Watching the children now, I am painfully aware that under the carpet of green in this cheerful recreation garden, beneath the playful cries of the frolicking youngsters, lie the mouldering bones of my ancestors.
The blackened vestige of a granite tombstone, its Hebrew lettering scarcely legible, lies half hidden in the grass. Crumbled ruins of an old stone wall likewise confirm this is indeed the site of the abandoned Staszów Jewish cemetery I had seen thirty years before. Time drift and decades of indifference have obliterated the graveyard grafting an incongruous playground onto its surface.
On this journey to my parents' ancestral town my niece, Judy, from New York and my old friend, Seweryn who teaches at a Warsaw university, accompany me. Seweryn is one of that tiny remnant of surviving Polish Jewry. Having fled east from his native Warsaw as a young student when the Germans conquered Poland in 1939, Seweryn was conscripted into the Soviet Army. In the fateful Battle of Leningrad, he lost his left hand.
We have driven south from Warsaw on a 200 mile linear route bisecting the pancake flat, Mazowsze countryside of central Poland. To the east, the broad Vistula River rolled swiftly seaward in the opposite direction, descending from the High Tatra Mountains to the gray Baltic.
Ours is a pilgrimage. No sentimental, self indulgent search for roots. What roots could we hope to find in a Judenrein Polish town half a century after its Jewish community vanished forever? Aging patriarchs, flowering youth, the newly born descendants of centuries old Staszów lineages (Jews first settled here in 1526) all cut down by the Nazi scythe.
My, pilgrimage was highly personal. A deeply felt need, though inexcusably belated, to reflect on what I know of the lives of my lost kinfolk. To set eyes again on their houses, to tread in their steps through the narrow streets and alleyways. To listen for the echoes of their Yiddish intonations chattering, arguing, joking in the Market Square on market day. My earlier visit had been too superficial, too rushed, too mindful of the waiting taxi that had brought me from Warsaw.
I am a generation older now and my perspective has changed. This journey, a self imposed debt to those never met, but often thought about, cousin, uncles, aunts. A tribute to their obscure lives and their agonized deaths. A kaddish long deferred.
More was the obligation mine by God's grace or destiny's quirk that had me born half a world away beyond the clutch of the Nazi death machine. Growing up in Philadelphia, I only knew the Staszów, relatives through tintype photographs stiffly posed before backdrops of painted trees and ivied trellises, and from tightly scripted postcards stuck with Polish eagle stamps. As a toddler, I remember fetching, one of these postcards from our letter box and proudly handing it to my mother, only to see her collapse at the news of her mother's death.
In this 700 year old town, my four grandparents managed to live out their pastoral lives in longevity despite foreign occupation armies, cholera epidemics, bloody pogroms and family tragedies. A merciful fate decreed that my venerable grandparents depart for Gan Eden before the cataclysmic winds of the Holocaust swept away, the five thousand Jewish souls who once shared this town with an equal number of Christian neighbours.
Following the expulsion of the Staszów Jews to the death camps of Treblinka, Auschwitz and Belzec, the Nazis confiscated the Jewish gravestones for use as paving blocks in the ever muddy marketplace. Latter the town's mayor sold the stones to a construction company. Eventually the burial ground became a grazing field for goats, and now in a bizarre twist, a playground.
Niece Judy, Seweryn and I wandered down Swierczewskiego Street searching for traces of the former Jewish existence. We discovered a badly weathered street sign revealing the earlier name Ulica Bozniczna - Synagogue Street.
A cluster of antiquated wooded dwellings clung to the area where once stood the main synagogue. After its destruction, the local headquarters of the late , unlamented Polish Communist Party was erected an the site, Today the half empty building housed a few municipal offices as Poland's political forces regrouped. But surely these dilapidated houses across the street were once Jewish owned. On more than one doorpost we were startled to find faint outlines of mezuzot. It seemed incredible these had remained for so many years.
A slight, sharp, featured woman in a tomato red cardigan, who had been following us, hesitantly approached and whispered to Seweryn she had 'cos ciekawego' - something interesting to show us. Would we come to her home?
In her sparsely furnished living room she drew out a frayed, creased document from a cabinet drawer. In Hebrew text, illuminated with flowers and entwined hands, the document, dated the year 5687 (1927), was an engagement contract, a 62 year old Tnoyim. The fathers of a Sarah Frydman of Staszów and a Pinchas Applebaum from a neighbouring village had agreed on the betrothal conditions of their children; the amount of 'damages' if the nuptials were cancelled, ad the precise sum of the dowry.
