Every year hundreds or even thousands of Jews travel to the difficult-to-pronounce towns their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents came from. They fly to Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Hungary, Belarus, they schlep onto creaky trains and cramped buses, hire zany guides, knock on ancestral doors, pleadingly ask old people if they recognize this name, have confusing and meaningful interactions with the locals, try to map out the patchy passed-down memories. In general it is a thrilling, fraught, emotional trip (how could it not be?). It is kind of like a memory-safari.
The destination is as much mythological as it is geographical. At the center of these families there is a story. How did he survive? How did she get out? What did he go through? The story might be partially known, or even entirely unknown; but it is known that there is a story. It is less historical than anecdotal: it is personal, it is living. These descendants are traveling great distances in order to interrogate, probe, glimpse, touch that story.
The hometown is significant because it is the setting of the story. (Otherwise it’s entirely uninteresting, just one of ten thousand shtetls: I wouldn’t make a great effort to go to your grandfather’s Polish hometown.) The regular tourist submits herself to the place (“Can you recommend a place to eat?”). She recognizes, celebrates, and reinforces the local/foreign divide. The memory-tourist, however, is on a mission. She attempts to cajole the place into giving up its buried secrets. The question is not “What is this place?” but “What is the meaning of this place?” She blurs the local/foreign divide. I’m not from here but I’m from here. The purpose of the trip is not to experience place as much as it is to ratify or elucidate or edit the myth of the place. The memory-tourists try to find and speak to ghosts. Sometimes they succeed.
That the descendants will just as likely use the Yiddish name of the town instead of the Polish one makes for a very handy metaphor.
On one level this is similar to the genealogical impulse (Where do I come from? Who are my people?) but a thousand times more intense, given that most of the branches of the family tree terminate with horrific abruptness. On another level it’s a way of approaching, even if it’s only a tiny step closer, an ineffable tragedy. (Here is a great vibrating dissonance: on the one hand, your grandfather lost every single one of his family members; on the other hand, his story is unremarkable, almost a cliché.) What are these descendants searching for? Sometimes it’s straightforward. Sometimes the questions are answered with a visit to an archive, or a conversation with an elderly local. But I think they are often searching for answers to questions they don’t know how to ask, questions that cannot be formed. If you grew up around Holocaust survivors you know what I’m talking about. If not, try to imagine trying to imagine a survivor’s inner state.
Over the next few years I spent a lot of time in Poland, sometimes for research, sometimes just because, and every so often my father would mention the building in Sosnowiec, those documents gathering dust in the closet. He’d encourage me to take a look, see if there was anything there, maybe I’d be able to do something. That it took more than four years from when I first learned about those documents until I read them speaks to how unurgent the matter seemed. The file was in Toronto, in my parents’ house, and the couple of times a year I visited I’d always forget I was supposed to take a look.
Finally in the summer of 2015 I was in Kraków for a few weeks and my father faxed me a copy of the file. It was a thick sheaf, fifty or sixty pages, in Polish, German, English. And it was a mess: original documents, carbon copies, translations, translations of translations.
After I organized the file a story emerged, though it was a story without arc or resolution. There was only frustration: for twenty years my grandfather had tried to reclaim or at least be compensated for his family’s property, and for twenty years he’d gotten nowhere. The bulk of the documents consisted of letters to and from people and institutions who couldn’t or wouldn’t help him. A lawyer in Sosnowiec demanded a hefty retainer and “the dates and places of death [of your uncle and father] and witnesses who can confirm the information,” an absurd, impossible request; my grandfather never even responded. My grandfather asked a Polish friend to check the municipal records to see if there was any possibility of compensation from the Polish or German government; she wrote back that she couldn’t get access to the records and that compensation was pretty much impossible anyway. My grandfather wrote to a Rabbi Brandys, the head of the Sosnowiec Jewish community, to request a certificate that he was the owner of the building at Małachowskiego 12; Brandys responded curtly that “the Jewish community is not authorized to issue such a document.”
My grandfather’s best chance for compensation came in 1957, after the US government established the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission in order to register claims of US nationals against Poland for property that had been expropriated during the war. On my grandfather’s application he cites the loss of a building worth 58,000 złoty, about $400 (roughly $3,500 in 2020 US dollars). And in 1960 Poland agreed to pay
