I left Warsaw this morning with mixed feelings. I consider this part of the trip the bridge between the past and the future. In Poland, I leave my mother’s former homeland, a place of bottomless sadness for her, and I go to Sweden where the remaining fragments of her grandfather’s family found refuge after the war. Here (and in the U.S.), a branch of the Galas family grows and its future lies.

Yesterday morning, Chris took me to the Lódz City Hall where the vital records are kept. On Monday morning, I had placed an order for my mother’s birth record as well as that of her brothers and sisters. I hoped that the records would be found and that the clerk would give me the originals as promised.

Chris and I were able to go right to clerk who assisted us on Monday, and within minutes she laid out in front of me the birth certificates of my mother, her older sisters Rwyfka and Bluma, her brothers Chaim, Menachim, Efrain, and little Israel. I arranged these certificates in front of me and imagined my mother’s family, arranged around the dining room table when they were children. The oldest of these certificates were written in Russian, but by the time of my mother’s birth, the certificate was written in German, an indication that the Germans were in control of Lódz at the time of World War I and an omen, perhaps, of worse to come for my mother’s family.

I was overwhelmed with a sense of loss holding these precious documents in my hands.

We had to return the state archives to pick up the last of the Dobrzynski records. I thanked the young man who helped me assemble more than 300 birth, marriage and death documents from my grandmother’s line, and tried to explain again why I was willing to spend so much time and money on these pieces of paper. He said, “I understand. My father’s brother was taken to the front (during WWI), and he was never seen again. We just found out five years ago what happened to him. His name was on a list we recently received. He was executed by the Russians.”

I needed to go to Jezow one more time to take pictures and to thank Alina, the town hall records clerk who last year reluctantly, at first, showed me the documents about the Galas family last year. Alina has become more helpful since that first meeting, and last year, she turned the vital records from 1909 to 1939 for Jezow to Jewish Records Indexing (JRI), an organization devoted to scanning and indexing birth, marriage, and death records all over the country. Without JRI and its volunteers, I would never have been able to assemble my family tree.

Alina was cordial. It is not her style to be friendly in the American sense, but I noted that she showed me that she kept my letter of appreciation for last year’s help at arm’s reach. Chris gave Alina a CD with all of Jezow’s Jewish records on a spreadsheet and showed her how to use it. We can only hope that if other inquiries are made in the future that it will be easier to provide answers.

Chris and I went one last time to the Jezow market square where my ancestors lived and worked. I took pictures of the intersection where my great-grandfather’s hardware store was located and , as we returned to the car, the lady who helped us yesterday saw us and wanted to take us to two 90+ year-old residents who might have information bout the Galas family.

The first lady and her daughter lived in the building that was on the location of my family’s hardware story. As they began t understand why I was there, I was told that this family bought the building and the business from a man named Popochinski after the war. They were told that Popochinski owned the property, but I don’t know if Popchinski owned it or whether he was some kind of broker. It doesn’t matter. I wasn’t interested in the real estate. I was interested in my family who lived there. (Most likely, my great-grandfather and great-uncle either had to sell the business at a great loss before they were deported or they were forced to abandon it when the Nazis took them away in 1942.)

Unfortunately, this lady described a segregated society in Jezow—the Jews went to school in one place, the Christians in another—so she did not know my family.

The second person we talked to was a 95-year ld man. Without any coaching, when he was asked about the Galas family, he remembered the father and son who ran the hardware store. This was my third confirmation that my family lived on this street and owned this business, but he did not remember more. This man and his very elderly wife lived in a pre-war wooden building--run-down, cramped, airless, and claustrophobic. It was housed the tailor shop and no doubt was also a Jewish home. I think Chris sensed my distress because we ended the conversation fairly quickly when we determined that this man held no other information...

We went to the Galinskis one last time to say goodbye and to say thank you. Always warm and welcoming, Tadeusz and Yolanta served us refreshments and let us rest before we made our way to Warsaw, two hours to the east.

By 7 p.m., we were at Chris’ home, across the Vistula River in the capital city. I have been told that Chris does not take all of his clients to his house, so I am very honored that he brought me to his charming home for the second year in a row. His wife Margaret was waiting with homemade soup and cabbage rolls, even though she is a highly-placed and busy HR executive at Citibank. Margaret is not as shy as last year and her English was rapid-fire. She talked about her challenges at work and then about their grandchild Yoshiro and her daughter and son-in-law who live in Belgium, and about their son who works for Skanska.

I told Margaret how much Chris had contributed to my family’s history and shared a copy of my book with her. She was duly impressed that I had acknowledged Chris at the end of the book. Margaret is often modest about her English, especially in comparison to Chris’ fluency, but I let her know that Chris confused the word “Mozilla” (the Internet browser) with the word “Mozarella” today, so his English wasn’t perfec!.

Chris and Margaret’s home has a stunning garden, but I was drawn to their art and their books. They have a collection of drawings from a Jewish artist and numerous books about Jewish-Polish history. Several of them are on the nightstand by Chris’ side of the bed.

We spent time sharing family photos, but I was so tired from the heat and the emotions of the day that I had to ask Chris to take me to my airport hotel. I had to get up at 5:30 the following morning.

On the drive to the hotel, Chris recited some Polish poetry. While I cannot remember the poem exactly, the sense of it was that Jews and Poles will always have an uneasy relationship and history until they confront their past, like “two moons in the sky.”