Several weeks ago, my daughter Pauline mentioned that she would be using the occasion of a two-week trip to Poland, which she had planned for some time, to visit the small town of Lomza, where my long-dead mother and my mother’s sisters and brothers had grown up. Neither myself nor any of my cousins had ever visited Lomza, though our childhood was filled with stories of the family’s life there prior to the moment, in 1919, when they all fled the war-torn continent of Europe to a refuge in the home of an uncle in Syracuse, New York.
My mother’s father, a rabbi in the Yeshiva of Lomza, had died in 1911 of typhus, which he contracted by staying to treat his students with that illness in their residence hall. He left a penniless wife with six daughters and one son. She raised them on a pension from the school of one ruble per week .
In 1918, my grandmother also died, of malnutrition in wartime circumstances, leaving the six daughters and one son as orphans having no relatives living in Europe. My mother, then 16 years old, shepherded the entire group to Warsaw, where the U.S. embassy was then besieged with desperate people clamoring for visas to the United States. She avoided the crowd out front by climbing through a backyard window into the embassy, where she fell to the knees of an official, crying, and begging him to grant her group of children a visa. He complied, and my mother, then 16, took the entire group of younger siblings to a German seaport, where they boarded a ship with money from an uncle living in Syracuse, New York. And thus they sailed to Ellis Island in New York, and the haven of America.
In Syracuse, my mother met another refugee from the wars and oppression of Europe, my father . They had each joined the “New Americans Club” of Syracuse, New York. They married, eked out a bare living in the ensuing years of economic depression, and lived to attend the graduation of my sister with an advanced degree from New York University and my own graduation from the Yale University Law School. Talk about the American dream!
By fleeing from Europe, instead of staying in Lomza, they enabled us all to escape the Holocaust. Every single member of a large Jewish community in Lomza was either shot to death by members of the German army in a forest outside the town, or buried alive there, or shipped to the death camp of Treblinka. This history of the people they left behind in Lomza was constantly related to me and to my cousins as we grew up.
When Pauline told me she was planning to visit Lomza, I felt that I should be with her, even though I had only four days-or-so for the entire trip. On Monday evening of this week, I flew to Warsaw, devoted most of Tuesday and Wednesday to seeing that large city, then drove to Bialystok, Poland on Wednesday afternoon to meet Pauline and one of her daughters in Bialystok.
And this morning, Thursday, we drove for an hour and half to nearby Lomza, which is near the border of Belorussia. We picked up a map at the city hall, toured the former Jewish ghetto from which those residents of Lomza had been sent to their deaths , saw the former Jewish hospital of Lomza, surveyed various plaques commemorating the life of that now-disappeared community, walked through the “old” Jewish cemetery of 19th century persons, and then undertook a long, long walk through a residential area to the hidden-away “new” Jewish cemetery, an area of headstones marking the graves of persons who died in the early 1900s.
And after searching for nearly two hours amidst massive piles of weeds and overturned and tilted tombs, we discovered the graves of my grandfather and grandmother , both of their headstones being heavily damaged by vandals but totally and precisely recognizable. And there, I delivered a short speech to them of my gratitude for their lives, and also, staunch atheist though I am, I recited as much as I could remember of the Hebrew prayer for the dead, the Kaddish.
It has been a very emotional day for me, but one I am so grateful to have had. And I am so indebted to my daughter and granddaughter for making the trip, and thus initiating my own decision to go with them.
We returned late in the day to modern Bialystok, where Polish young people in the most modern dress throng the main city square and converse with great animation about the latest happenings in Poland .
Tomorrow I return to New York, after a short four days abroad — but what days these have been!
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