Remembering the Young Historian

On this dark day, February 24, 2022, when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in a brutal fashion, I, along with many others, have yet another reason for sadness: Our friend and colleague Tadeusz Przystojecki has died.

When I first met Tadeusz in 2007 in Lublin, I referred to him as a young historian. For some reason, that name stuck, even as he got older, but I told him he would always be the “young historian” to me.

Tadeusz was greatly influenced by his grandfather who was an amateur historian.

Tadeusz was known by many as THE genealogist from Lublin. He helped countless Lubliners of Jewish origin trace their families, sometimes back centuries. In my own case, he discovered my ancestor, Rosa Jenta, who was born in 1789—Tadeusz shared my joy at finally having gone beyond the 19th Century in my family search.

Tadeusz was the one who took me to the archives to get my mother and my grandmother’s birth certificates.It was an emotional moment for me that I will never forget, and over the years many people have told me about how integral his help was to their genealogy research and their efforts to connect to the past.

Tadeusz accompanied two of my Bridge To Poland trips and the participants adored him.

The last time we spoke was when I was preparing this interview of Tadeusz for the Brama Grodzka English newsletter. I made sure to include a reference to him as a “young historian.” When I asked him if he had noticed, he said, “Of course!” (Here also is a video interview of Tadeusz).

Blessings to Tadeusz’s friends and family. You are missed, Young Historian.

Tadeusz, talking to one of my Bridge To Poland groups in 2015

Remembering Zbyszek Wieczorek (Polskie tłumaczenie znajduje się poniżej)

Remembering Zbyszek Wieczorek 1957-2021 (May his memory be a blessing)

Every gesture of compassion in these terrible times is vital to life. Zbyszek Wieczorek, Nov. 11, 2020

 Today I received the devastating news that a wonderful human being had died.

He had a clear voice: “The political and social tensions are all a result of the authorities’ negligence concerning the education of our citizens. A result of separating the history of the Jewish people from the history of the Polish people. It’s a crime against memory, and, in fact, we are trying to cope with the trauma caused by this crime right now. So it is not only the Holocaust itself that we have to make contemporary people aware of, but also this crime against memory.”

Zbyszek Wieczorek believed that silence was the enemy of memory. For years he was active in the mission of making schoolchildren aware that before the war almost 30% of the town’s residents had been Jews. Organizing a Jewish festival every May. Creating an annual a ceremony where his students read the names of Radom Jews who had been imprisoned in the ghetto (the ghetto to which his mother had brought bread every day): First name, last name, address, occupation, age.

And then: Przeżył or Zginał.  Survived or perished.

Zginał. Zginał. Zginał, the students would read for person after person. And every once in a while—a great while—Przeżył.

Zbyszek was steadfast in his determination to keep the memory of Jewish Radom alive and to combat silence. He died several days ago from COVID 19. We have lost a powerful voice.

In February 2019 my cameraman and I spent a day in Radom with Zbyszek—first interviewing him for The Neshoma Project, then seeing some sights in Jewish Radom—like the Jewish cemetery cared for now by a Roma woman. There are no Jews left. The four of us (Zbyszek, me, my cameraman Przemek and Zbyszek’s translator friend) went to eat in an Italian restaurant after the interview. He was gracious about the screaming children next to us and about my need to order something off the menu due to my celiac disease. He was always gracious.

Our plan for me to spend several months in his classroom observing his teaching and telling the students about my family’s experience in Poland was derailed by COVID. But I always thought we would revive it.

Zbyszek Wieczorek was that perfect combination of head and heart. He thought deeply about memory, silence, compassion and he was a mentsch. In an email from last year he wrote: “Showing kindness and tenderness to each other is very necessary in our world… Every gesture of compassion in these terrible times is vital to life.”

Jewish memory in Poland, and particularly in Radom, has suffered because of your passing, Zbyszek. You were a gentle, yet fierce soul. I am lucky that our paths crossed for a short time. I will speak your name and do my part to prevent history from being distorted by the corrosive effects of silence.

Wspomnienie o Zbyszku Wieczorku 1957-2021

 –Niech Jego pamięć będzie błogosławiona–

Każdy gest empatii i solidarności w tych strasznych czasach jest niezbędny dla życia. Zbyszek Wieczorek, 11 listopada, 2020

 Dzisiaj otrzymałam druzgocącą wiadomość, że zmarł wspaniały człowiek.

Jego głos był klarowny: „Napięcia polityczne i społeczne są wynikiem zaniedbań rządzących w zakresie edukacji naszych współobywateli. To wynik oddzielenia historii narodu żydowskiego od historii narodu polskiego. To zbrodnia przeciwko pamięci i w istocie próbujemy teraz poradzić sobie z traumą spowodowaną tą zbrodnią. Trzeba więc uświadamiać współczesnych nie tylko o Holokauście, ale także o tej zbrodni przeciwko pamięci."

Zbyszek Wieczorek uważał, że milczenie jest wrogiem pamięci. Przez lata aktywnie działał na rzecz uświadamiania młodzieży szkolnej, że przed wojną prawie 30% mieszkańców miasta stanowili Żydzi. Co roku na wiosnę współorganizował festiwal Spotkania z Kulturą Żydowską „Ślad”. Zainicjował doroczną uroczystość, podczas której jego uczniowie wyczytywali nazwiska radomskich Żydów, którzy byli uwięzieni w getcie (do którego jego matka przynosiła codziennie chleb): imię, nazwisko, adres, zawód, wiek.

