Sara Weinberger: A visit to family home the Holocaust took away
NORTHAMPTON — I spent the evening of July 31 at Logan Airport, waiting to fly to Krakow, Poland, to join my daughter on a journey to discover my deceased mother’s past.
My mother, Irena Schenker, grew up in a country that would lose about 3 million of its 3,300,000 Jews during World War II. Alone, amidst the travelers, I am overcome with doubt. Whatever possessed me to want to visit this place, so often referred to as a Jewish graveyard? I convince myself that this trip can only be a lose-lose situation. I would either walk the streets of Krakow feeling like the “other,” the “Jew,” or I would curse myself for falling in love with what I am told is a dazzling city.
In spite of misgivings, I board the plane. For six days, I wander the streets of Kazimierz, the former Jewish district of Krakow where Jewish life flourished until 1942, when its residents were ordered to march themselves and their belongings across the bridge over the Vistula River to the ghetto built for them in Podgorze.
The remains of the ghetto walls resemble curved tops of headstones. Across the street from my mother’s childhood home is a large, almost vacant square, barely noticeable amid today’s traffic and businesses. Our guide tells us this was where the Jews of Krakow were herded before being deported to Belzec extermination camp, where 500,000 people, including my grandmother, aunts and young cousins, were murdered.
Only two people lived to bear witness to Belzec’s existence. The silent square with sculpted metal chairs scattered in all directions resembles the scene after each deportation, when the elderly Jews of Krakow had left the chairs they were resting in to board their death-bound trains. Today’s Kazimierz has been reincarnated into a mecca for hipsters, as well as an effort to create a thriving Jewish community. Before 1939, 65,000 Jews lived in Kazimierz. Today, there are about 200, many elderly. A constant tension exists here between commemoration and commercialization.
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Of course, the comment to the article demonstrates her question posed in the article.