Claiming the stories

The past few months have been transformative in so many ways. I returned to Vancouver after an intense, cathartic trip feeling the urgency to do something, but not knowing what ... the story of my grandmother's last resting place, of that horrible camp, was foremost in my mind. But the mind plays tricks, and in a short time the images and sensations began to blur, and something else began to take over. The need for my generation, and even those younger than me, to take ownership of this story has become vitally important. For so long we relegated this story to our parents and grandparents - they were, after all, the ones who lived it. But each year there are fewer and fewer survivors, fewer and fewer first-hand stories. It is up to us, the next generation, to claim the stories of our ancestors and honour their memories; it's up to us to make their stories relevant to the world today.

Life goes on ...

Before taking the train to Miskolc on Friday night, dad & I went for dinner at a little restaurant across from the apartment we rented during our stay in Krakow. At one point a woman seated at a nearby table came up to talk to us: she was visiting from England, and had seen us at Auschwitz on Wednesday. She had seen how deeply moved I had been - I won't minimize my reaction, I wept openly several times at the camp - and said she hadn't been able to get me out of her mind. She had called her sister in England that evening to share her experience. Seeing us at the restaurant, she felt compelled to come and say hello and talk a bit about the experience ... so I shared some of our family history, explained how we'd been on the trail of my grandmother for the past 10 days. She told us that her teenage son had asked, incredulously, after visiting the camp, "but why?" and, of course, she and her husband had no answer ...

A few days earlier, when we took the train from Torun to Krakow we shared a compartment with a woman returning home to Krakow. She was very interested in knowing more about our experience, our history, our impressions of Poland, and we learned a great deal from her as well. At first I was a bit reserved about sharing the purpose of our trip (it seemed to be imposing a tough topic on what could otherwise be pleasant chit-chat), but dad told her very honestly what we were doing in Poland; she was very interested, very well-informed, and we had an enjoyable, fascinating and candid conversation for a good 4 hours on the train.

So, in some way, our presence here has made a small difference, I suppose ... it has been important for us, of course, to help piece together the fragmented pieces of our family history, to put our ancestors to rest, and to help us move on. But I feel that we've left a legacy, even if a small one - that we've given a personal connection, a human face, to this story.

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Today we visited Eger, a beautiful little town in the hills near Miskolc, where my great-aunt (the one who survived Auschwitz & Buchenwald) was born. Eger is famous throughout Hungary as the place where the Turks were finally defeated. The town is very well preserved and is a real jewel of a place. We enjoyed walking its charming narrow streets, climbing up to the remains of the fort, having lunch on a beautiful plaza (it was an unseasonably warm day, so we comfortably ate outside), buying some local wares, and generally enjoying life and the beauty of this place. We have seen the remains of horrible things on this trip, but have also experienced great beauty, joy and celebration of life.

Miskolc itself is nothing spectacular, in stark contrast to Eger - there are many old buildings (maybe 150-250 years old) that once were beautiful but are now run-down, unkempt, with crumbling facades, graffiti, broken windows. The old Soviet-style apartment blocks are also generally in bad shape. Everywhere we find places and spaces that feel unwelcoming - deserted dark alleys, long stretches of blank buildings, dirty streets, and the ubiquitous graffiti ... there is a feeling of lack of care. It's a good lesson in urban design gone wrong ... we visited the house where my dad grew up - his aunt & uncle's house - and were greeted by large, vicious dogs barking at us while hurling themselves at the high fence surrounding the house. The most pleasant place we've found is a new mall, a very lovely outdoor square, and the surprisingly high-quality hotel.

Tomorrow we visit Miskolc's synagogue, hopefully to talk to someone there and learn a bit more about what happened to this city's Jewish community after the war ... after that we leave for Budapest, and return home a few days later. We're both looking forward to enjoying our final few days here, relaxing, seeing the sights, discovering the best coffee houses, visiting a museum or two, and generally enjoying life once again.

Leaving Poland ...

Last night we left Poland after a 10-day stay that felt like much longer ... after an 8-hr overnight train ride we are now in Miskolc, Hungary, where dad was born. one chapter of our journey has ended for now, and I am left with conflicting feelings ...