A potem: Przeżył lub Zginął 

Zginął. Zginęła. Zginął – tak młodzież czytała przy kolejnej i kolejnej osobie. A od czasu do czasu—w dużych odstępach—Przeżył. Przeżyła.

Zbyszek nie ustawał w wysiłkach na rzecz zachowania pamięci o żydowskim Radomiu oraz w walce z milczeniem. Zmarł kilka dni temu na COVID 19. Straciliśmy potężny głos.

W lutym 2019 mój kamerzysta i ja spędziliśmy dzień w Radomiu ze Zbyszkiem, najpierw przeprowadzając z nim wywiad do Projektu Neshoma, a potem oglądając miejsca związane z żydowskim Radomiem, np. cmentarz żydowski, którym obecnie opiekuje się romska kobieta. Żydów już nie ma. Po wywiadzie nasza czwórka (Zbyszek, ja, mój kamerzysta Przemek oraz znajoma Zbyszka, która tłumaczyła rozmowę) poszliśmy coś zjeść we włoskiej restauracji. Był wyrozumiały wobec krzyczących obok nas dzieci i wobec mojej potrzeby zamówienia czegoś spoza menu z racji mojej celiakii. Zawsze był wyrozumiały.

Nasz plan, żebym spędziła kilka miesięcy uczestnicząc w jego lekcjach, obserwując jak uczy i opowiadając uczniom o doświadczeniach mojej rodziny w Polsce, pokrzyżowała pandemia. Ale cały czas sądziłam, że wrócimy do tego planu.

Zbyszek Wieczorek był idealnym połączeniem rozumu i serca. Miał głębokie przemyślenia na temat pamięci, milczenia, współodczuwania, o takim kimś w jidysz mówi się „mensz” (szlachetny człowiek). W wiadomości e-mail z zeszłego roku napisał: "Okazywanie sobie nawzajem życzliwości i czułości jest bardzo potrzebne w naszym świecie... Każdy gest empatii i solidarności w tych strasznych czasach jest niezbędny dla życia.”

Zbyszku, Twoje odejście to wielka strata dla pamięci o Żydach w Polsce, a szczególnie w Radomiu. Byłaś łagodną, ale i nieustępliwą duszą. Miałam szczęście, że nasze drogi skrzyżowały się choć na krótko. Będę wspominać Twoje imię i zrobię to, co do mnie należy, aby zapobiec zniekształcaniu historii przez niszczące skutki milczenia.

Leora Tec, 26.10.21

“Even the stories that are preserved exist against a background of silence" (Glenn Kurtz, "Three Minutes in Poland")

“Even the stories that are preserved exist against a background of silence. Large swaths of a person’s experience may fall away and are forgotten. Other aspects, perhaps the essence of each experience, may be vividly recalled, yet resist expression.” (Three Minutes in Poland p. 228)

This is true even of our own experiences, so how can we ever hope to “resurrect” the life experience of a deceased loved one? “Resurrect.” Perhaps that word describes our ultimate hope when looking into the past of our families, ancestral towns or countries, but Glenn Kurtz shows in his book that “resurrection” or “reanimation” is not the same as remembrance. The latter may perhaps be achieved, though we must come to terms with those inevitable missing pieces.

One of the things I have learned from my friends in Poland, particularly from Tomek Pietrasiewicz, the founder and director of Brama Grodzka-Teatr NN in Lublin, Poland, is the value of fragments. Instead of lamenting the inevitable “large swaths” of missing information or the failure of language to accurately describe an experience, relationship or feeling, we can be grateful for those little things that we do know: My grandfather Roman would cross to the other side of the street when a German was coming, rather than have to step off the sidewalk; my great aunt Golda sang and played the guitar beautifully. She died of pneumonia during the war. My great-grandmother Syma resented having to marry my great-grandfather Hersz Pejsach—though he was tall, handsome and gentle—because she was in love with a boy whom she had met on vacation. But her parents (Chana Laja and Berek Rosencwajg, from Chmielnik) did not allow the match because the boy was not religious enough. My great-grandparents left Lublin in the 1920s and moved to Międzyrzec Podlaski. They may have been among those deported in the first deportation from there on August 25 and 26, 1942 to Treblinka, in what Kurtz writes (quoting Christopher Browning) was “accomplished with an almost unimaginable ferocity and brutality, even by the Nazi standards of 1942.” There is no way we can fully understand the horror, the fear, the brutality and the pain that the Jews of Międzyrzec experienced on those two days. Even if Holocaust victims had a voice in their last moments, would they have been able to convey all that they were feeling, all that they were losing?

What I can hang onto are these wisps of memory of my great-grandparents: He was tall. She had beautiful legs. He was generous and would give candles from his candle factory to poor people who could not afford to buy them. This generosity irritated her. I will never know if I would agree with these assessments of looks, or of character that have been passed to me from my grandmother, mother and aunt. I will never see a picture of Syma and Pejsach, but I can treasure these small pieces of them. A piece that would not be found in any archive or listed in any record. A piece of their humanity. I am grateful to Tomek for teaching me to appreciate the few precious wisps of life that remain.

