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Back from Poland, or still coming back
Week of 30 June 2005
By María (Marisha) Blum.‘The desire to transmit our descendants stories, customs and principles
dwells in each of us. Nevertheless, taking refuge in our traditions or
ancient practices involves the risk of staying on the fringe of social
and cultural changes cultivating nostalgia for past times. Likewise,
rejecting or silencing the history or the geography inhabited by our
predecessors may result in stray generations, lacking historical
continuity and references.’Jacques Hassoun. Les contrebandiers de la mémoire
When trying to give some sort of order and understand everything that has happened to me since my recent trip to Poland (June 20 – 27), I made an effort to express all my different feelings and sensations while still fresh in my memory. Most probably they will appear messy and contradictory but that was the way I felt and I wanted to show them as they were and retain the freshness of my emotions. I am not sure I want to put them in any order beyond that which time, an essential ally, would allow.
It was an ancestral journey, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity my children –Carla and Hernán Rein– and I shared with Moishele Rosenberg, my mother’s cousin (our cousin) a survivor or the Shoah. He traveled from Israel exclusively to guide us around Proszowice, a shtetl very close to Krakow, where my father, mother and he himself had lived. It was a beautiful present he gave us and it made me feel, among other things, that I had recovered part of the family spirit my mother had passed on me and so much regretted having lost.
Three generations walked around the soil where the Blums and Rosenbergs (my father’s last name and my mother’s maiden name, respectively) used to live. Mir zainen do? Kind of but I did not feel that way. I did not feel triumphant. I just lived, walked, looked and even ate perhaps momentarily in confusion but not in sorrow. Two Polish friends and their families welcomed us into their homes. They had been Moishele’s schoolmates. Only one woman, who was about eighty years old and lived in the building where the cheder was located, produced a disturbing déjà vu in me for a few seconds. We rang her bell and she opened the door. When we asked her a question, her face transformed and she answered immediately, as it was easily expected at that moment: ‘I know nothing.’
During our walk, Moishele told my children stories about the family and zayde (my children’s legendary great-great-grandfather), Abraham Itzrik. He told them about life there and answered my children’s questions. Several pictures bear witness to Moishele’s passing on our legacy. We visited the school my mother used to go to (zayde, the patriarch, wanted his grandchildren to receive the best education possible), the cheder my father had probably attended, my father’s family home, and the place where the houses of my mother’s family used to stand, now replaced by tower blocks. We visited the old Jewish cemetery, and even went to the stream my father used to tell he went swimming with his friends. Oddly and happily enough –the memory of it moves me now–, in our way back Hernán carried an old clock Moishele bought for his house. He claimed sure it had belonged to a Jewish family, maybe our family, the Rosenbergs. The clock, past days, had been lost and recovered and given to my children, and Hernán carried it in his hands.
Another day, in our way to the Wieliczka salt mines, I literally bumped into Plaszow, which I didn’t know it was there. It was one of the concentration camps where my father and Moishele had been kept. Moishele offered me to stop the taxi and get out and I saw in his eyes he was taking care of me. I asked him whether he wanted to stop by but I was afraid for him, and for me. Finally, we decided to go on our way. During the trip I asked him whether the experience was too intense for him and he answered thoughtfully: ‘If I’m here with you and your children…’ That was his way to say mir zainen do.
Krakow was beautiful. The weather was fantastic with a heavenly atmosphere, in the broad sense. We stayed in a hotel in Kazimierz, right in the old Jewish neighborhood. I felt we were in the perfect place, the most suitable one for what we were looking for. You can feel Krakow’s long history in the air while still enjoying the advantages of the modern world, and synagogues tell about a different world. The city is bursting with cafes and enjoyable places to have delicious meals with a familiar taste while watching people pass by at the clear and sweeping Summer nightfall. There is also an important university where Copernicus once studied, and the Wawel Castle. A most ideal combination. I fell in love with Krakow.
I went to Warsaw to celebrate and share with my dear friends Liliana and Osvaldo the wedding of their son, Matías Glusman. Only then I was surprised at myself when I almost burst into tears out of emotion and bottled up shock. But when I saw my children and the rest of the young people going to the party which usually takes place before the wedding, I contained myself. I haven’t been able to cry yet…
Once at the party, sitting at a beautiful table with candles surrounded by lovely gardens and background music dominated by the sax, we listened to the speech given by Osvaldo, the bridegroom’s father, who was both moving and moved, and we witnessed a marvelous tango danced by Matías and Justina (already his wife) and we all danced the well-known shers with all our strength and joy. I don’t want to forget to mention my heartfelt reunion with Martín and Rebecca (my husband’s son and his wife, who live in Berlin). Meanwhile, we shared intense, still vibrant experiences with some Argentinean friends whose parents were also Polish.