The Polish woman told us she had found it in a destroyed Jewish house during the War. Its ornate style and exotic lettering had convinced her it was worth keeping all those 45 years.
I offered her three American dollars, equalling three days' wages, and it was mine. Subsequently, I discovered that bride Sarah and groom Pinchas, astonishingly, were alive and residing in Paris. When I mailed them a copy of their Tnoyim, the 82 year old couple telephoned me with an effusive Thank You,
In Staszów I observed many changes. Most streets were paved now. Cheery flowerbeds and sturdy saplings edged the sidewalks. To my critical eye and grudgeful frame of mind it all seemed not an effort to beautify the drabness of the town but a connivance to camouflage the past I was searching for. Hadn't my ancestors' graves been callously concealed forever in the deep earth?
It didn't matter that a productive sulphur mine nearby had brought an economic boom to the 20000 inhabitants. It could now afford prettying up. I was confused and resented that the town was hardly recognizable from the sullen, mud soaked village I had seen before. My search became more difficult now, trying to locate the family landmarks I especially wanted to see: the houses where my father and mother were born and grew up. Street numbers had changed and new buildings replaced war scarred rubble, A group of older men, overcoming their initial mistrust of us, explained the number changes, enabling us to find the exact houses.
I contemplated with no little emotion the small two story dwelling at 24 Rytwianska Street where my grandmother had brought up her nine children, including my mother. The wooden gate to the courtyard was ajar. Inside, I recognized the hof, the yard of which my mother had spoken so often, Here the family had stored wooded logs for winter fuel. In this sheltered place the children had played their games. I looked around, but failed to see the rickety old wooden outhouse. Sulphur mines bring inside toilets too.
By now, occupants of the building were suspiciously watching us from windows and around comers. Who were these intruders, snooping on their property? Their obvious unfriendliness discouraged me from asking to go inside. I had actually been inside on my prior visit. It had been a government insurance office then, and the young clerks had greeted me with a friendly curiosity, agape at the idea I had come all the way from America, the son of Staszów people, no less!
A flood of my mother's Staszów memories surged before my eyes- a door banged shut somewhere, and a little girt in pigtails came racing down the staircase and out the wooden gate on an urgent mission; checks flushed, heart pounding, my mother was running to bring the doctor for her gravely ill little brother, Pesach, who died that very night .. . my mother, a recent bride, is leaving for America. 'Take something to remember your home,' says her scholarly, bearded father, and she chooses two of his notebooks filled with romantic Russian poetry. . - I hear the tapping of a cane and the shuffling footsteps of blind Uncle Harshel groping his way through the gate to the stairs, sightless since birth, and a learned teacher of Talmud and T'nach, Reb Harshel was highly revered by his young pupils.
My mother had always admired more than pitied Reb Harshel her oldest brother, for the plodding courage and piety that sustained his shuttered life. His years had been buffeted by poverty and recurrent despair. After his wife died, his elder son emigrated to Brazil where he was accidentally killed by a berserk soldier. But in his darkened world Harshel had been blessed with an extraordinary memory and a capacity for weaving rich fantasies. By all accounts, his depth of biblical knowledge and patience had made him an ideal teacher. Imbued with a sense of the dramatic, when he narrated the story of Joshua at Gibeon, he was Joshua, thundering his command for the sun to stand still.
On that ominous morning when the Nazi deportation squads ordered the Jews of Staszów to assemble in the Market Square, Harshel had refused to go, remaining locked in his room. In the afternoon, after hundreds of his fellow townsmen had been murdered and the others marched off, the sporadic gunfire finally ceased. An eerie silence settled over the town. Only then did Harshel emerge to stand in the mud soaked street. He became Jeremiah, the ancient prophet, chanting a litany of verses from the Book of Lamentations: How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people.
Even the hardened S.S. officers, bemused or possibly unnerved at the sight of the tragic blind figure, did not disturb him.
Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow...
After several hours, according to witnesses, the Germans sent for a Lithuanian recruit, who fired a bullet at close range ending the prayerful songs and mystic visions of Uncle Reb Harshel.
For these, things I weep; mine eye, mine eye runneth down with water; because the comforter is far from me, my children are desolate because the enemy hath prevailed.
