“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.