Escaparse de Nueva York

We are a strange generation. We have no direct experience with the Holocaust, like my grandparents’ generation. We don’t even have the experience of living with people who have, like my parents’ generation. But it has not yet faded into history, known only in academic and philosophic ways, like it inevitably will for our children’s generation. We still know what it is like to see a person you love turn back into a terrified 9-year old girl in front of your eyes when she says, almost apologetically, “you know Mose, I don’t so much like to go to Germany.”

My Great-Great Grandparents had twelve children. Six died in childhood. 5 more emigrated to the United States between the wars. One stayed in Poland, in the small town she had grown up in called Krastynstav. She and her husband had three children. The only daughter, my grandmother’s cousin Maria, was sent to hide with a Christian family during the war. Her father, mother, and two brothers were shot on the streets of Krasynstav in 1942.

Directly after the war, in one of the most stunning displays of human selfishness I had ever heard of, a distant relative of ours who knew Maria was alive decided to keep that fact to himself in order to claim the house that she and her family had owned. Maria eventually married one of the children of the Christian family and moved across the country to Sczcecin, right next to the current German border. In the late 1950s my Great-Grandfather finally learned she had survived.

I went to see Maria in Szchecin for a couple of days. We talked well into the night, and the next day she showed me some of the sights of the city, including the docks where her late husband Janek had worked for most of his life, and which are one of the centers where the famous Solidarity movement had started. Then that night we went to visit some of Janek’s family, and I got to meet the some of Maria’s in-laws, the family that had hidden her during the war.

Family is a strange thing. This was my grandmother’s cousin’s husband’s sister’s husband’s house. I wasn’t related genetically to anyone I met in the room. I don’t share a nationality, religion, or even a language with these people. I had never met any of them before in my life - in fact, I wasn’t even aware that most them even existed. Still, from the moment I stepped in the door I immediately felt at home. Part of it might have been because of the legendary Polish hospitality, heck part of it might have been because of all the whiskey they were plying me with (apparently Americans are supposed to drink whiskey). But mostly it was because I knew we were family, and so did they.

Traveling, and especially traveling alone, is one of my favorite things to do. The freedom, the complete responsibility for yourself (and complete lack of it for anyone else), the ability to see and do and learn things you thought you would only ever read about. But there’s a down side to everything, and for as many interesting people you meet and converse with on the road, there’s still a sort of melancholy loneliness that lingers with you. It’s not an altogether unpleasant feeling, and there’s even times when I quite enjoy it. But the breaks from that feeling are always appreciated while on the road, and there is no better break from that feeling than being around family.

I left Poland on the bus ride back to Berlin (after Maria gave me enough food for two weeks, instead of the two hours the trip took) feeling refreshed, relaxed, and extremely grateful. I had gotten the opportunity to see an old family member and meet new ones. Maria had told me that the best day of her life was when her family in the United States found her. In some very, very small way, that night I think I know how she felt.

Talk to most ethic groups in New York, and you’ll find a least a little nostalgia for the lands of their forebearers, even if it’s more manufactured than genuine. Caribbean immigrants dream of their island paradise, the Irish sing about the Emerald Isle, the Italians talk about taking a vacation to visit the little town in Sicily or Calabria or Campania where their grandparents used to live. There is one stark exception to this nostalgia: you will never hear a Jew pining away for the memory of Central or Eastern Europe. With good reason.

I had been to Italy and France, countries that had been occupied by the Nazis, but not to the extent that the entire Jewish population was destroyed. In fact, Rome has the oldest continually active Jewish community in Europe, a community that is still fairly active today - despite not being allowed to live outside the confines of the 4-block square ghetto until 1870.

I had also been to the Iberian countries, former centers of a Jewish culture that had been eradicated, and which are virtually devoid of any Jewish community today (Portugal, a country that was once about 20% Jewish, today has about 600 Jews). But half a millennia of time has insulated that period of history to a large degree. Not so with Central Europe.

Being Jewish in Central Europe, even today, even as a young person, was eerie and extremely unnerving. What you know to be alive is said to you to be dead. A culture you are used to experiencing in sounds, smells, and feelings is relegated to tourist shops and museums. And, of course, a heavy dose of security cameras and police officers, as a reminder that despite a near-complete extermination, there are still plenty of people willing to come back to try and destroy what pathetic little there is left.

You feel like a living ghost - that who you are shouldn’t exist. That you have been told in the most brutal way possible that this was no longer your home, that you were no longer welcome here. Despite the changes in Central Europe over the last 60 years, that fact remains that these changes occurred only after the vision of the old ideology had been fulfilled to a unbelievably horrific extent. Politically, the Central Europe of today might not resemble Hitler’s dreams of the future, but in terms of the “Jewish question” the undisputable fact remains that it does - a fact that I could feel in my bones from Austria to Poland.

Somewhat ironically, of the Central European cities I visited I by far felt the most comfortable in Berlin. One has to remember, before the war Berlin was the most anti-Nazi city in the German speaking world, and one of the most liberal and cosmopolitan in all of Europe. And today, Berlin is well along the road of returning to these noble roots. Immigrants from all over the world walk its streets, multitudes of languages are heard in its cafes, gays and lesbians live openly and freely. There is even a small, but growing, Jewish community. I can think of no better historical repudiation of the Nazi ideals than for its imagined racially pure capital of a totalitarian empire to, in fact, become a multinational, liberal, cosmopolitan city - complete with a Jewish presence and culture - embracing the exact values that the Nazis abhorred.

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