I am also grateful to Glenn Kurtz for laying out so many deep and important thoughts about memory and remembrance in his book. So excited, in fact, that not only am I reading it with my Polish friends from Brama Grodzka who study English with me, but I have created a whole class using his book as a vehicle to explore our own thoughts about and experiences with memory and remembrance. The class will give participants the chance to discuss the book, write and share their writing with the group. I’m teaching the first iteration of the class through the Tufts OLLI program. I hope to offer it later through Bridge To Poland. If you’re reading this and have not read Three Minutes in Poland, I highly recommend it!

My journey to The Neshoma Project

My first exposure to Jewish remembrance in Poland came in 2005 when I briefly met Tomek Pietrasiewicz and Witek Dabrowski of Brama Grodzka-Teatr NN. My mother Nechama Tec, a survivor and Holocaust scholar who had been born in Lublin (on Szeroka Street) in 1931, invited me to come on the book tour when her memoir “Dry Tear” (“Suche Łzy) was translated into Polish.

Though my parents had both been born in Poland (my father in Baranowicze, now Belarus) and had positive feelings about Poland, I had never felt connected to the place. If my mother had not invited me to accompany her and my father I don’t know if I would have gone.

I knew that my ancestors were from there, and I knew that many had been murdered in the Holocaust. But apart from making a family tree some twenty years earlier I had not thought about them too much. So it was quite astonishing to come to Lublin (where I subsequently learned that generations of my family had been born) and encounter non-Jews who were preserving their memory. How could it be that Tomek and Witek and everyone at Brama Grodzka were holding space for not only my relatives, but for all the Jews of Lublin, when I had not thought even to visit my ancestral homeland?

That first brief visit led to many more, during which I got to know Tomek and Witek and others at Brama Grodzka. Witek took me to the places where my mother passed as a Catholic girl during the war (Otwock and Kielce). On one visit I brought my two sons and we met people from the family who had saved her. Tadeusz Przystojeski—Brama Grodzka’s resident genealogist—showed me where  my grandfather’s factories had stood before the war, and took me to the archives to get my mother’s and grandmother’s birth certificates.

I was amazed at the work of remembrance being done at Brama Grodzka because it was so human. Theirs is not was not a dry, scientific approach. On the contrary, it was fluid and human and alive. I wanted to tell other people about it—to show it to them because, unlikely as it may seem in a country that many regard as a cemetery, it gave me hope.

So, I created Bridge To Poland (Most Do Polski) in order to bring people to Poland and show them this beautiful work of remembrance.

At first Brama Grodzka was all that I knew. But over the years I discovered other people in many parts of Poland doing remembrance work. I realized that their voices were important. This was a generation of memory workers—I came to call them Rescuers of Memory—who had been lucky enough to have had contact with survivors. Many of them grew up during a time when Jewish topics were mostly not talked about. I felt deeply that their voices needed to be preserved.

This idea was solidified one day at Majdanek. I was there with the late historian Robert Kuwałek.  A tourist group approached us next to a barracks and the tour guide told the group they wouldn’t be going inside because it wasn’t authentic and they would be at Auschwitz the next day which was much more authentic. The guide spoke in Hebrew, which Robert did not understand, and after I translated for him he was as incredulous as I was.  We often talk about our concerns about Holocaust memory after the survivors are gone. I told him that I worried too about what would happen in fifty years after all the people who knew the truth, and knew the survivors, like him, were no longer there. He agreed with me. In a few short months he would be dead at the age of forty-seven. I always thought I could go to him with any Lublin related question. He knew everything about Majdanek, Bełżec and Lublin Jewry. But now he was gone. It made my project to preserve the memory of the rescuers of memory, even more urgent. The Neshoma Project is dedicated to Robert’s memory.

In 2018 I was lucky to get a grant from Wellesley College to spend seven months in Poland interviewing people for an online video archive, eventually to be called, The Neshoma Project: Conversations with Poles Rescuing Jewish memory. I am grateful that this is a joint project with Brama Grodzka-Teatr NN. In 2019 I got a grant from the US Embassy in Warsaw to spend another few months in Poland. I have conducted forty-four interviews to date and hope to receive funding for fifty-seven more.  About a third of the interviews are in Polish (though not all the interviews have been uploaded to the site yet).

My definition of Rescuers of Memory is quite broad and includes: scholars, teachers, guides, museum workers, artists and grassroots activists. I interviewed people all over Poland: Lublin, Kraków, Białystok and Warsaw of course, but also smaller places like Biecz and Zduńska Wola, to name a couple. Many of the people I spoke with talk about discovering an absence and needing to act. One of them, Dr. Rafał Kowalski Deputy Director of the Museum of Mazovian Jews in Płock, formerly a journalist at Gazeta Wyborcza, talks about Jewish history in Poland being like a phantom limb that is painful though it is not there anymore.

To meet the incredible people whom I interviewed, go to the website: www.neshomaproject.org. There you will find a contact form where you can share your impressions or suggest someone for me to interview in the future. I invite you to sign up for the newsletter if you want to be alerted when new interviews are added.

Sometimes people ask if I have a favorite conversation, but I have to say that every time I watch one of the interviews I fall in love with the person I am watching all over again. They are all inspiring to me. In these times of division and polarization I am so grateful that the Rescuers of Memory exist, and that my mother invited me to Poland fifteen years ago so that I could begin my journey to The Neshoma Project.