Visiting Auschwitz was one of the hardest things I've experienced - at one point walking through the camp I felt utterly dehumanized, after only one or two hours of being there. My mind simply could not process that such a crime could be committed on such an enormous scale. Psychopaths, mass murderers, serial killers took over the leadership of a nation and terrorized a continent. I simply could not (and still cannot) comprehend how that could happen ... how it is possible to turn such crimes into an assembly line of human suffering ... the standing cells I described earlier were a turning point for me: I was no longer just witnessing the massive evidence of human suffering, but rather, I realized that this place had designers who likely sat around thinking about even better ways to make people suffer. The tiny ground-level entry to the cells was more than I could bear - having sat through my share of design brainstorming sessions, I could visualize the discussions around that particular detail. Anyone with even an iota of a conscience would have said, this is too much, at least put a regular door on the thing ... but no, the design of the door was approved, perhaps with much laughter and delight ...

That evening was exhausting; I was grateful for this blog, which has helped me sort through the powerful emotions I've experienced throughout this trip, and I was grateful to have my father at my side through this. I came to support him in his quest, but he has supported me in mine at least as much.

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We had some time in Krakow to visit the city itself, and spent a morning in Kazimierz, the old Jewish district, across the Vistula river from the area that was set up as the Jewish ghetto (the residents of this area were forced to leave to make room for the Jews, who in turn were forced from their homes in Kazimierz). Before Kazimierz we visited Oskar Schindler's factory, where there are plans to set up a permanent museum - right now there is a small viewing room with a slide show documenting Schindler's context, his role in saving Jews from deportation, and some background on the film, and there is an office set up with Schindler's original desk. Not much yet, but it's heartening to know that something bigger is in the works.

From there we walked to the site of the ghetto. In the plaza where Jews were gathered for deportation is a beautiful, simple memorial - it is a large square paved with stones, and has a widely-spaced grid of bronze chairs. It was haunting in its simplicity; it subtly marked an absence and longing. We were told that the inspiration for this memorial was a series of photographs of children being evacuated to the ghetto, carrying their school chairs so they could continue to go to school.

We crossed the bridge to Kazimierz. It is a lively neighbourhood, its Jewish history is very evident. There is an annual international Klezmer festival; we visited two of the synagogues (I think there are six in the small neighbourhood), one of which has a cemetery where a "Wailing Wall" has been built with remnants from tombstones shattered during the war. Like the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, people put little pieces of paper in between the stones with their prayers, pleas, dreams ... we briefly visited a relatively new Jewish museum and education centre.

We visited Wawel Castle on top of a hill (which was commandeered by the Nazis), which is a beautiful campus of buildings with an impressive cathedral, gardens, a large central plaza and interior courtyard; and we slowly made our way back to the old city of Krakow, a beautiful, magical place.

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Wednesday our tour through the two camps (Auschwitz & Birkenau) ended after the archives closed, and we weren't able to ask about records of our relatives. So yesterday (Friday) morning we returned. I wasn't looking forward to entering that horrible place again; but it was a surreal experience - the mystique of the place, the power of it, was gone. It was a beautiful, crisp, sunny fall morning, the sky was a brilliant blue, the massive crowds were gone (Wednesday we wondered why they couldn't do better at managing the masses of people as we were tightly herded from exhibit to exhibit, standing in line to gain access to many of them; yesterday there were perhaps 1/3 the number we had seen two days earlier, and they were very well managed), the fear of what we would see was gone. We were clear that we were there only to see the archives, we weren't going to visit the exhibits again. And this time, we walked into a compound with a number of brick buildings, nothing more.

We weren't sure what to expect at the archives - I'd emailed them a while back to inquire about our relatives but hadn't received a response ... we were warmly welcomed, as we have been everywhere this quest has taken us. We filled out an inquiry form for each of the five relatives we wanted to know about (the three whose lives ended in Bocien/Grodno, an aunt who survived Auschwitz, and an uncle whose fate is unknown, but was likely killed before being deported) - and we got a little bit more information about them. There were no records about the uncle, but we learned that the aunt who survived was transferred to Buchenwald; dad thinks from there she went to a work camp, though isn't sure - she died in 1999 and rarely talked about her experience in the camps - I only knew she'd been at Auschwitz. On Wednesday, as we walked through Birkenau, dad commented that she would be furious with us for going there. Why on earth do you want to see that God-forsaken place? she would say. Better to forget that horrible past and move on ... she lived to be 95.

