What is left
December 29th
I don’t know if anybody else goes to visit old, abandoned Jewish cemeteries that dot all the northeast Poland. I do, and I have been doing that for years. And I don’t have any plans to stop it. I have this internal compulsion and need to still visit them. To remember those who for tens of generations lived here, and who then were gone. Gone completely, their houses, the synagogues, their language, culture, and simply their presence there. Their survivors (if there were any) live now in different countries. They might visit the old country, but those visits are all too infrequent. I mean, who would willingly go to the place where their ancestors were subjected to unspeakable cruelties and wholesale slaughter and genocide.
There are very few things, very few memorials to a Jewish presence, still left here. It’s difficult to imagine that all those small towns in this area were predominantly Jewish shtetls before 1939. Very few memories remain as well. I want to keep those memories for as long as I can. Even by just visiting remnants of Jewish necropolises like this one in Sokolka I visited today. Few headstones are left standing between the trees in a tangle of shrubs and grasses and branches. Some Hebrew letters and words are still visible or felt by a finger tracing the outline hewn in the stone. Nature takes its course, taking over even stones. I could feel the autumn leaves underneath the snow there. In the spring, that will help the grass and the trees to grow and conquer those few visible resting places of local peasants, doctors, teachers, shopkeepers, rabbis, and cantors.
That growth will be a natural process until nothing visible will be left. My memory will remain in me and in what I write and in the photos I take. Not much of solace, is it? Against reason, I hope for another growth to take place as well in us, growth of understanding and mutual respect and tolerance. I don’t want any more memories to fade away because of hatred and violence and purges. I will always remember. Who will remember it after I become a memory myself?