Leora Tec

American Ambassador for and Special Projects Partner to Brama Grodzka

(This blog post was first published on the Ośrodek Brama Grodzka-Teatr NN blog.

Introducing The Neshoma Project!

For the last two years, starting as a Mary Elvira Stevens Traveling Fellow from Wellesley College, I have been working–in cooperation with Brama Grodzka-Teatr NN—on an online video archive of conversations with non-Jewish Poles who are rescuing Jewish memory in Poland. This has involved traveling within Poland to conduct interviews, and coordinating editing, transcribing, translation subtitling and website creation. I am so thrilled and excited that the website of The Neshoma Project is now live. As I write this, we are in the middle of a contentious presidential election. There are deep divides among people in our country and around the world. The people with whom I spoke for The Neshoma Project: Conversations with Poles Rescuing Jewish Memory give me hope that we can heal some of these rifts and build together to a future with less division and misunderstanding. I invite you to take a look at the amazing non-Jews that populate the Neshoma Project archive. I hope they will inspire hope in you as well. Keep on the lookout for more interviews to be added soon.

Part of the Neshoma Project journey in photos.

What's that you're saying?

Believe it or not I will be giving a talk in Polish at a seminar for teachers on Saturday! It’s mostly about my mom’s experience during the war and rescue. Wish me luck!

A Rose for Remembrance

Sometimes we don’t know who remembers. An unknown person placed a rose on one of the markers of the ghetto boundary in Lublin.

A Mother and Daughter Exploring Jewish Life and Death

Moving. Fascinating. Fun. Those are all apt words to describe the experience of spending time* the other day with Małgosia and Magda Płoszaj a mother and daughter pair in Rybnik, Poland, which is in Upper Silesia. We discussed their mutual dedication to Jewish memory. It all started when Magda, who now works in the education department in the Auschwitz Memorial Museum, was five or six years old and her mother started dragging her with her when she visited Jewish cemeteries. They went all over Poland and probably visited 200 cemeteries together, while Małgosia estimates she has visited over 300.

Where did this drive come from? For Małgosia it started after seeing “Schindler’s List.” Before that, like many Poles I have met who are dedicated to Jewish memory, she did not know about the Jewish history in Poland. She was devastated by the loss when she realized it. She took little Magda to the Kraków neighborhood of Kazimierz, where the Jews used to live, and stood on Szeroka Street, one of the main Jewish streets. At that time Kazimierz, which today is full of trendy restaurants and coffee shops, was dilapidated and grim. Małgosia looked up at some empty windows and said aloud,

“My God, there used to be so many of you, and now, nothing.”

Over the years they spent all of Magda’s school holidays traveling across Poland to discover Jewish cemeteries, and at the beginning this was without mobile phones or GPS.

At a certain point Magda rebelled and did not want to do it anymore. The twenty-seven year old explains that she got into something “completely different.” I am expecting her to say ice skating or punk rock. “World War II military history,” she tells me!

But now she’s come full circle, working, as I said above, at the Auschwitz Memorial Museum. Małgosia meanwhile, keeps a blog about Rybnik Jews: http://szufladamalgosi.pl/

“It’s funny,” Magda tells me, “we’re both involved in Jewish remembrance, but somehow I focus on death and mom focuses on life.”

“I’m proud of you,” Małgosia says, as she plants a kiss on her daughter’s forehead.

*My meeting with Małgosia and Magda was for the purpose of recording an interview for the Rescuer of Memory Archive that I am creating in partnership with Brama Grodzka-Teatr NN.

Present Meets Past in Katowice, Poland

Wow, wow, wow. I have written before about how I never expected to meet actual, live Polish cousins. I met them, I think it was in November 2018 in Kraków, but today we met on their turf—in Katowice, where my grandmother’s first cousin Maria/Myriam Kozłowska is buried. My grandmother and Maria never knew that each other survived the war. It seems they might not even have known of each other’s existence; there was a Chmielnik branch of the family and a Lublin branch and perhaps they had lost touch. Today I went to pay homage to my grandmother’s cousin at her grave with her son, his wife and her granddaughter. Her granddaughter and I compared notes as we are both interested in the family tree and she gave me a beautiful print out of a tree she had made with all the descendants that stem from our common great-great grandparents: Hana Laja Rozencwajg and Berek Płuciennik.

Earlier in the day I met with a woman who had known Maria Kozłowska—the mother-in-law of the American rabbi who performed her funeral, whom I met by chance in Rzeszów the other week. She did not speak English so our two hour meeting was all in Polish. With my cousins too I spoke Polish—only occasionally I had to ask how to say something in English.

I remember a few years ago, meeting the parents of a Polish friend for dinner. They did not know English and there were so many subjects we could not tackle. And I remember even before that, being so excited when sitting with my friend Witek and some Polish friends when I actually told a story of going snorkeling with my sons in Polish—broken Polish to be sure, but Polish. Don’t get me wrong, the Polish language is wicked hard, as we say in Mass, and I still make a ton of mistakes and have many lacunae in my vocabulary, but the fact that I can spend several hours interacting in a meaningful way with other humans in Polish is a huge win. Yay, team! I only wish I had found out about my grandmother’s cousin early enough to meet and speak to her.

Sign upon the entrance to the Katowice cemetery.

Outside of the Katowice cemetery.