The three women we've been tracking through this trip were not registered at Auschwitz; the only record that exists is the transport registry from Stutthof, which we obtained about a week ago, showing the date they arrived at Stutthof and indicating their transfer from Auschwitz. We asked why there would be no record of them at Auschwitz, and were told that by that point in the war there were so many new prisoners arriving that many were simply not processed, but held in transit before being transferred to other camps. So, our three women lived out an anonymous, undocumented several weeks or months (we don't know how long) in Birkenau. How many others died awaiting transfer, never to have their existence or their fate documented anywhere? The life expectancy for Jews in Birkenau was 2-3 weeks according to our guide on Wednesday (for non-Jews and non-Roma, it could be a bit longer - 2-3 months perhaps).

Leaving the camp one last time was a strange sensation - we were simply leaving a place. Horrible things happened there, but there is now a strong commitment to ensure the horrors that took place there are known and continue to be known. The droves of visitors are a testament to the interest around the world in bearing witness to these crimes; how anyone could claim the Shoah never happened is beyond me. Perhaps they need to come and take a tour.

I find myself thinking a lot about the memory of a place ... a few days ago in this blog I lamented how quickly the evidence of these crimes is being wiped out in some areas. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, the memory is preserved. Throughout Poland are buildings and structures commissioned and built by the SS, and even more buildings that were commandeered by the SS during their occupation of Poland. At one point I was looking at every ruined building we passed and imagining it was a victim of the war, and imagining every monumental building as a strategic stronghold of the Nazis. But after only a few days it seemed that to keep focusing only on this was to prolong the crime, and hold people hostage to this period of history. Life goes on. Our ancestors suffered terribly, as did 11 million who died horrible and senseless deaths at the hands of psychopaths and murderers. That can and should never be forgotten or diminished. But to make every building, every ruin, a monument is perhaps to hold a country frozen in a period in history that should never have happened in the first place ... it's such a complex issue, and I left Poland feeling grateful for the effort the country has made to honour the dead, acknowledge and preserve the important relics of the past, and at the same time move on and learn to celebrate life once more.

Still, I don't feel there is a tidy ending to this story, as much as part of me wants to come away with a big life lesson from this. I don't believe there is a lesson: to find a lesson is to suggest that all of this happened to teach us that lesson. To suggest that is to justify the Shoah on some level, and that is something I can never do.

Krakow & Auschwitz

We arrived by train from Toruń last night to Krakow, a city more beautiful than I imagined. How it is that I knew next to nothing about it, I don't know. I've realized that my knowledge of Poland in general has been very limited - I laugh about it now, but really, the images I had of Poland were of black and white pre-war photos of people in heavy coats with fur collars bustling through the streets of Warsaw, and of communist-era triumphal modern architecture ... I knew a few other details, but really had a very naive, simple and antiquated image of this country. The past 2 weeks have opened my eyes to a wonderful country with a rich and complex history, and with gracious, welcoming people, who have (obviously) advanced with all the rest of us ... I've humbly acknowledged that I may not always be as informed, up-to-date and reasonably knowledgeable about the world as I often imagine. This experience has been an valuable lesson in the importance of seeing things for oneself ...

Now the part I don't want to write about ... today's trip was beyond anything I had imagined. I have read books, I have seen dramas and documentaries, I've heard survivors tell their stories, I've grown up knowing about the horrors of Auschwitz. Dad & I had long conversations over the past week about whether to go or not; we had the idea that the packaged tours would be somehow manipulative, that they'd be designed to ellicit an emotional reaction, and after Stutthof we were both put off by the idea of being forced into something similar again. We thought, we've seen a concentration camp, we don't need to see another one.

But eventually we both agreed that, being here, it would be a dishonour to our ancestors NOT to see it simply because it might make us uncomfortable - we tried to arrange for a private guide who could get us access to the archives so we could find some record of our people, but it wasn't possible. So, grudgingly, we agreed to take one of the packaged tours.

We arrived in Oswiecim (the town next to the camp) and were put off by what seemed like blatant commercialism - we have a new local guide here, Tomasz, who drove us to Oswiecim, and he parked in a little shopping mall next to the camp entrance. It seemed wrong to have a burger and pizza joint so close to this terrible place. Our preconceptions seemed confirmed, at least for now.