There is a marked contrast between the way I felt there, my peace of mind and happiness, and my great sense of relief that I would not go to pieces and could enjoy daily life, and my feelings since I have arrived here.
I went to Poland ready to have the best time possible, as I usually do when I embark on a project, and I was willing to absorb as many positive things as I could. As I have already said, I enjoyed Proszowice and, surprisingly enough, I walked its streets and even had a delightful soup in a kawiarnia, and only on a few occasions was I about to burst into tears. The experience was not sad or shaking, my haunting fears, but unconstrained –I cannot find a better term– and sharing was present throughout the journey, most of the time in a warm and tight family embrace.
I felt a great many stimuli and my head was loaded with even more information I could process. But it did not make me uneasy. I knew the moment would come to do so. I told my children many a time: ‘Good thing you are here. How could I tell you everything?’ Day after day, moment after moment, we assimilated all our experiences, and even more. We all felt the deep and profound satisfaction of having met our goal and knew that the conditions had been ideal.
My first days back in Argentina were to be quick (or to bequeath, a telling slip of the keyboard). In a fit of rage, I imagined what the survivors could have felt at their arrival, after the war, at the place where they emigrated. I started to understand them with my body. You have to break with the past. You cannot look back too much. If you do, like Lot’s wife, you may become petrified or bound to the past, paralyzed, unable to live in the present. You have to fill yourself with present without letting melancholy in. You can’t walk right on the edge of the past because you may fall and get trapped. I made an all-out effort to shake away the memories that were pervading me. But what memories, the recent or the past ones?
It is weird (this is the most suitable word although I cannot find the right word, I am just making an attempt) when I come to think about it, to walk routinely the streets of what used to be a taboo. (This phrase I borrowed from Carla, who said: ‘The past has finally turned into routine and is no longer a taboo!’) But shockingly, back to the routine here, that (Poland) starts turning into a taboo.
What is lost is inevitably lost. I went for the life that used to be there and I am not sure I found it. But we did find something. We located the exact place where my father and his first wife had a picture taken in 1935, as it was written on the back. They were smartly dressed at the gates of St. Mary’s or Mariacki Church and it is possible to make out, with exceptional certainty, their way of life in those days. We took a picture of ourselves right there.
Despite the fact that my children and I held Polish passports, I did not feel a Pole in Poland but a wandering Jew in the place where, as they say, we made a temporary 1000-year-stop in our Diaspora. My father estimated once that at least eight generations had preceded him in Poland. It is strange, I insist, that we were ‘lent’ the land and never belonged to it. The Poles were neither strangers nor too close to me –virtually nothing there looked strange. I experienced confusional feelings, particularly relating to time, I had to face with great strength and inner resources. How long had I been in Poland? Three days, three months, thirty years?
Neither in Poland nor in Proszowice did I notice the war but life flowing, except for sudden images and memories I could not have there because I was overwhelmed by what I was saw. It was absolutely different from my sensation when I first arrived in Berlin immediately after the fall of the Wall. There the war seemed to have finished on the previous day –black, shot buildings with vast empty stretches of land on their sides. You could clearly tell where the bombs had fallen. The war was either present or had finished the day before.
All this made me think that if the scenery changes, even though you are on the scene of the drama, you do not experience it as such. You forget and simply live quite naturally… or almost naturally, and that is the weird thing. Oddly enough, you are there, on that scene many a time feared and thought about and you are not surprised or stricken dead. You smile and enjoy soup, live daily life, and maybe this is the disconcerting thing.
There is some feeling of disappointment which causes almost sharp pain. Maybe it is the fact that our memories or images do not match what the scenery (is that the scenery?) shows of the dreamt, imagined or known elements on the scene of the drama. The scenery is lost (collapsed buildings) and the atmosphere and realities are also lost. And there is also some feeling of guilt, in a sense, for having the chutzpah to forget or dissociate then or to look at what I knew used to be there. I remember an essay written by Jack Fuchs (a survivor of the Shoah) where he tells about his experience when he visited Auschwitz and felt almost a tourist. On the one hand, there is the immense relief from confirming that the horror of the concentration camps belongs to the past but, on the other, there is the eloquence and desperate certainty that what has been lost will no longer be transmitted. Only the memories remain which each of us will tell turned into a personal novel.
I go on. This important journey is part of a constituent and refreshing path to the missing pieces of an inner puzzle which was once or is still broken but did not disappear. And maybe it helps to reassemble it all.
¡¡¡Mir zainen dó!!!.
“... I came for impossible shadows,
old heartbeats of mother and time
The air is a pending stone
Nothing has yet been told.
Millions of pages
to shut this silence down”Eliahu Toker, poet and writer, Padretierra
These were the last lines of a poem written by Toker after his journey to Warsaw he sent to me generously in an e-mail as an answer to this account. I think they are perfectly in tune and, as it is always the case with poetry, it contributes to its meaning.