Inside the cemetery.

My grandmother’s cousin’s matzevah.

Remembering those who perished in the Holocaust.

Me and my Polish cousins.

A Polish Olympic Kayaker Takes on Jewish Memory

“A Polish Olympic Kayaker Takes on Jewish Memory.” That tagline or something like it is what often initially grabs people’s attention about Dariusz Popiela. He told me he is happy to use what he calls his “modest career as a sportsman” to bring attention to the devastating loss of the Jews in Poland during the Holocaust.

Dariusz is embarrassed to admit that he was around twenty years old when he realized the truth about the Jewish life that once existed in his city, Nowy Sącz—which he sometimes pronounces in the Yiddish way. About one third—11,000 out of 32, 000—of its pre-War in habitants were Jewish. Most of them were murdered during the Holocaust and yet there was no memory of them in his city. When he discovered that history and lack of memory he felt shame, as a Pole interested in history, as a resident of Nowy Sącz and as a human being. And he felt he had to act.

I was lucky enough to spend all of yesterday with Dariusz—he was generous with his time— and I hope our interview will be available soon on the Rescuer of Memory website (hopefully to be unveiled in April 2020) but to be brief: Dariusz created an organization called People, Not Numbers. It’s very important to him to show that the victims of the Holocaust were human beings with plans, with dreams, just like us. http://centrumfundacja.pl/o-nas

We went to Grybów where he together with other local activists, cleaned up the cemetery (which though fenced in, looked, he explained to me, like a jungle before). The plaques that they installed listed the names of all the victims that they know about. It was very poignant to see the ages of the children in particular: at the top of one column 2, 2, 7 mos., for example.

I accompanied Darek to a school where he spoke to 13 and 14 year olds first about his sporting career and then about his passion for preserving Jewish memory. The kids were enrapt.

People, Not Numbers will continue to mark cemeteries and places of executions and bring back to humanity of those who were murdered on this land so that they will not be forgotten.

Thank you, Dariusz for your passion, dedication and humanity.

Dariusz Popiela and I at the Jewish cemetery in Grybów

Darek always wears a kipa in the Jewish cemetery out of respect.

Such a beautiful spot and such tragic history.

The memorial in the Grybów cemetery.

People, Not Numbers.

The sites of two mass graves in the cemetery.

Don't Be Indifferent

In his recent speech at The Museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau Marian Turski, Auschwitz survivor and moral compass in Poland encouraged his listeners not to be indifferent to intolerance.

I thought of that today after speaking with two African friends in Poland who discussed with me their academic experiences here in Poland. I will leave out their genders, fields of study and place where they live to give them privacy. They both said that only two people in their classes speak to them beyond a cursory greeting, and only those two people share notes with them. They said that people always leave two seats between them so that they end up sitting with two seats on either side of them in a kind of island within the classroom.

One of them said they often break up into pairs to do projects but since there is an uneven number of people in the class this person ends up alone. Even when the project involved going out into the community and talking in Polish (something that was clearly harder for this person than their Polish peers) this person had no partner.

Poland, you can do better! If there’s someone different in your class, speak to them, get to know them, include them. Do you think they don’t notice? Do you think they don’t feel pain?

Rescuing Jewish Memory in Zamość

Yesterday I met another amazing person as I continue recording conversations with non-Jewish rescuers of memory in Poland for the Rescuer of Memory Archive I am creating in partnership with Brama Grodzka-Teatr NN. From the moment I met him it was clear that Marek Kołcon is passionate about and dedicated to Jewish memory in Zamość. (Zamość is a town about an hour and a half from Lublin where I traveled with the indefatigable team of Agnieszka on camera, Łukasz who took a break from his usual duties at Brama Grodzka to drive and assist, and Monika who interpreted).

Trying to make small talk while testing the mics I asked Marek what he had done during his winter break from teaching high school.

“I read books,” he replied.

“What books?” I asked.

“A book about the Kielce pogrom, for example” he answered.

I had not known him five minutes before realizing that the topic of Jewish memory is never far from Marek Kołcon’s mind.

It’s the emptiness, he says, the fact that that forty percent of the population of pre-war Zamość is not here anymore that drives Marek. He believes that those who live here now need to know about their onetime neighbors. The school he teaches in now was once the school of many Jewish girls and people need to know that truth.

Marek talked about the emptiness but what I felt was how much he is filling that emptiness with memory. He knows who lived at particular addresses and who owned particular businesses. If you walked alone in Zamość it might feel empty of Jews (and of course it is) but if you walked with Marek you would hear stories of individual people and begin to feel the life that once made up forty percent of the population.

Marek is responsible for raising money to install plaques at what is called the Beetroot ramp—the place from where the Jews from Zamość were deported. Those plaques, in Hebrew, Polish and English are surrounded by material from the pre-War streets of the Jewish section of Zamość and pay tribute to all the Jewish victims of Zamość.

(On a personal note—but also a note that’s important for my work in Poland—our interview was in Polish and though we had a translator I am happy to report I did not need her for a lot of it and understood 80% or more of what Marek said! This is great news because it is of course easier to connect with people when you can speak and understand their language).

Zamość teacher Marek Kołcon and me.

Stolpersteine installed this summer in memory of Jews who lived on Żydowska Street, now Zamenhofa Street

Portion of one of the plaques from the Beetroot Ramp.