We crossed the street to the camp entrance, and again, were put off by the dozens upon dozens of tour buses - students, foreigners, Poles - all coming to be shocked, we thought. I commented on the great irony of being herded like cattle to consume a tourist-geared sanitized and dramatized version of this place, while so many hundreds of thousands, or millions, had been herded like cattle in very different conditions 65 years ago.

Then we entered the cinema. And our preconceptions began to change. The screening room was packed full (as was every place we visited); they showed a short film showing what the Red Army found when it liberated Auschwitz. It was the first of many exhibits that made clear to me the purpose of this museum: the importance of bearing witness.

Nothing in the Auschwitz museum - the entire camp is a museum, and is a UNESCO world heritage site - nothing was manipulative. The guides weren't crying; they weren't angry; they weren't telling us what to feel, what to think, how to interpret all of this. They showed us what was there, how the spaces had been used, what had been found in the camp at the time of liberation - and it was overwhelming beyond words. It became clear to me in a way I'd never quite grasped before just how sadistic and psychopathic these people were - these weren't individually cruel people who liked to humiliate and beat prisoners; this was an entire institutionalized system of sadism, torture and greed on a scale I never imagined, even after all the evidence I've seen through other means. Words fail me; "The world went crazy", "It was hell on earth", "It was like stepping into another planet", and all the other descriptions I've heard can't do justice to the extreme cruelty, the insanity, the enormity of this crime beyond any scale imaginable.

As I walked through the camp and saw the various exhibits - the mounds and mounds of women's hair collected to weave cloth for the textile industry; the mounds and mounds of shoes; the mountain of glasses; the mountain of hair and toothbrushes; the clothes, household goods, suitcases collected in gigantic piles daily from the thousands of innocents arriving by train to be redistributed or sold in Germany ... as I saw the different prison cells (there were special prisons in this gigantic collective prison, an insanity in itself), the isolation cells, the suffocation cells, the standing cells -less than 1m2, solid brick, with a tiny door at floor level (maybe 60x60cm) where 4 or 6 prisoners at a time were forced to crawl through and face a punishment of standing for anywhere from 3 days to 6 weeks, with no room to move, no light ... as I saw the camp commander's house adjacent to the camp, with a clear view of the chimney of one of the crematoria, where his children played happily in the manicured garden ... as I saw walked through the gas chamber in Auschwitz I and past the ruins of the larger gas chambers and crematoria in Auschwitz II ... as I walked through this, my mind could not process the fact that this had REALLY happened, that this wasn't a creation of some sick, twisted imagination ... and at the same time, I knew that my ancestors lived this, somehow survived long enough to be transferred to Stutthof (which must have seemed civilized in comparison to this hell) ...

Words fail me at this point. I don't feel this text even begins to do justice to what I saw in a few hours at this camp. Anything I write has been written about before; others' words are much more powerful. I understand why there is so much emphasis on this place when learning about the Shoah ... this was so much more than a few sadistic guards. This was about mass-produced torture, suffering and humiliation. Having seen it with my own eyes, I understand it even less than before.

I'm also saddened that so many people come here only to see this horror, and bypass the beauty of this country and the graciousness and hospitality of its people. This journey has been difficult and painful at times, but I feel privileged to be able to undertake it in the way we have.

Bureaucracy - addendum

On the drive back to Toruń yesterday, Jan asked dad if he knew anything about the condition of the labour camp at Bocień. Dad related a passage from the autobiography of the survivor that led us here ... one day Red Cross inspectors visited the camp to see what conditions were like. A few of the prisoners complained that there was no infirmary, no medical care of any sort, and there were a number of sick people. After the inspectors left, the camp commander made the prisoners line up in the yard and said he'd heard there were some sick people who needed medical care. He asked them to identify themselves, as he would arrange for a doctor for them. A few prisoners stepped forward. He looked them over, then declared that HE was the doctor, he would fix them. With his rod he beat them to within an inch of their lives; as the beaten, broken women lay in a heap on the ground, the commander asked the rest of the prisoners: now, does anyone else need to see a doctor?