The courtship of my father and mother was never hindered by distance. They lived on the same street, which changed its name at my father's house on the Market Square. At Number 12 Rynek a tiny shop was the successor to the grocery once owned by my Aunt Pessah and her husband known as der hoiche Shlomeh. Photographs of my aunt and uncle in our family album portray Pessah as a woman of character, her even features combining a calm beauty with a quiet dignity. Der Hoiche Shomeh - Tall Sally - was a swarthy, towering giant of great physical strength. His thick brows, bushy moustache and heavy beard covered most of his face, but his piercing sorrowful eyes were what I remembered most.
The present shop was selling shoe findings, but was closed today. In the diminutive window a skimpy display of dusty shoelaces, a pair of synthetic heels and a couple of boxes of boot polish indicated an air of indifferent pettiness that was characterizing the town for me.
Adjacent to the shop a wide wooden door opened into a, prim little garden and an inside door which led to the rooms above the store. In those rooms my father had spent his childhood and his youth. Ten or more relatives had lived together in this house as an extended family. I wanted very much to get the feel of those rooms. I knocked a long time before the door was opened gingerly by an annoyed burly ma with a fierce unruly moustache.
No, it wouldn't be possible to come in, he told Seweryn in gruff Polish. Surmising a threat to his property, he defensively claimed he had built an entirely new structure when he moved in 25 years ago. Even the walls were his own, he asserted, chin thrust in our faces. Clearly, he wanted us out.
Refusing to he so abruptly turfed out of my grandfather's ancestral premises, Judy and I stalked about the grounds, leisurely snapping photos of the garden flowers, curtained casement windows, even the man himself. Like forensic investigators, we scrutinized the grounds while the portly Pole scratched his fingers across his paunch, itching to bolt the outer door behind us.
Outside again, we could plainly see the two story building's wall was of advanced age. Made of rocks set in concrete, the wall was fully exposed by the construction of a hotel next door. This was surely Grandpa Isaac's original wall, as, no doubt, was, most of the basic structure his too. But short of faxed entry there was no way for us to go inside.
Years ago I had heard of the 'righteous gentile' Baltin who had saved Jewish lives during the Nazi Occupation. Seweryn asked an elderly, gnome like man idling on a Market Square bench if he knew of Baltin. 'Tak, tak!' he nodded, pointing to an upper window across the Square. He offered to take us there. At the top of a creaky stairwell our motley group faced a hulking, raven haired man, who, hearing of our interest in him, beckoned us inside. Coughing and Sneezing, he cleared a cluttered table and apologized for his 'catarra' Uncorking a bottle of Wyborowa vodka and passing it around, he explained he was 'young' Baltin - Zygmunt, by name. Crimson faced and surprisingly youthful for his 74 years, he recounted that it was his father, Jan Baltin the town's popular butcher, who had tried to rescue Jews.
He remembered six Jews given refuge under the floorboards of their kitchen. A week of being holed up in such confined space, however, proved too much for them, and they emerged only to be caught leaving the house. Baltin's father was promptly arrested by, the Gestapo and readied for immediate execution. His terrified family wept and held their anguished breath. But a close friend of the Baltins, a Polish police officer interceded with the Gestapo and Baltin's life was miraculously spared.
Zygmunt Baltin told us there were others in Staszów who had done far more to save Jews. He described how Maria Szczecinska a widow with five children, who worked as a railway clerk, managed to shelter fifteen Jews for almost three o years in her secluded house near the railway station. When word reached her several times that the Gestapo was searching for hidden Jews, she guided her charges to a friend's farm on the edge of the nearby Golejow Forest. She remained with them until it was safe to return to her house. A devout Catholic, Maria often questioned the risk to herself and her children. Eventually she sought the advice of a priest in Krakow, fearing to confess such secret activities, to any local cleric. By all means, the Krakow priest counselled her, you must continue to protect these unfortunate people.
In Krakow at that time a young student and resistance fighter Karol Wojtyla had his own secret activity. He was studying theology, a subject forbidden by the Nazis. Karol Wojtyla later became Pope John Paul II.
To know more about the fate of the Staszów Jews, Baltin said between wheezing coughs, we ought to see Dr. Maciej Zarebski . Zarebski was a 'youngster' of 38 years, born after the War, but deeply interested` in the lost Jewish community. He had organised a local cultural society that held discussions on town's history. Members wrote stories and poems, often based on the marginal knowledge they gathered on the 400 years of Jewish life in Staszów.