Beetroot Ramp Memorial

Back in Jerusalem on Christmas

Here I am in Jerusalem. I don’t think I have been here since 2004. I lived in Israel from 1989-2000, the first year in Jerusalem but then I moved to Tel Aviv.

The start to this trip was not auspicious. I got one of those obnoxious Israeli cab drivers. Are they a thing or was I just unlucky? I don’t know, but there’s no denying that this guy was downright rude. Here’s how it went down (the whole conversation was in Hebrew):

Me: The Kings Hotel in Jerusalem, please.

Driver: What’s the address?

Me: I’m not sure. I think it’s King George Street.

D: You think? How am I supposed to get there?

Me: Don’t you have GPS?

D: Yes, but what if there are two hotels with the same name? There are 500 hotels in Jerusalem.

He gives me more trouble, so finally I say that if he doesn’t want to take me he can bring me back to the airport.

D: How do you think I can bring you back, lady? In reverse?

Me: Please, have mercy on me. I have been traveling for 24 hours.

He didn’t, though eventually he did shut up for most of the way, so maybe he did.

Anyway, it is weird being here because I lived here before marriage and kids and I keep walking by places that remind me of old boyfriends. I half expect to see them in these places, looking as they did 30 years ago!

I went poking about some shops yesterday and had some interesting conversations:

—One guy tried to convince me how great Trump was.

—Another guy, who I spoke to for an hour, I think, asked me my name and then proceeded to do gematria on it (According to Wikipedia: “Gematria is an alphanumeric code of assigning a numerical value to a name, word or phrase based on its letters. A single word can yield multiple values depending on the cipher used. Gematria originated as an Assyro-Babylonian-Greek system of alphanumeric code or cipher that was later adopted into Jewish culture”). Also he told me all these really accurate things about me and my kids based on our names. It was fascinating! And then we spoke politics too, but we were on the same wavelength.

—With my friend Jody, we went into a tiny boutique. I commented on two old photos of women that the owner/seamstress had up on the wall. She said they were of her grandmothers, one of whom was murdered with two of her children in the Holocaust. Then her friend came as I was telling her that my work involves non-Jewish Poles preserving Jewish memory in Poland and said friend started saying how horrible the Poles are and how horrible the Germans are and did not want to hear any of our arguments to the contrary. I did not even manage to say that it doesn’t make sense to make a blanket statement about an entire group, and that we did not and do not like it when people do that to us as Jews—she was too closed to hear it. The owner of the store, however, was gratified that we had noticed her grandmothers. She said that she always knew that if she ever had a store she would put those photos there.

It’s so much fun to go out and talk to the people! I feel myself channeling my father as I do that. He loved meeting people and had an intuitive sense about them, often “guessing” how many children they had, what ages they were, etc…Also, he spoke so many languages (Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, French, English, Belorussian, French, German, Italian, Spanish (in the present tense) and some Arabic) that he was able to connect to many people. I love speaking other languages as well. I went to a taco place and when I went to order I was tongue tied and said to the guy in Spanish (I heard him speaking native-speaker Spanish) that I did not know if I should order in Spanish, Hebrew or English. He said any of them was fine so I went for Spanish. How fun!

It’s Christmas in Jerusalem and my Yad Vashem Seminar for tour guides who bring groups to Poland starts tonight. I will report back.

Feelings in the Forest

“This is your happy place,” my cousin Giselle told me when we were together in Lublin, Poland a couple of years ago, where her father Gerszon and my mother were born.

It’s true. Though I realize that for many, Poland equals nothing more than death and cemeteries, for me it is a place of hope and friendship and new possibilities.

Don’t misunderstand me. Our Lublin family experienced tremendous loss on this land. Giselle’s father Gerszon’s wife Cyla and three year old son Eljusz were murdered during the Holocaust. Apparently Giselle (born of Gerszon’s second marriage in America) looks so much like Eljusz that my grandmother nearly fainted when she first saw her. My grandmother’s sisters and brother and their children were murdered as was my grandfather’s beloved sister Ela along with her children and husband. Both my mother and my aunt describe Ela as delicate and fearful, someone whom you wanted to protect. My grandfather did that. Until one day he no longer could. Ela and her family were suddenly gone. My grandfather, Roman “Rachmil” Bawnik seemed to work miracles at times during the War—finding out information about where people had been taken, bribing someone at Majdanek to release my great uncle Józef , for example, (it was a temporary reprieve, as Józef was later murdered). He tried and tried to find out what had happened to Ela, his beloved little sister. He was only 14 when the three of them—him, Gerszon (Giselle’s father) and Ela were orphaned and he was the oldest. He was responsible. According to my mother’s memoir, “Dry Tears,” he sought and sought information until one day he stopped abruptly, saying: “We will not see them again.” My mother said something changed in him after that. Something died inside.

I always thought that they had been shot in Krępiec Forest outside of Lublin. Yesterday on a tour I arranged for participants in the Seminar I co-chaired with Brama Grodzka-Teatr NN and EVZ Foundation we had a guided tour with my friend the wonderful Krzysztof Banach, of places connected to Operation Reinhardt (the German plan to murder Polish Jews—and nearly 2,000,000 were murdered as part of Operation Reinhardt): Majdanek, Majdan Tatarski and Krępiec Forest.

