“Zambrow” (pronounced Zembrov) was part of my childhood. The town was mentioned whenever the topic of family history came up. It was where my Zaidy (grandfather) was born and, in 1920, at the age of 20, left. Other than Warsaw and, maybe, Krakow, it was the one place in Poland I had heard of. But …
“Pardon me, can you tell me the way to the mass grave?”
Our visit to Zambrow included sites near Zambrow that related to the history–actually the end of the the history–of Zambrow’s Jews. I had done a lot of research before leaving for Poland about how the last Jews of Zambrow died. I was aided by my work as editor of the English translation of Sefer Zambrow–the …
Jews: lost and found (part 1)
I need to take a break from describing mass murder sites, so here’s a more uplifting story from my travels in Poland. To be sure, for a Jew, a visit to Poland is going to focus a lot on loss. Each place you visit has its Holocaust story. (I never liked the word “story” to …
Mass murder sites: Kazamierz Biskupi
So far I have described various places where we encountered Jews who had died, either of natural causes or by Nazi murder. The state of these cemeteries varied, to being mostly intact to being completely desecrated and destroyed. But there are other places were murdered Jews rest, mass murder sites and death camps. The differences …
Friendships through the generations
How can an act of kindness be measured against the gas and thousands of bullets that stole the lives of the Jews of Poland? Yet among the ruins of the Jews of Poland, we came across rays of light that shone from the past into our hearts. My wife and I showed up with our …
Barest Remnents: The Cemeteries of Konin and Slupca
In a previous post, I tried to categorize the types of Jewish burial places I encountered in Poland. I attempted to list them in order from intact cemeteries, an identifiable marker for an named individual most of whom died of natural causes, to death camps, where hundreds of thousands of people, or, in the case …
A trashed cemetery: Zambrow
Among our stops in my grandfather’s ancestral home town of Zambrow was the Jewish cemetery. I knew I would not find any graves of my ancestors as the cemetery has already been digitized, and no names of my ancestors appeared. I learned from my aunt, the last living connection I have between my generation and …
Remnant of a cemetery: Lomza
Lomza (pronounced in Polish Womsza) was our first stop on the day that we visited Zambrow. Lomza is located about 15 miles north of Zambrow in the northwest section of Poland, about 30 miles west of Bialystok. Lomza was an important Jewish town in Poland before the war. Jews constituted about half of the population of about …
Somewhat and minimally intact cemeteries: Lublin and Kazimierz Dolny
In a previous post, I began to describe the various types of places where Jews are buried in Poland, since, unfortunately, there are millions of Jews in the ground in Poland and very few walking the streets. As a result, much of my trip in Poland centered around the visiting of Jewish burial places of …
Post Poland traumatic syndrome
Last night my wife and I left Poland. We flew from the airport in Warsaw to Israel. We had a final dinner together with our incredible guide. By the end of the trip, the experiences of the trauma of the past had fully embedded themselves in me. You cannot go to death camps and mass …