Minutes after we took leave of Zygmunt Baltic we rang Dr. Zarebski's doorbell on Szpitalna Street. He too, was suffering a cold, but cheerfully ushered us into, his book crammed, memento strewn salon, Zarebski spoke fairly good English having learned it in, of all places, Libya, where he bad practiced medicine for several years. A dark skinned, cherubic faced man with an energetic temperament, Dr. Zarebski, judging by his hoard of bric-a-brac, souvenirs and wall hangings, was either a compulsive collector, or a man who felt more at ease surrounded by mounds of accumulated possessions. Items ranged from ceramic elephants, to sexy pin-up calendars, to archaeological finds unearthed in North African deserts. Zarebski's shy, soft spoken wife brought tea and quietly joined us. Dr. Zarebski explained that one of the main aims (if we Staszów Cultural Society (he was Chairman) was to erect a memorial for the Staszów Jews who had perished in the Holocaust. I listened, but could only visualize a stone monument smeared with graffiti, or worse, grimly hacked to pieces by drunken vandals on a dark night. When I suggested this possibility, he smiled, and forcefully shook his head to deny such a dire prospect. I recommended a less vulnerable memorial - an annual lecture in the local high schools to stimulate sympathetic understanding of the life and times of Staszów's vanished Jews.
Dr. Zarebski brought out a copy of the family 700 page Yizkor Book (I have one myself) published in Israel by a handful of Staszów Holocaust survivors. Tears unexpectedly came to my eyes. A copy of this book, like most Yizkor books which recall the pre-War world of the towns and villages of Eastern Europe, is preserved in the Jerusalem Yad Vashem Library. Another cape rests in the British Museum Library, donated there, by myself. That this book with its collection of loving remembrances and precious photographs should have made its way back to, this town where there wasn't even a Jewish graveyard left, symbolised that there ware still people around who cared enough to concern themselves with the all-but-forgotten annals of the town's Jewish history.
But I wasn't sure what to make of Dr. Zarebski. What urged him to take on the task of remembrance in a town, which, by most accounts had been indifferent to the Jews' fate, and had abandoned them more often than not? Was he simply a conscience stricken, expiating Christian? Or did this sensitive physician have knowledge of Jewish lineage in his ancestry?
After saying good-bye, I suggested to Seweryn and Judy that Zarebski had the makings of a lamed vavnik, one of those honourable, righteous men, thirty six of whom, the Talmud says, are needed for the world to exist.
In the late afternoon sunshine we trudged, past the rickety little houses in the pinched streets back to the Market Square. Jeans clad teenagers streamed by on their way home from school. Fair haired, serious looking, they ignored us as they chatted to each other, munching on sernik cheesecake squares and paczki doughnuts. Occasionally sonic youngsters glanced at us with momentary curiosity. Their provincial world had little concern for transient strangers. But I was not indifferent to them. Their grandparents may well have bought flour and beet sugar from my Uncle Shlomo's grocery. Or their elders might have been among those rapacious citizens who ransacked and looted my relatives' homes within hours of their deportation. Or could they have been among the 'Schupo', self appointed vigilantes, who searched under the floorboards and in the walls of empty Jewish houses for Jews and their valuables, and combed the forest so relentlessly that only a hundred out of the thousand Jews who hid them managed to survive?
In the centre of the cobblestoned Rynek marketplace stood the Ratusz, the 300 year old former town hall. Inside the Roman arched entrances of the squat landmark building tiny shops had traded in leather, textiles and notions in my parents' time. Today was not a twice weekly market day and few people were about. On the east side of the square the suit cast shadows on a long queue of Fiat Polonez taxicabs on the look out for fares. Ghostly images suddenly dissolved the line-up of taxis. In my mind's eye I was witnessing a harrowing scene that had taken place in this square half a century ago.
It was autumn, 1942. The Jews had been confined to an overcrowded ghetto for three months. Their economic and social life had, deteriorated drastically. Alarmed community leaders were aware that under Gestapo direction squads of Ukrainian and Lithuanian mercenaries were inexorably drawing closer to Staszów while deporting and murdering the Jewish populations of the towns and, villages in the surrounding district. In a desperate effort to save lives, the Jewish leaders proposed a deal to the German authorities to allow several hundred youth and middle aged men to work at an arms factory, in Skarzysko a town 60 miles north. The offer included a considerable monetary gift for the workers 'privilege' of being useful to the Nazi war machine.