As we approached the forest I was feeling emotional. I had never ventured there. And as we started walking in I also felt the emotions well up in me, and I wanted to walk alone. I felt the weight of what had happened there. I thought it was personal. Strangely—or perhaps not strangely at all—as soon as the memorial with it’s candles and fake wreathes came within sight—my emotion dissipated immediately. It was like that official mourning place stripped the authentic mourning from me. I don’t quite know how to express it. I had been on the edge of tears—in that place where if someone says the right thing you free fall into your grief. But somehow seeing those standardized expressions of memorialization knocked me back to a place where I was a cognitive being listening to what Krzysz was saying with objectivity. And suddenly I realized he was saying that the Jews murdered in this forest came from Majdan Tatarski—the secondary ghetto in Lublin. My great aunt had not been in Majdan Tatarski.

“Weren’t any Jews from the Lublin ghetto shot here?” I asked

Krzysztof said no.

Oh. So now what do I do with what I thought was a knowing about the fate of my gentle aunt and her children who never got to grow up? And her socialist, journalist husband who relied on my grandfather to make ends meet? And why do I care? Why are the tears pouring forth as I type this? I don’t know why it matters how they met their deaths. Maybe it’s just that I am so desperate to hold on to any fragment of their lives—even if it’s their deaths. Yesterday I felt one small thing I had was taken away from me.

And what about all that emotion I felt in the forest, which I thought was at least partly connected to personal loss? Is it fake? Of course not. Emotion that you feel in your body is never fake. People can argue about whether you can feel the tragedy that happened in a place. I believe that you can. And many people were murdered in that forest. I feel the loss and mourn people who were not my aunt and her children. Those people may not have anyone alive to mourn them.

This blog post is very raw. It’s not planned. I was going to write about the Seminar I just co-chaired and how at home I felt among all these amazing people doing memory work. But that’s not what wanted to come out in this blog post. Perhaps it will speak to some of you.

Blessings to all.

Krzysztof Banach explaining the memorial in the Krępiec Forest to a group from our Seminar: “Local Perspectives on Difficult Histories: An Open Exchange for Best Practices on Memory Work.” The people standing around him are practitioners of Memory Work from Ukraine, Russia and Israel.

On the Way to the Soup Place

So many times when walking through the streets of Lublin on an ordinary day I have a fleeting thought that my ancestors almost certainly walked on these same streets. It might have been my mother or my grandparents, people I know/knew. Or people many generations removed, like my great-great grandmother Nechama Borensztajn born on Nadstawna Street in 1843 I think—part of that street survives. Or maybe the earliest Lublin-born ancestor I know of: Roza Jenta, born in 1789, who was my great-great-great-great grandmother. Born the year the French Revolution started and the American Constitution was put into place. Kindof blows your mind. I wonder what her life was like. Did she have a clue about those events? Would we have anything to talk about if I were able to teleport into her life? For some reason every time I input info into my family tree it disappears so I can’t find her profession, but I think I might have known it. I think my great-great-great grandfather on the other side who was born in Parczew, Poland and died in Kock (pronounced Kotzk) was a grain merchant, but I will have to reconstruct that history once again. It’s weird that the wisps of life of these people who are so unknowable, keep disappearing from my grasp.

The place where Jews came after the War to find out if anyone was alive is part of my daily landscape while in Lublin on the way to the soup place for lunch. It’s where my grandmother finally lost any hope that her parents, any of her sisters, her bother, or their children were alive.

Sign on the building that my friend Witek calls the House of Last Happiness. (After a visit there often there was none left).

I continue on those familiar streets.

The soup place. I wonder who lived there through the decades and centuries?

Searching for Lost Places Letter by Letter

I don’t know why it was so gratifying—picking out the letters one by one to form the names of the streets and places that made up the landscape of my ancestors’ city—Lublin. Picking the letters out of an old typography box and then forming the names in Yiddish—backwards so that the visionary printer Robert Sawa could print them forwards. Forming names of streets that no longer exist. One that my great-great grandmother Nechama Borenszajn was born on— Nadstawna Street. One that my mother and grandmother were born on and many others were born, lived and worked on: Szeroka Street—an iconic street in Jewish Lublin.

Robert is preparing a poster that will feature these places written in Yiddish in the background. Memory workers from all over Europe coming to a Seminar we are holding at Brama will get a poster to take home but here in Lublin they will see the only poster with these streets embossed in the background—because they cannot take those streets with them. No one can because many don’t exist. Such a simple idea and yet someone had to think of it. That someone was Robert.

He asked me to help arrange the Yiddish letters because they are unfamiliar to him.

Today after I picked out all the letters and formed the names of the places, the poignant “Brama Żydowska” or Jewish Gate,” and the funny “Ferkakte Brom” or Shitty Gate, among them, and Robert made a print, he remarked, “I wonder how long they’ve been waiting.” At first I didn’t get it and thought maybe my confusion was because he had said it in Polish, but then he explained that he meant he wondered how long these letters had been waiting to be used. I said, “You should use them more.” He said he didn’t feel it was his place.

“But together we can.”

He agreed. I hope we’ll do more with them in the future. There’s something sacred in the act of physically putting the letters in place to form Yiddish words in a place where the Jewish culture was wiped out. They have not been together in those combinations for a long time. I wonder if they are grateful that someone remembers.

