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?