Dad went on to say that he could understand that the Nazis were losing the war and decided to use of prisoners as a labour source. In spite of the inhumanity of enslaving innocent civilians, on some level there is some twisted internal logic in it. But the sheer cruelty and sadism of the commander is unfathomable. What could possibly drive people to treat other human beings with such cruelty is beyond comprehension.

A bit later, Jan asked dad if he knew how his mother had died. Again, dad referred to the autobiography ... the writer described one day seeing Anna. She was weak, emaciated, thoroughly broken, and told her that she didn't have the strength to continue. After the next day's pile of corpses was carted away, she never saw Anna again.

This morning we travel by train to Krakow. We leave the land where three of my ancestors lie, and go to where their journey into hell began.

As we prepare to leave this part of Poland, we are left with a profound sense of gratitude to Jan for putting us in touch with people who have given us an insight far beyond our expectations when we began planning this personal pilgrimage. We have been so warmly and compassionately received, and he has helped orchestrate much of it.

Government bureaucracy

Dad got the idea a few months ago to erect a monument at the cemetery site in memory of his mother, aunt and cousin; he contacted Jan in Toruń a while back to see what kinds of red tape we'd have to go through to make that happen. Today Jan took us to the local government in Chelmza to talk directly to someone there about getting the right approvals; at first we thought it would be difficult, as she said we'd need to submit proof of the story of the deaths (there is no official proof, the Nazis were not in the habit of issuing death certificates, and the daily cartfuls of bodies taken from the small makeshift camps where they died were not identified as far as we know) ... when Jan explained what kind of scant proof we had, the woman seemed very understanding, gave us further suggestions about what to submit and who to submit to. She shared that for many years after the war ended, bodies continued to emerge from the lake where so many had drowned ... those recovered now rest in the cemetery we visited yesterday. She told us that the original cemetery was set up so that the mass graves of Jewish women were outside the cemetery walls, but after the war, the local priest and townspeople had the configuration changed so that the mass graves were within the cemetery walls. We learned that there had been another monument years ago to the Jewish women, which was replaced by the one we saw yesterday.

She also mentioned a local high school history teacher who is involved in a Holocaust remembrance group, and suggested we go by the school to see if we could meet her.

We went to the school, about 7 km from the government office. Unfortunately the teacher was on a field trip with her students, but the school principal welcomed us warmly, and told us of this teacher's work - she's been active with a Polish organization concerned with Holocaust history - erecting and maintaining monuments, education projects - and she teaches a special history class on the Holocaust. We saw the history classroom and the kinds of Holocaust education projects this teacher has undertaken with her students. It was very moving to see this; as we left, the principal told us that our visit reinforced to her the importance of this education effort, that it made the whole story more real, that it wasn't simply an academic exercise. She was as grateful for our visit as we were for her warmth and hospitality.

From there we went to a higher-level regional government about 50 km away to try to get further information about the approval process. The building is a cold, unwelcoming bureaucratic labyrinth, a remnant from communist times - I now understand Kafka a bit better - and we were expecting a welcome as warm as the building ... but once again, once Jan explained who we were, why we were there, we were greeted with warmth and compassion, and were given as much information as we needed to get the process rolling. So far, government bureaucracy in Poland has turned out to be humane, accommodating and compassionate. I wasn't expecting it, and have felt really moved by the whole experience.

Today, more than ever, it has become clear that this trip is more than a personal journey to find the traces of our ancestors. Our responsibility to tell this greater story to the rest of the world has become clearer as we go along, and our role as representatives in this country of the human faces of this story has also become clearer. There are few Jews left in Poland, particularly in this part of the country, and besides, the crimes committed here were committed by foreigners against foreigners, so there is little personal connection for the local communities. The priest, the historian, and I suspect the school principal, had never before met descendants of the victims that lie in the local fields.

Tomorrow we take the train to Krakow; we'll visit Auschwitz the next day.

Bocien & area

Today was the most cathartic and intense so far ... our guide Jan picked us up first thing this morning; he brought a local army major who has been researching WWII fortifications in his spare time for several years. A few years ago he became interested in the construction of the anti-Soviet tank trenches around Torun - where they were, who built them - and discovered that they were largely dug by Jewish women in forced labour camps. From there he started researching these camps, and has uncovered many of them in the local area.

