Poland: Walking Between Memory and Everyday Life

Playing the piano with my grandmother

“Good girls practice every day!” my grandmother Esther scolds me.
I sigh and go back to the piano.

I love playing music – the flute, the clarinet, the piano – but I hate being told what to do.

“We used to be very rich, back in Warsaw,” she muses. “My family had factories, we had a big house full of servants, and I could play the piano all day.”

We are sitting in her tiny apartment in the middle of the desert. The heat is intense. The air doesn’t move. Her stories feel old and far away, like they belong to another planet. I don’t really want to listen.

I know there’s chocolate waiting for me in the fridge, protected from the heat, for when the lesson is over. So I go back to practicing.

Years later, I get an offer to travel to Poland. I ask my mother what she thinks of the idea. She curses under her breath.

“My feet will never stand on Polish soil,” she says.

She will never forget the Holocaust, or the atrocities that took place on that land – with too many former friends and neighbors participating, and sometimes enjoying what happened.

But I am a generation removed. I want to see. I need to know.

I go to Poland, and the only protection I bring with me is my camera.

Arriving in Today’s Poland

I arrive on a beautiful, sunny day in mid-summer and discover a place that looks, at first glance, as far from the horror stories as possible.

Warsaw is beautiful – modern yet quaint – living somewhere between old and new. I walk through streets full of coffee stands, children playing, couples on dates.

I came here for remembrance… and I find a country that wasn’t frozen in 1945.

Finding My Family in Warsaw

I step into the Jewish cemetery. It is lush and green, alive with plants and trees, but also completely neglected. Headstones are buried, broken, tilted, lost. I know that family members are buried here, but I can’t find them.

I walk the ghetto streets holding an old address – the house where my grandparents lived after they left their wealth behind. Miraculously, the building still stands, one of the few to survive the destruction of the ghetto.

There is no one home.

Traces of a Lost Jewish Town

In Tykocin, the old synagogue still exists. Its painted walls whisper stories if you stand still long enough.

Outside town, I walk through the memorial forest and remember what happened here: thousands of Jewish children, women and men marched into the woods and murdered in mass graves.

The ground is soaked with their blood.

Camps and Memorials

At Auschwitz, the entrance sign looks smaller than I expected. Almost ordinary.

“Work Makes One Free.” It didn’t, for so many.

Inside, I look in the book of names. There are several spelling variations for my family name, and I am not sure if I am looking at “my” relatives or someone else’s. The uncertainty is its own kind of ache.

At Majdanek, the sky is very blue and the grass is very green. It doesn’t sit well with what happened there. A man is lighting memorial candles at the crematorium. Just beyond the camp fence, regular houses stand a few steps away, their windows looking out at history.

In Krakow, the city shows its age in stones and façades, but continues to live on. Do the people who pass the memorials every day know the full story of where they live?

Those Who Saved, Those Who Remember

We visit Esther, a woman with the warmest smile – a Holocaust survivor. She was a toddler during the war, hidden first in a field in Boguty-Milczki, and then in a family’s barn until liberation.

She stayed in touch with that family for decades, coming back to visit them and their children and grandchildren. On the wall they proudly display their Righteous Among the Nations certificate from Yad Vashem.

In one living room, survivors and rescuers look back at one another across the years.

Back Home

I come back and tell my mother about the trip. She spits and curses.

But a few years later, she decides to go on her own journey to Poland – her own walk through memory and loss.

I went to see the places in my grandmother’s stories. My mother went, eventually, to walk through her own.