My
father, who was 76 at the time, was in Poland the last week of August
1999. He was taking a side trip from Prague, Czech Republic,
where he was going to attend a Holocaust survivors' conference.
He hadn't been back to Poland, the land of his birth and youth, since
the Nazis moved him from a concentration camp in Mielec to a camp in
Flossenberg, Germany, in April 1944. By coincidence, I was going
to
be in Poland the following week in connection with my work; so I
decided to spend a couple of days with him in his hometown, Krakow.
The day I arrived in Poland, I
went by train from Warsaw to Krakow. There, I went with my
parents to see the apartment where my father had grown up, the place
where his father's business was located, and the site of the Hebrew
grade school he had attended. My mother was accompanying him on
the trip. The school was located in the Kazimierz section of
Krakow, which was the part of the city where most of the 70,000
pre-World War II Jews lived. My father had left Krakow with his
mother and sister in the fall of 1940 to avoid having to move to the
ghetto that the Nazis had created to concentrate and control all of
Krakow's Jews. They went to Gorlice to live with his maternal
grandmother. Gorlice is about 60 miles south of Krakow and was
the place where my father spent the summers of his youth. It was
a small town of about 8,200, half its inhabitants Jewish.
Amazingly, not having been in
Krakow for 55 years, my father was able to remember the places we
visited. The buildings of his apartment and school were still as
he remembered. However, his father's place of business was no
longer there, even though a building that had been his uncle's home and
hardware store was still on the site. It was exciting for him to
revisit these places, along with the Kazimierz neighborhood, to show me
the memories of his youth.
The second day he hired a guide
and a driver to take us on the two and a half-hour drive to Gorlice in
search of memories there. The nervousness not evident in Krakow
appeared on the way to Gorlice. Even though Gorlice held dear
memories for my father of summer vacations with his grandmother, the
true nightmare of his survival of the Holocaust had begun in
this small town.
As we drove into the center of
town it was raining, and a large crowd had gather to attend Sunday mass
at the large Catholic Church located there. We parked and started
to walk around under umbrellas, my father immediately recognizing the
general layout of the town. We walked for a short distance, and
he located the home where his grandmother had lived and where he spent
many summers enjoying her love and pampering. In many ways my
father had felt closer to his grandmother than he had to his own
mother.
He then attempted to find a
second apartment he had helped his grandmother to move into. We
found the street, but not having the address was an encumbrance since
the apartments on the street were very similar to each other and the
stores under them were of course not those of 55 years earlier.
The next search was for the apartment that my father had moved his
grandmother, mother, and sister into. It was in the ghetto that
the Nazis had created in late 1941. However, not a clue remained
of the ghetto and perhaps the memories were buried too deeply. In
the meantime, our driver had found the town museum and suggested that
we visit it. The museum curator was there and opened it for
us. The first room of the museum held remembrances, postcards and
pictures, of the Jewish pre-war parts of Gorlice. We spent some
time looking at them and then asked if the curator had any historical
information about the ghetto or the town's pre-war Jewish
inhabitants. We were hoping to find a map to help locate the
ghetto apartment. She said she had nothing that could help us but
did show us a paperback book that had been written in Polish about the
Jews of Gorlice [Zydzi gorliccy,
by Wladislaw Boczon]. There were some names and pictures in the
book but almost nothing my father could recognize. He did see in
the book one picture he knew all too well. It was of a friend of
his in a concentration camp uniform. It had been taken shortly
after he and this friend were liberated. It was one of a pair of
pictures that were taken of him with this friend, with both of them
putting on concentration camp uniforms over their clothes to preserve a
memory in a photograph. However, only his friend's picture was in
the
book, probably because the friend had grown up in Gorlice while my
father was only a summer resident.
The curator seemed to have
nothing else to offer us, but we considered the visit worthwhile
nonetheless. We still had some other parts of Gorlice we wanted
to see. Just as we were about to leave the museum, the curator
came out with a manila envelope containing a large handful of passport
size photos--about thirty of them--taken as the authorities rounded up
Gorlice's Jews for re-settlement in the ghetto. All the pictures
were from people with last names beginning with the letter "S."
My father leafed through them one by one. He was about halfway
through the pile when he gasped and handed me the picture of his
sister, Tosia. Leafing through a few more, he came upon his
mother
Erna's picture. This was the first time I could clearly see what
my grandmother had looked like. My father's eyes welled up with
tears as he sat down from the weight of the memories these pictures
brought back.
My father continued to go through
the pile until the very last picture. That last picture was of
his grandmother, my great grandmother. He broke down at this
discovery, having found the connection he was looking for. He
grandmother was the person he had thought of most through the trials of
his survival during the Holocaust. He retains to this day a
belief that her spirit is what gave him the will and strength to
survive. He had not seen her face since the day he buried her
after she died in the Gorlice Ghetto. All three pictures were
signed, and my father learned for the first time that his grandmother's
given name was Rachela. He had known her as "Babcia Ricka" or
what others had called her, "Ricki." We placed the pictures side
by side, looking at three generations of the women who had been in my
father's life before the war.
It is interesting to note that my
wife, Edna, and I named our younger daughter Raquel without knowing her
great great grandmother's name. Furthermore, when we named her we
didn't know that her great great grandmother's name on Edna's mother's
side was also Rochel. She, too, died in the Nazi camps.
We arranged for the curator to
make copies of the pictures and send them to us. We left the
museum with the feeling that something special had occurred and headed
to a restaurant for a well-deserved lunch. We then found the park
my father had played in as a boy and where he was denied entry after
the Nazis occupied the town and a sign was put up that said: "No
Jews, Gypsies, or Dogs Allowed." We strolled in the park, and my
father reminisced about his climbs up a nearby mountain as we enjoyed
the
green and brightness of the park. The rain had stopped. We drove
around looking for the building that my father was detained in and
sneaked out of, only to see his sister for the last time as she was
transported away in a train cattle car to her extermination in
Belzec. His mother had suffered the same fate. We found the
building in a factory complex. It had a plaque on it to the
memory of the Jews, Poles, and Russians who were detained there before
shipment to slave-labor and extermination camps.
We had thought to visit the
remains of the Jewish cemetery, but it was getting late and we still
had a long drive back to Krakow. So we called it a day--and a
very
rewarding day at that. My father had achieved what he had wanted
to and then some. Finding the pictures exceeded what anyone could
have hoped for. He also was able to share those moments with
me. I am glad I was there, and I will share the same moments with
my
children and, I hope, someday their children through this narrative and
the pictures I took.
The next day my parents continued
on to Prague, and I took a tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The experience
was overwhelming--perhaps a story for another time.