It seems that by the end of the war the Nazis were sending so many Jews to the camps that they became overcrowded, even for Nazi standards; they increased the executions at the main camps we all know about, they sent prisoners to smaller camps such as Stutthof (for the first few years of the war a POW camp), and when those filled up, to smaller sub-camps. Stutthof had 39 such camps; Bocien (Botten, Bottschin) was one. Bocien, in turn, became overcrowded, and prisoners were sent to makeshift camps - no barracks, no amenities of any kind. In a deep forest we saw the remains of sunken dwellings dug by prisoners for shelter from the elements; the Nazis supplied some rough plywood for them to make walls, and canvas for roofing. The prisoners dug holes with raised berms around the perimeter, and built their makeshift shelters. They used branches from the surrounding forest for bedding. The camps were well hidden from the surroundings, and each dwelling slept about 40 people (by the size, I'd say they would fit no more than 10 by any normal standard). Today most of the bermed holes have been levelled, and only 3 survive in this area. Locals have no idea of the history of these depressions in the ground.

We saw a few places where there are remnants of trenches, all dug by Jewish women to exact Nazi specifications (depth, width of base, slope of sides). The trenches originally zigzagged through the landscape, though only a few scattered bits of the original trenches remain.

He told us that often, trenches were dug not as anti-tank structures, but as graves for the women who dug them. The Polish countryside is saturated with such graves, some marked, some not. Some have been exhumed, but not many. We may never know the final resting place of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of innocent souls.

We saw beautiful farmers' fields that were once used as labour camps. Most traces of their existence is now gone, and more is disappearing as time goes on. We saw the roads the women had to march each day to get to the trenches - in some cases, 5 or 6 km each way, after little sleep, long, hard physical labour, and meagre amounts of food and hydration. One such path included an L-turn; in the middle of the "L" lies a lake. On cold, icy days, the guards would tell women who were too tired to make the long walk home that they could take a shortcut diagonally across the lake, not telling them that the ice was thin. Many broke through the ice and died there.

We saw where a Bocien sub-camp, Grodno, had been located, including the commander's house (still intact), the large brick barn that housed the animals, and the open field where there are no signs of the prisoners who were once there. The camp was visible from a large building used as a factory during the war, and employing POWs, and was close to a lake.

Close to this camp, on a penninsula on the lake, is a monument to the women in a mass grave in two trenches on the site. The major/historian told us that shortly after the war, one of the former POWs testified that he had seen soldiers regularly carting corpses to throw into the mass graves. One day he saw that there were four women at the top of a cart who were still alive and tried to escape. The soldiers took them to the lakeshore and bludgeoned them to death.

We visited the cemetery in Dzwierzno, which today is a Catholic cemetery. Before the war it was a farmer's field; two large trenches were dug there in an L-shape which also became mass graves - there are between 1,000 and 2,000 lying there by the major's estimate. After the war, the area inside the "L" became a Catholic cemetery; there are no gravestones showing deaths before 1945. Apparently locals have been leaving flowers for the Jewish women who died there since the end of the war, and several years ago the town erected a monument in their memory. There are always fresh flowers, which townspeople place there of their own initiative - there is no specific group or person responsible for this, but there are always flowers. I was really moved by this; the women lying there may not have individual graves, but at least they are remembered and their communal grave is respected.

We met the parish priest of the cemetery; he's been there 3 years, after the monument was erected; he seemed very moved by our visit (dad asked who's responsible for the flowers at the monument; when he told us that they were a spontaneous gesture from the town, I lost it, and my sudden weeping made him cry as well) ...

The major showed us so many places where Jewish women were used for slave labour, where they were executed by gunshot, by injection, by beatings, where they are buried, where he knows large mass graves exist but all traces are covered by farmers' fields ... it's difficult to record them all.

I'm left with a deep sense of grief not just for my own ancestors, not even just for the countless Jewish women who perished with them, or for the other 6 million, but also for this land that had such horrible crimes committed on it, and carries such a painful history ... it hurts that some people don't want to know what happened under their own feet, that the family living in a former commander's house has no interest in knowing about it, that artifacts that connect us to that history are being levelled, erased, washed away. But I suppose I can also understand how difficult and painful it would be to live with that horrible story constantly.

