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April 6, 2012
Mourning in Kazimierz
A trip to Poland highlights what has been lost.
JODY GRUBER
Warsaw. Tarnow. Rymanov. Krakow. Poland. 1995. Life races all around me. The noisy horseplay of laughing children nearly swallows up the silent, screaming ruins of synagogues and Jewish memorials. I trudge through the streets, dragging my heart along the cobblestones, weeping and drowning in the chatter of people who stroll into my view. They pass me by in a moment. Yet we lived here for an eternity. I am out of place in this world that once belonged to us. I am an outsider in village after village that once rang with Yiddish laughter and Jewish life. This was once all ours but, today, only the crying void of lost millions fills it up. This was once all ours but, now, I am a foreigner.
Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter of Krakow. Sixty-five-thousand Jews lived in this area south of the city centre, prior to being forced across the Vistula River to the ghetto at Podgorze in March 1941. Nearly all were dead by March 1943, killed either during the various aktionen in the ghetto, or following mass deportations to Belzic, Plaszow and Auschwitz. I wander around Kazimierz, this sorrow strangling my heart. I see faded signs in Hebrew and Yiddish, dilapidated tenements, Jewish schools, the mikvah, the central marketplace, the synagogues. Nearly a dozen synagogues still stand. But where are the Jewish people? The weight of their absence is staggering. Only ghosts haunt the empty, forsaken streets.
I envision men scurrying home from the synagogues to their families on Friday night. I imagine children playing marbles and tag in the courtyards, women joking and bargaining at the marketplace. I feel the throngs of Rosh Hashanah worshippers pouring through the synagogue doors and spilling out all over the streets. They fill up the streets and are so real to me that, by my third day in Kazimierz, I begin sneaking inside the apartment buildings as if to follow them home.
I tiptoe up the stairways, I peer into the innermost courtyards, I listen to the muffled voices behind the heavy doors, I read the names on mailboxes. Why, the Jews were here only yesterday ... certainly until last night. Surely, there must be an unfinished bowl of soup somewhere, a trickling water faucet, an open book, a lost shoe. I know they were all here just yesterday because I feel them all around me.
I run my hand up and down the banister, like the hundreds who lived here did a thousand times before me. My feet fit perfectly into the well-worn imprints of all the feet that once stood here and bounded up these sagging stairs to home. I am startled and shaken when a cat, appearing out of nowhere, rubs up against my legs and circles round and round me. Where is the child who once stroked and loved her cat, setting out a tiny dish of milk on the floor? I cannot find her anywhere. I cannot find anything or anyone anywhere.
I go back outside into the blinding sunlight. And there, what my eyes really see, are two young, blond girls. What are they doing? What are they doing here in these holy Jewish streets that scream out with the silence of my people? They are walking down the street where they live. Hand in hand, they are walking down the street past the stones of the old Jewish cemetery. They are holding their small Easter baskets filled with greenery and flowers. Tomorrow is Easter.
But today is Pesach. It hurts so much to roam through Kazimierz, yes, Kazimierz of the Jews, and to find only Easter baskets. It hurts so much to wander all over Poland, knowing that there are only stones, memorials, bones and ashes.
I have come back to this land of my grandparents, but we don’t belong here anymore. I watch these people of Poland gently carrying their little baskets of plants and flowers with great tenderness as they smile and chat. But, for me, the streets are silent and empty.
The second seder of Pesach was just last night. In Kazimierz, more than 200 people gathered in the newly renovated synagogue’s social hall to celebrate. I was the youngest, so I sang Mah Nishtanah, the Four Questions. I was the youngest, already in my forties back then. I looked at the elderly faces sitting around me and realized: this is all that is left in Kazimierz of the Jewish community.
One elderly man wept, lamenting for the past, crying for everything that was gone. I tried to say something to him, but what words could I ever find, anywhere, in any language, to even begin to respond to him? Together, the adults laughed and played the children’s game of looking for the afikoman, the hidden piece of matzah. But those gathered were mainly Poles interested in Jewish things, not Jews celebrating the holiday. They had come to learn about Pesach, and to help keep the holiday and traditions alive. Here, there were no Jewish children.
American by birth, Jody Gruber lived in Europe and Israel before moving to Alaska to work with all things wild – both kids and critters. Thirteen years ago, she and her family headed south to Vancouver, where she is a naturalist for a whale watching company, a teacher on call, and always planning that next trip back to eastern Europe.
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