Five writers return to
their ancestral lands
Executive summary by darmansjah
Unearthing a Polish
Past
In search of a prewar life in Krakow, original text by Nina
Strochlic, is an avid traveler and a reporter for Newsweek and the Daily
Beast.
A few times a year throughout my childhood, my mother and I
sat around a tan suitcase. She’d pop open the single working hinge and pull out
sepia-toned photographs and frayed papers-curfew extensions, identity cars,
immigration forms. The suitcase held the remaining tangible links to my
grandparent’s prewar lives. In the late 1930s, my grandparents were forced from
their homes in Poland into ghettos, and later into labor and concentration
camps. On nights the suitcase came out, we’d watch videos of my jovial grandpa
remembering the miles of frozen marches and how he won my grandmother’s affection by baking her a cake in a displaced
persons camp. Soon after, they got married, boarded a ship for Cuba, and
sneaked off in New York City. My grandmother died long before I was born, and
my grandfather died when I was five, but I know their stories. I know that when
my grandmother’s parents and brother returned to the rural house where they’d
stored valuables, they were murdered by its postwar inhabitants. “Never forget’
wasn’t just a phrase for my family; it was a mantra.
My grandfather swore he’d never return to his homeland, but
my mom and I needed to go. I thought of it as time travel-Poland was a country
of ghosts, a crowd of bearded men walking down cobblestoned streets and hastily
evacuated shtetls. A county stuck in the loop of 1938. But the Krakow we
encountered, with its soaring castle and café lined medieval squares, was
nothing like that. Virtually unscathed by the Germans, it had the charm of a
young, modern city set amidst the mystery of an ancient one. Bursting with
Jewish tours, museums, and shops, the city catered to tourist like us –
pilgrims unearthing their heritage. Mom and I arrived with a jumble of
addresses and began a scavenger hunt in search of my grandparents’ past. On a
corner in the center of old town we found the storefront site of the seasonally
rotating ice cream parlor or fur shop my great-grandparents owned, and across a
bridge a music school now occupied the ghetto building they were forced to live
in. but our main goal was to see my grandmother’s apartment, to touch the
childhood home of a woman I never knew.
Rising from the middle of Krakow, a Gothic castle keeps a
watchful eye on its city. We found my grandmother’s building on a street
encircling it, a classic limestone structure. Standing inside the dim hallway,
my mother holding a note that explained our quest, we rapped on the wooden door
of Number 2. A middle-aged woman cracked it open and greeted us hesitantly. Her
eyes flitted over the handwritten note, and confusion melted into warmth. She
introduced her self as Marta and ushered us in. the apartment was beautiful,
with ornate inlaid wood floors. “It hasn’t been remodeled, except for the
bathroom, since my mother bought in 1949,’ she said. Mom’s expression mirrored
my own disbelief. I could almost imagine my great-grandparents stoking the
green ceramic tiled heater that stretched to the ceiling. We talked to Marta
for an hour, lingering in the apartment that, save a war, could have been our
home.
As my mother and I left, it was hard not to admit our
unexpected love for Krakow. The city no longer conjured only fleeing Jews and
ghetto walls. Along with them were pierogi festivals and imposing castles. I
put mementoes of these in the suitcase where the old and new worlds could
finally merge.
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