Still, as an heir to such recent memory, I can't help but think that it's being wiped away too quickly in some cases, before the full extent of the crimes and suffering have been uncovered.

Torun & Bocien

It's Saturday night, and seems like an eternity since my last post. Stutthof was heavy and difficult, and I was grateful to have had Adam there to handle the mundane details and make sure we were ok through that experience ...

After Stutthof he drove us to Westerplatte, where WWII began. There is an elegant, simple monument that is typical of the 50s/60s communist iconography - it's a totem, a beacon, and a tribute that reveals different aspects at different scales. I was glad to see it.

Yesterday (Friday) Adam drove us to Malbork Castle, the largest brick structure in Europe, and the main outpost of the Teutonic Knights - it was pretty spectacular. I had no idea it existed, so was quite blown away by the scale and complexity of the place. Even more so by the fact that large parts were destroyed by WWII bombings, and have been meticulously rebuilt and restored. I wasn't too impressed with the knights themselves - they were violent and racist profiteers as far as I could surmise - but the elaborate castle was really impressive.

Yesterday afternoon we had a local guide give us a tour of Gdansk, which is really a jewel of a city. While we were in Malbork it snowed a bit in Gdansk, so the streets were slippery and treacherous (particularly the beautiful polished granite walkway bordering the city walls by the river) ... It was a chilly but lovely tour, just before sunset when the light was magical. We visited an amber shop where the shopkeeper taught us the basics about amber - turns out Gdansk is one of the few places in the world where amber is found. Who knew?

Our city tour guide was professional and knowledgeable, but not as friendly and personable as Adam - I'd never had a private guide before, so I guess until that point I simply assumed that his demeanour was typical for guides ... as it turns out, he's just simply a really nice guy, he was genuinely interested in us and our story, and had the sensibility to have figured out that we're not here looking for stock, scripted tours - dad & I both feel that we've made a new friend in Adam.

(Ok, so if it sounds like I'm gushing, I am ... ;-) )

Adam picked us up this morning from our rented apartment in the heart of Gdansk's historical district, and drove us to Torun, where we parted ways. We only met a few days ago, but it felt like I was saying goodbye to a very dear old friend. We are staying in a hotel that's been set up in an old grainary building, the rooms are a bit small compared to the full 2-storey apartment we just left, but they're comfortable and a bit more luxurious than I was expecting. Except for the lack of soundproofing between our 3rd floor rooms and the loud polka music coming through the open stairs from the restaurant downstairs ... (they told us it's all done by 10pm, so should be ok.) :-)

Our local guide in Torun is Jan, whom dad had been in contact with by email for a few months organizing this trip. He met us at the hotel and took us on a walking tour of Torun ... it's a UNESCO world heritage site, very well preserved as it didn't suffer any damage during WWII (a few buildings were bombed by the Swedes in the 17th, or maybe it was the 18th, century, including a much smaller Teutonic castle than the main one at Malbork). Torun is really lovely, it has some beautiful examples of original architecture dating to the 12th century. But so far I feel that the Gdansk experience was a highlight - more real, somehow. This city is smaller, but feels a bit more geared to tourists. Of course, that includes us ...

Except that we're not here for Torun, it's a stopping point to Bocien, the main purpose of this trip ... it's where my grandmother, her sister and her sister's younger daugher died. We're going tomorrow morning; Jan has arranged for a local who knows about the camp to show us around. Apparently there is nothing left of the labour camp; a few years ago locals erected a monument to the women victims of Nazism (the camp was for Hungarian Jewish women, most of whom were from dad's hometown of Miskolc). Other than that I don't think there is any outward sign of the camp's existence. We'll see tomorrow ...

Gdansk & Stutthof

Dad & I have been travelling for just under a week - arrived Saturday night in Berlin, spent the weekend with aunt, cousins & cousins' kids, then Monday and Tuesday we were hardcore tourists: we visited a few museums (Jewish Museum, Pergammon, Gemaldegalerie, Holocaust Memorial), saw the Sony Plaza at Potsdamerplatz, took a boat tour through Berlin's canals, all in the company of my aunt C. Wednesday we flew through Munich to Gdansk: we were greeted at the airport by our guide Adam, who first took us to see the only synagogue in town (in the district of Wrzeszcz - he also told us of another synagogue in nearby Sopot that was set on fire on Cristal Night in November 1938) before showing us to our rented apartment in the middle of the old town of Gdansk. It's really a beautiful place.