On Saturday morning, October 10, 1942, a convoy of trucks suddenly rumbled into the marketplace to pick up the 'volunteers'. Men and families had to decide within minutes whether to trust the SS promise of work or be lured by yet another sinister trick to betrayal and death. While groups of men boarded the line-up of trucks amid the tearful farewells of their families and loved ones, others rushed about the square seeking advice, frenziedly trying to decide what to do. When the packed vehicles family lumbered off, all hearts were torn by the question, would they ever sea each other again?
Four thousand miles away, al that way same hour, too was taking leave of my family and loved ones. In New York's Penn Station along with hundreds of other recruits, I boarded a crowded railway coach for service in the United States Army. But the strength of America's army and the might of all the Allied Forces were no comfort in those days to the isolated, helpless Jews of Staszów. A hard core of courageous young men had gallantly tried to organize armed resistance. They sent an urgent messenger to the Polish Communist Party pleading for weapons for self defence. Back came the scornful reply. 'We have no conventions with the Jews. You have absolutely nothing to hope for from us'.
The long dreaded Doomsday arrived before daybreak on Sunday, November 8, 1942. At, 5:30am be SS, with their Ukrainian and Lithuanian collaborators began herding Jews into the frosty, muddied Market Square, Hundreds of people, bundled in thick layers of clothing for their unknown destination, crammed into the space around the old Town Hall, With an eerie sense of déjà vu, I am there. I am staring into their despairing faces, bewildered eyes, prayer mumbling lips. A miasma of impending disaster hovers over all. From the ghetto side streets laggard, burdened figures reluctantly shuffle into the thronged square. Raucous shouts and angry curses of the mercenaries reverberate like feral cries of wild beasts. Families huddle close. Elders moan in confusion. Children whisper unanswerable questions. Wild eyed and staggering from a night of heavy drinking, the collaborators suddenly open fire on victims at random. Dozens of Jews fall in pools of blood in the oozing mud. Waves of panic sweep over the crowd of people. But the ominous threat to kill everyone en masse keeps them in check. In the midst of the havoc and slaughter my remarkable Aunt Malka cries out in her legendary defiance of the Nazi murderers. A doughty, dauntless 70 years old Malka hurls her darning prophesy at the startled Germans: 'Know your defeat is near. All those who tied to destroy Israel, were themselves destroyed. We have had many oppressors in our history and outlived them all - we, will outlive you too...' These are the last words of Malka Nissertgarten.
At 10 am Obersturmfuehrer Schild bellows the order: 'March!' The procession begins mournfully moving down Krakowska Street toward the road to the neighbouring village Sielec. By noon, nearly two hundred bodies lay where they fell in the desolated square and on Krakowska Street. On the long trek more than a thousand more are slain and swallowed by the earth in mass graves along the way. These are the early dead, released from the agonies of starvation, debilitation and the final crush in the gas chambers. Such was the destiny of all but a very few townsfolk who made their exodus from their beloved shtetl that day.
Almost fifty, Novembers have passed since demise of Staszów's vibrant centuries old Jewish community. But as I linger in the Market Square, now adorned with rows of greenery in neat flower boxes and a Gothic sandstone memorial to fallen Polish soldiers, I can faintly hear from beneath the uneven cobblestones muted wails and muffled sobs. Sounds that will forever haunt this unhallowed ground. Mothers and fathers are calling their children home, their names echoing across a void.
'Devorah-le!', 'Chask-kell!' 'Ley-bish-el! 'Yuss-el'... I too am calling to them. Kin of my generation, contemporaries I never knew. How richer our lives would have been had they lived. And I feel a terrible poignant longing for them.
Some days later I came to Treblinka. That vast Valley of Ghinnom, today a stark field of 17000 upright, jagged boulders symbolizing the lost Jewish Communities of the Holocaust. Earlier visitors had told me they could find no stone commemorating Staszów. For whatever reason they said, it had somehow been omitted. Sad indeed, because many of the Staszów Jews had perished at this accused place.
I went to the massive central monument and in the awful silence of this grim forest clearing, under a crystalline blue sky, I recited the Mourner's Kaddish. I turned and walked toward the distant pine trees that still camouflage this infamous site. Suddenly I saw it. A triangular weathered rock inscribed with the single word, 'Staszów'.
My pilgrimage, was at an end.