The Keys to the Cemetery

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Yesterday was the first full day with the group of 40 educators who've taken a week to gather in Kraków. From a 21 year old Austrian young man from the Tyrol to a 65 plus year old Israeli from a kibbutz in northern Israel we are on the same bus this week in order to understand more about the Jews of the territory in southeastern Poland described by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, many Jews from pre-war Poland, and then again the Nazis as Galicia. This was one of the densest heartlands of pulsating Jewish life for more than 500 years. It's where my father's father's family hails, and so it is the landscape that many of my ancestors looked upon.

Yesterday we traveled to Bochnia. A small town of about 12,000 people, including about 2500 Jews in the interwar era, it had once been an important a center of salt mining. Its Jewish community saw the same fate as most of these village towns scattered all over southeastern Poland. As I walked with the group through the town streets and listened to the narrative of life there before and then during its devastating end I tried to imagine a world whose shape and contours are very far from my own reality and yet to which I am closely tied by the power of memory.

What struck me on this visit and as a whole on the expedition so far is that there are a handful of Poles and other locals from the part of the world who are not Jewish and have no direct ties to Judaism but who have chosen to keep memory and history alive through education. The tour guide in Bochnia has the keys to the Jewish cemetery (one of the best maintained in Poland by a partnership of descendants of Jews from the town and local Poles) so that the story of the Jews from her town, horrible as its end was, will not be erased and effaced from life. Nor is it now only the preserve of Jews, but a shared heritage that can and needs to be struggled with and mourned over by Jews and Poles. The young educators from Slovakia and Lithuania and Latvia who are on this trip with me who are not Jews for the most part have decided that understanding and confronting the past is not a task to be feared but a process to face. Doing it with educators from around the world is a gift.

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Photos

Before Annihilation
Plaque and Image of the Hasidic Prayer House before the war.

Hasidic Prayer House
Back in the day...

unmarked graves
Unmarked because the names are unknown but the memory of a life lived in this town has been honored by restoration.

Entrance to Bochnia cemetery
Bochnian Polish local helps keep memory and history alive. A shared sense of moral responsibility for the past.

Comments

[Robin Bezark]

Once again, you capture the mood with your writing. Thanks for letting us take this important journey with you.

[Dad]

Illuminating as usual
Keep up on further places.

[Paul Kleinman]

Hi Sarah, Thank you for sharing this fascinating trip with us!

[Sarah Siegel]

I'm reading a novel while you're facing history in RL
Sarah, I'm reading *Those Who Save Us* by Jenna Blum pre-bed nightly and marveling that while I'm reading this novel, you're actually in the Poland that Hitler tried to take in Real Life (RL). Am so grateful you're blogging about your experience as well as sharing photos. This morning while rowing indoors, I was thinking about how my ancestors left Russia -- on the border of Poland, but it was Russia while they lived there -- to escape pogroms. Because they did, they missed the Holocaust period, thank God. I think it's a sacred pilgrimage you're on. Looking forward to more posts.