did see in
person were records, in their originals, that testified to my grandmother's and
her family's presence. Six months later, I sent a Christmas card to Malgorzata
Woloszyn, the museum historian who brought out and showed me the census books.
I remember her and that moment fondly. I wish she'd
email me back. But I do have a favor to
ask of her; simply to rephotograph one of the pages I shot; the most important
page came out blurry. Probably because
I promised not to use a flash. Or
because I was excited. Or both.
I also brought the "Anne Frank of Przeworsk" Polish
diary that I bought in the museum, by Basia Rosenberg, to a Polish friend here
in NJ and she's been working on translating it.
I may offer that to the museum; neither Elzbieta nor I want anything for
it but to spread this history to wider audiences and set more visitors on my
path.
Once I got home, things I found by googling added to what
I'd learned and seen. I found an amazing postscript to the little "Jewish
Cemetery" monument, its inscription
crumbling in a corner of the Przeworsk bus station that covers my ancestor's
bones, in a recently published book, "Jewish
Spaces in Contemporary Poland," by Erica T. Lehrer and Michael Meng. Google took me right to most of the relevant
pages; I bought the ebook for the rest.
Seems that in the
early eighties, Przeworsk's municipal council decided to build a badly needed
bus station on the site of the former Jewish cemetery. A road widening between
Rzeszow and Przemysl had already disturbed much of the site. There were no surviving
headstones and presumably no visitors.
But the decision to build on the site had one dissenter on the council: One Jan Sasak. Outvoted, he suggested that the town at least erect a
monument to mark the spot's former existence.
Again, outvoted.
But, as history would have it, this Jan Sasak was himself a
stonecutter. So he made the little monument
himself, and had it erected in the middle of the station. Without his knowledge or consent, it was
later moved to the back, in a corner on a small bricked rectangle. Google Streetview still shows it, but only if
you know where to look. And that is why
this little monument looks like an unofficial afterthought. It's certainly unofficial; one man's
professional act of righteous, compassionate obstinacy. Does anyone know this man? Does he still live? Can't find him on
Facebook. I'd certainly like to thank
him for this act of historical rescue.
I keep in Facebook touch with Jakub Lysiak, our guide to
Przeworsk, Jaroslaw and Przemysl. He has
sent me the info should I want to get more research done on my behalf in the
Przemysl archives. I should follow up on
that. Last I heard he was applying for
training as a guide at the Polin Museum in Warsaw. I'm also Facebook friends with Helise
Lieberman, director of the Taube Center for the Renewal of Jewish Life in
Poland. Both their paths cross with
Agnieska (Agi) Legutko, a Yiddishist
from Krakow who I met when I booked her for an adult ed presentation at
my synagogue in NJ years ago. Today she heads up the Yiddish department at Columbia in
NYC.
Then there's the surviving distant relatives newly turned up
by Anna Przybyszewska of Warsaw's Jewish Historical Institute; third cousins,
perhaps, whose existence is documented by pages of testimony they gave to Yad
VaShem in the fifties. The survivor's
name: Chaim / Henryk Schopf, of Tarnow.
Married to a Helena Eisen, with two kids, a Jan and a Ludwig. His testimony says they made it from the
nearby Krakow ghetto to Budapest in 1943, and presumably all made it to Israel.
I have other third cousins in Israel who
exchange messages with me all the time; how could they not know of these others
in such a small country? There's a
mystery to which I could apply more time and money.
I would like nothing more than to swim around in these
records and mysteries as a full-time occupation. I have a lot of the language skills and more
than passing familiarity with the more popular tools of online genealogical
research. What I have done is given introductory workshops in Ancestry.com to my
synagogue, and, with my Lifelong Learning cochair, gotten a wall-sized map of
eastern and central Europe printed on sturdy vinyl and hung in the social hall.
The idea is to encourage others to research and mark their ancestral towns
within its borders. (We've added inserts
of Israel, Iraq, Spain and Sudan for our few Sephardi members. And Italy for inter-marrieds.) We've just gotten
started.
Then there's Poland, a place the grandmother I knew certainly
didn't care about, and who could blame her.
I follow its politics a little now. The news is not good; fear of Muslim refugee
hordes, among other factors, has turned voters sharply to the right, and what
has made the news but a photo of the archetypical Polish antiSemite of my
grandmother's nightmares, holding a bottle, in a group burning an effigy of
a Hasid holding the European Union flag.
What is that about? Is that a safer stand-in for a Muslim effigy, which would also be repulsive
but at least more relevant? Is it
cowardice, a drunken fringe element, or just
the most virulent outbreak of an incurable xenophobia, expressed against the
most traditional, vulnerable Other?
You beautiful young people I saw sipping wine and beer on
the Rynek of Rzeszow, the college town, speaking other languages: You folks who gave me the Jewish History tour
map of Tarnow: Jakub: Did you go to the polls?
Did you sit this one out? Or were you simply outnumbered. And by whom.
The "renascent" Jewish community of Poland is
miniscule; somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000.
I can't see that number ever approaching even five percent of its
pre-war population, which would get to 150,000.
But we could become more frequent and interested visitors. Even if
somewhat transient, the community could
grow. Jewish Studies is apparently popular at Warsaw University, among Catholic-born
Poles. Here's hoping that with the churn of Polish generations, we will see even
wider acknowledgement and acceptance of our historical relationship.
