If you have been following my blog, you know that Kasia Klimala is my friend from Czestochowa who has been helping me with challenging Cyrillic and Polish documents.
On this sunny morning, Kasia chose to continue her journey to discover more about Jewish traditions by driving to the Lodz Cemetery, the oldest Jewish cemetery in Europe. I was the appointed tour guide, but not a very navigator. It is difficult to navigate when the map has words you don't understand!
We stumbled upon the moving memorial to the children who died in the Ghetto, a heart-shaped structure that is deliberately severed--a broken heart.
While we had little trouble locating the cemetery itself, as I have written before, this place is huge-- 100 acres-- and I could not re-trace my steps to my ancestors' graves. I was able to take Kasia around the cemetery, explaining why most of the men are buried separately from their wives; the meaning of the matzevot symbols; and the significance of the Ghetto Field and the mass pits. (See http://www.lodz-ghetto.com/the_jewish_cemetery.html,35 for more information.)
Kasia asked me good questions about Jewish burial, funeral and marriage traditions, but I could only give the most superficial answers. I am not the best one to respond to these questions since I am not very religious. Like my Hungarian cousin Nora, Kasia is struggling to discover what it means to be Jewish. Kasia has many mysteries in her family that suggest a hidden Jewish past, but she must tread carefully with her questions. Her grandmother holds the key, but she is reluctant to provide answers.
After the tour of the cemetery, we drove a short distance to Rodegast Station, a place that bears a terrible history for my mother. On August 7, 1944, my grand-parents were taken to this train station while my mother hid in terror under a piece of furniture in their little ghetto room. When my mother came out of hiding, she discovered that the Nazis were not taking young people, but rather they were deporting virtually everyone from this district. She left the apartment, running to find where her parents had been taken. Imagine this blisteringly hot day, running for miles past starving, sick people, trying to find your parents among the masses.
When my mother arrived at the station, the Nazis had already packed the cattle cars bound for Auschwitz. She begged a Nazi to be allowed to be with her mother, and surprisingly, the officer went from car to car calling the name "Galas." My poor grandmother responded, and my mother thanked God for reuniting her with her beloved mother. They were together in the same cattle car, unable to sit, no water, no sanitation, sweating, thirsty, scared but together, all the way to Auschwitz, a trip that must have been two days long.
The memorial at the station includes a small museum, some structures with the names of the death camps where deportees were taken from Rodegast, too-awful real cattle cars from those days, and a chilling concrete tunnel which is lined with the names of people who were deported. At the end of tunnel is a room which has the names of Polish communities represented in the deportations. If you look up at the ceiling of this room, you see a cone-shaped chimney, symbolizing the fate of the people who left Lodz from Rodegast.
I no longer can cry at these places, having been here several times before. They just make me sad. Kasia was quiet during our time at Rodegast. It is a lot to take in.
After our trip to the cemetery and Rodegast, we stopped for a lovely lunch at a real Polish restaurant on Piotrokowska Boulevard to get some traditional food and some rest before we went a short distance to the area that was the Lodz ghetto. Kasia didn't know it at the time, but she parked her car right in front of the building that became my mother's home for almost four years during the war. My grandparents and my mother and her brother shared one room in this slum building.
Kasia and I walked less than two blocks from this building, and I showed her what my mother must have seen when she ventured out of her apartment room: dead, mangled bodies in front of the Red House (Kripo), where Nazis tortured ghetto inhabitants; St. Mary's Church, where people were deported and gassed in trucks going to Chelmno, their clothing returning to the Church where they were sorted and stacked to the very top of the church spires; and the infamous Ghetto bridges.
We also saw other reminders of my mother's life in the Ghetto. Kasia is reading my book about my family, and it is important for her, she says, to understand what happened. She is shocked by the Holocaust history of this city just as she was surprised to find that there were slave labor camps in her home town of Czestohowa.
We both wonder what it must be like for people to now live in a place that was so filled with despair. Do they know the history of misery in these buildings? If they do, do they care? What do they think of their city's history?
We returned to the hotel and nearby Galleria for a brief time to do some souvenir shopping for Jennifer (I left it to Kasia to pick something that Jennifer would like) and to say a sad goodbye. Kasia is afraid of flying, as is her boyfriend Piotr, so it is difficult to know when we will see each other again. But I know that we will continue to correspond--I will help her with her genealogical journey; she will help me with mine.
I am grateful that there are young people in Poland like Kasia who are interested in the past. While they may not be able to embrace Poland's horrific and tragic history, I hope that Kasia and people like her will not be bystanders if such times come again.
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