This morning Adam picked us up early to drive to the Stutthof labour camp where a museum has been set up. It was quite intense - they have maintained about 1/4 to 1/3 of the original camp, including the commandant's buildings, several of the ubiquitous watchtowers, the dogs' quarters where specially-trained attack dogs were kept, prisoners' quarters, and the gas chambers and crematoria. Unlike many other Nazi labour or extermination camps, Stutthof was very international: there were prisoners from 23 countries, plus Jews and Gypsies. We learned that the Jews (all women) arrived much later, transported from Auschwitz. They were in barracks at the edge of the camp, and after those filled up, the kitchen building was used for additional Jewish women. Dad thinks that our three ancestors who were at the camp must have been at the kitchen building based on the description in the autobiography that mentions this experience.

We met an archivist briefly who showed us the log book entry including the three names in order, and she made a copy for us to take with us. Dad left her a copy of the autobiography, though since it's only in Hungarian, I suspect it'll be a while before they can get any information from it ...

We were invited to join an English-language tour being given by a Polish survivor to a group of Swedish high school students. It was really moving to see this old man telling his story, and seeing the kids so engrossed.

One of the first exhibits was a small portion of a mountain of old shoes that were found when the liberators first came to Stutthof after the war ended. The small exhibit extended the full length of one of the barracks. Prisoners were forced to give up their shoes in exchange for clogs. There were tiny childrens' shoes in the mix.

We saw the "hospital" where human experiments were conducted. They still don't know exactly what the Stutthof doctors did, but suspect they supplied a local soap factory with human fat for soapmaking. There was another operating room where people were injected with phenol, which killed them within a few minutes.

We saw the mess hall where prisoners were given their meagre daily rations.
We saw the lavatory, where water was turned on twice a day for 30-40 minutes for the entire camp of several thousand prisoners (originally the camp was designed for about 3,500, but was later expanded to hold 57,000). They had seconds to get their water supply, wash, and use the toilet.

The watchtowers were everywhere, and the camp was surrounded by layers of electrified barbed wire. Many prisoners hurled themselves against the wires when they could no longer bear the conditions.

There were numerous testimonials, mostly in Polish. Our guide Adam translated one for us that spoke of an endless journey in a train, where a small one day's ration of half a loaf of bread and a piece of sausage was all the prisoners received before travelling for six days. The weak and ill died, and by the end of the trip, those who were still alive did what no human ever wants to resort to in order to survive a little bit longer.

Near the end of the tour, near the gas chamber and crematoria, is a memorial from the 1960s. On one side extends a long windowed chamber where one can see a long stretch of ashes and human bones - skull remnants, jaws, arm bones, bones of children.

The Stutthof Museum has a small screening room, and the operator offered to show us two films they have in English, so we had a private viewing for three. One of the films documented what the Allies discovered at Stutthof a few days after liberation; the second documented the trials of the various camp guards, kapos, etc., which were held in nearby Gdansk.

Stutthof camp is surrounded by a beautiful forest that kept it sheltered from the nearby town, and must have been a bittersweet setting for those who passed through or for whom it was a final resting place. Today it is overrun with friendly feral cats, the grounds are well kept, and it is a shadow of the hell it was 65 years ago. Still, the museum has done a commendable job of respecting and remembering the memory of the horrors that took place there.

Let me introduce myself ...

I've resisted blogging for it seems like forever - but as I prepare for an upcoming momentous trip, this feels like the right time to finally jump into this. In 10 days I'll be travelling to Europe with my dad to pay our respects to my grandmother - his mother - for the first time. She died in a concentration camp in Poland in WWII, and it is only recently that we learned the name and location of the camp where she died. The past few months have been a bit of an emotional roller coaster ... this is a trip I've wanted to make for a long time, dad even longer. But as it gets closer to becoming reality, the reality of what we will face becomes more overwhelming. I'm ready for it now after months of a difficult emotional reckoning. I'm hoping that through this online journal I can track my trip as it goes, share a few photos and impressions, and come a little bit closer to making peace with a horrible, tragic piece of history.