Warsaw was a city yet again on the cusp of change; wherever I looked, I saw the influence of Western culture locked in a cautious dance with history. Old men pulling wagons traveled alongside backlit cars, glowing around the edges; buildings cloaked in centuries-old design looked polished and new.
In the soft summer light of our first evening we honored the Sabbath at Nożyk, the only one of Warsaw’s more than four hundred synagogues to survive the war. I quietly took pictures from the last pew, waiting for the voices of the men gathered before me to reach a level that would help muffle the sound of the camera. I sensed spirits living in the walls of the synagogue, an imposing structure soaked in history and surviving precariously in a place once teeming with Jewish life.
The next morning our search for clues to the incomplete puzzle of my parents’ past brought us to the Jewish cemetery, an overgrown relic that amazingly had been left undisturbed during the war. Just inside the entrance stands a monument to Jewish children killed in the Holocaust. My mother burst into tears as she imagined all those bright lights snuffed out and the incomprehensible pain of the parents who watched helplessly as their children were marched away from them and into the gas chambers.
I couldn’t imagine why any Jews would have stayed in Poland after the war, but before leaving Warsaw we visited a woman who had survived the camps, and she and my mother, who had never met, hugged and cried and talked like old friends. She lived quietly in a shabby building watched over by a large statue of the Virgin Mary in the courtyard. Graffiti on the exterior walls proclaimed that Poland is for the Poles, a vivid reminder of anti-Semitism.
Beside her bed were an old radio and a pair of reading glasses and above them a shelf with framed photographs. She pointed to pictures of her children who were killed during the war and I was startled to find myself thinking, “They too are children of a survivor.”
