Back at home..

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Back at home enjoying my children and grandchildren at the beach…..doesn’t get better than that for me….but while they’re sleeping, my thoughts go back to this trip and what it meant to me.

The last evening in Warsaw there was a dinner at a nice Italian restaurant in Warsaw (raviolis and perogies really are the pretty much the same thing) and people made short speeches thanking the organizers and sharing their appreciation for the diversity of the group (first time they included Americans and other English speakers), and lots of pictures were taken. It was very warm and friendly. After one more delicious buffet breakfast with Meir and Rita, I flew from Warsaw to Toronto where we had 2 hours to catch our connecting flight to Newark. That did not go so well. Our flight was cancelled, as were all flights to Newark, NY and Philadelphia. They said it was weather in the area and there was no space on another flight for 2 days. Staying in Toronto for 2 days was not an option for us so we found our suitcases and marched ourselves to car rental. We got the last car Avis had available and hit the road. 8+ hours later we were back in NJ, more exhausted than I can ever remember being. Rita did most of the driving. I was too tired to do more than a couple of hours. But we made it!

So what do I take away from this experience…..spending time with people of a similar background to mine (which I haven’t ever done) helped me to gain an appreciation for the positive parts of my heritage. These people have a passion for the towns they came from and their family’s history there…such as, speaking and singing songs in Yiddish…even the jokes they like to tell. They work hard to connect to people from their past, finding a gravestone from a great grandparent, or a street their grandparents lived on, meant so much to them. Hearing and sharing their family stories seems to help them to keep their history alive. I wish I had stories from my parents to share and keep alive. They told very few.

My grandparents, I think, lived a very simple life, and probably worked hard for little money. I know from my Aunt Chana that my grandfather sold potatoes and other vegetables from a horse and wagon and that he traveled far each day to do that. Pilicia is a small village compared to the other towns that we saw. When they moved to Sosnowiec it must have been like going to the big city, although it was more of the size of a town. (Krakow and Warsaw being large cities.) Its good to now have a visual sense and a little bit of an understanding of the places I came from.



The moments that stand out most in my mind are being at the Sportsplatz in Sosnowiec and seeing the crematoriums at Auschwitz. How could people do this to others? I came home with no new answers but I do even more now recognize the miracle that is my life and the lives of family that I have. The odds that my father survived this hell are incredible. How he did it I’ll never know but through surviving and choosing to go on and make a new life for himself, he gave life to all of us.

What next…I need to label and organize all my pictures. I want to find a way to write up the history of my family that I do know so that my grandchildren will be able to read it some day and appreciate where they come from. I want to know more…to be able to add names to the family tree. From this trip I have leads to follow up on, websites, etc. I also spoke with people who were successful researching family history from the area of then Poland/now Russia my mother came from. I’d like to try to hire a researcher to see what there is to learn there. I have no interest in returning to Poland unless it was for a couple of days to follow up on research, or help my cousin to be at the places where my aunt spent the war. We learned, too late for this trip, that we could have visited the work camps she was in. Other than that, I still have a lot of difficulty understanding the reactions of the Polish people to what happened in their country. I know I should feel good about the "revival" of Jewish life in places like Krakow, and the Poles that are interested in Jewish Studies at the University or volunteering at the JCC, but I don’t understand their motives. I asked our Polish, English-speaking guide about it and she said many Poles are just finding out what happened to the Jews that used to live there and that sparks their interest…curiosity?? I asked about feelings of guilt or responsibility they might be feeling. She didn’t think they did. The Germans are to blame they say. Hard for me to accept that they have only curiousity for the near extinction of a group of people that in many towns made up 30%-70% of their population. Still not a place I want to spend time or money.

I'm grateful for having had the opportunity to meet the people, hear their stories, laugh and cry with them, experience the places from my family's past, and to share it all with my sister and cousin.

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