“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!