Me, searching for the letters. Some of the sets are incomplete and have no lamed or no dalet, for instance.

More searching (we do not have nikud-or diacritical marks-so had to go without).

The names as I was setting them up, before Robert took them away.

The letters, awaiting their first ink in decades.

The names printed as a test but on the poster they will be embossed, not printed, as many do not exist.

House of Great Pain and a Miracle

This is the house where my mother survived part of the War. It’s in Otwock, Poland. She was passing as a Catholic girl. So it’s a wonderful place. But also a terrible place because the woman in the family she lived with was emotionally abusive. But she saved her life. We have to hold both truths at the same time.

Witek's Visit and Presenting Brama Grodzka-Teatr NN in the US 2019

My friend Witek Dąbrowski came here for the second year in a row so that we could present the work of remembrance being done by Brama Grodzka-Teatr NN in Lublin, Poland. Brama Grodzka is an organization where over sixty non-Jewish Poles work under the leadership of Witek and my good friend the visionary Tomek Pietrasiewicz. Witek is the Deputy Director.

Witek and I did three presentation-performances: 1). in West Nyack, NY sponsored by Lubliners Judy Josephs, who is a survivor, and her daughter Ruth Josephs, and the Holocaust Museum and Center for Tolerance and Education; 2). in Milwaukee sponsored by HERC (the Holocaust Education Resource Center) and 3). in Boston at the Vilna Shul, co-sponsored by the Family Genealogy Center.

In the first two venues we had many survivors and children of survivors in the audience. There were people descended from Lublin Jews who had never heard of Brama Grodzka, non-Jewish Poles, non-Jewish non-Poles and assorted Jewish people. In all three venues we had engaged audiences and important Q&As. We had laughter and tears and lots of positive feedback.

We did not spend all of Witek’s visit performing, Qing and Aing, however! See the photos below.

Witek with Dr. Anna Ornstein, Hungarian survivor of Auschwitz and Płaszów. I had shown Anna a clip of my interview with Witek and she was delighted to meet him. The feeling was mutual.

Witek at the beautiful table in the home of my childhood friend in VA and his husband. One of the great side benefits of Witek’s visit was our travels and performances gave me a chance to catch up with old friends.

We visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture—very impressive.

This beautiful poster greeted us as we entered the Jewish Museum in Milwaukee.

On the way to our West Nyack show.

Witek mid-performance of an Isaac Bashevis Singer Story.

He performs in Polish, with English subtitles. I was proud that my Polish is good enough now for me to be able to advance the slides. ;-)

Me, explaining the work of Brama Grodzka.

Empty Spaces

There are empty spaces on my family tree.

The great aunts whom I know almost only by name—

Zelda, the redheaded one—the youngest, who could sing and play the guitar beautifully, who was born the same year as my father.

I know her better, I know more.

Zelda jumped off a train to save herself. it worked for a time, but not long enough for her to meet me.

Not long enough for me to know all the ways she is different from Chana, Golda and my grandmother—Estera.

Not long enough to for me to complain to my brother or my kids about those annoying things that Auntie Zelda, Doda Zelda, Ciocia Zelda does—

What would we have called her?

Not long enough to have children, who would have children—some who would be red-headed like her, some blond like my mother. Some that I would adore, some that would annoy me.

Cousins.

Cousins, who don’t exist.

How did my grandmother live with the pain?

A photo from my grandmother’s album. I don’t know who they are. Could they be her sisters?

Speaking to High Schoolers

Last night I gave my Rescuers of Memory talk, “They Enable Us to See: Non-Jewish Rescue of Jewish Memory in Poland,” to a group of mostly students at Milton Academy in Massachusetts. It’s so different speaking to students than adults. Whenever I speak to adults I am confronted with questions about Polish anti-Semitism or complicity that sometimes border on attacks or accusations. I don’t take them personally though because I understand where they are coming from—they come from the great pain and loss that Jews experienced in Poland during World War II (as well as ant-Semitism before World War II). Unfortunately the loss was sometimes at the hands of non-Jewish Poles. So, I understand the anger, and the difficulty in seeing the positive in a people that perhaps you were brought up to think so negatively of.

The audience last night did not come to my talk with this history. Perhaps some of them came from families with Holocaust in the background, I don’t know, but this was the first time I gave a talk when I can remember NOT getting a question about Polish anti-Semitism (and don’t get me wrong—I love those questions because they get us into important dialogue—please see my blog post right before this one for an article that delves deeper into this). They had some great questions:

1. “I just read a book about the Armenian genocide and the author said he did not learn about the genocide until he was a teenager, when did you learn about the Holocaust?” I answered that my mother had been silent about her past for 30 years and I too learned about it as a teenager, from reading her book! But I cannot recall the exact moment when I found out.

2. “Do you see parallels between your work and your mothers?” Yes, my mother’s work is about rescuers during the war and mine is about rescuers of memory. Some criticize me for focusing on this positive aspect of Polish society but I will leave it to others to focus on the negative.

3. “How can we foster the kind of attention and care for our neighbors that you have shown us that these people exhibit?” Oh, that’s a tough one. I will say I take inspiration from my Polish friends.

There was a middle school teacher there who said she wants me to speak to the middle school class. Now that scares me. I think they are too young to even know about the horror of the Holocaust but she said the stories that I tell are what they want to know. If I do it I will report back here.