I would not make a good press agent for Polish tourism. I recently visited that country with two of my cousins to find our great-grandparents’ graves and to attempt to find the house in which our mothers grew up.
It’s all part of a larger project I am pursuing during my retirement to transform six large boxes of inherited family papers and photos into a readable history for our extended family. Visiting the family historical sites involved seemed to be the next step forward.
My mother, Toni Wiener Ettenheim, and her sisters and parents emigrated from Breslau, Germany, to Milwaukee in 1937, too late for comfort, but early enough for survival. Breslau is now Wroclaw, a city in southwest Poland, in the province formerly known as Silesia.
As was true in many Shoah survivor and refugee families, the reasons for and consequences of this forced move were not discussed in our family.
My mother’s sister, Joan Wiener Prince, often discussed the “adventure” of moving to Milwaukee at our family seders; but the trauma of utter dislocation and murder of almost all of their cousins, aunts and uncles simply did not exist in the family storytelling agenda.
As American adults, my mother and her sisters were horrified at the thought of going to either Poland or Germany for any reason. So, Joan’s daughter, Ginny Prince, and I decided to take matters into our own hands.
We wanted to see Wroclaw and honor our great-grandparents’ memories by visiting their graves. We believe that there have been no other family members able to do this ever. They are either all dead or scattered to the wind, many of them buried in nameless, mass graves or worse.
Preparation needed
One does not just embark on this kind of journey. A lot of research and preparation are needed.
Luckily we had photographs of what our great-grandparents’ gravestones used to look like; but Ginny had to do much frustrating and often futile research to determine the city and the cemetery in which they were buried.
We first visited Legnica (Liegnitz) in the hopes of finding Paul and Jenny Schoenfeld Wiener’s graves. The cemetery was trashed, overgrown and chaotic.
Recent vandalism was obvious, and many of the matzevot (gravestones) had been smashed or stolen for use on someone else’s grave by being turned around and the back sides appropriated. This turned out to be true for Paul and Jenny’s graves.
Fortunately, a large stone structure to which the matzevothad been affixed was intact, but the matzevotthemselves were long gone. Ironically, a matzevah is meant to guard or bear witness. These defaced or stolen witnesses could no longer do their job.
Because of the large structure, although bereft of its matzevot to identify the site, we knew we were standing at Paul and Jenny’s graves, the first family members to do so.
Paul and Jenny Wiener were also the great-grandparents of our other traveling cousin, Marion Wiener of Stockholm. Marion’s father, my mother’s first cousin, is still alive at 91. He was on the last Kindertransport (Children’s Transport) out of Germany to Sweden in 1939.
We still had two sets of maternal great-grandparents to find. For this, we went on to Wroclaw, about an hour away from Legnica.
We were very lucky in this quest, because we had connected with a young employee of the small Jewish community of Wroclaw, Michal Bujanowski. He knew the cemetery personnel in both Legnica and Wroclaw, which eased our way tremendously.
As none of us cousins speak a word of Polish, Michal was the one who made sure that we had access to the cemeteries (three of them) and had help obtaining records of cemetery plot ownership.
There are two Jewish cemeteries in Wroclaw, the “old” which contained the graves of thousands of people, and the “new,” a fraction of the size, but still large enough to lead to immense frustration without assistance.
We first visited the “old” one. There was no one to provide records. The search was complicated by profusions of dense vine and other plant growth which often obscured the markers entirely. We came up empty, a discouraging afternoon.
After bombarding the superintendent of the “new” cemetery with requests to assist us, Michal met him when we visited the next morning. This man, Piotr Gotowicki, turned out to be a diamond in the rough.
He has painstakingly cleaned up the grounds, righted overturned matzevot and updated the logs of burials, complete with dates, plot sites and full identification of those buried. He facilitates the replacement of missingmatzevot, working with families who request this service.
With Gotowicki’s help, we found the graves of Julius and Anna Kernbaum Gruenberg, our maternal great-grandparents, and those of Rosa Levkowitz Eckstein and Max Eckstein, Marion’s maternal great-grandparents.
The matzevot were missing from all of these graves. Nonetheless, this was a profoundly moving event for the three of us.
Prejudice endures
This type of journey requires a fair amount of emotional preparation, because the odds are high that one will be met with disappointment at best, and devastation at worst. Our experiences certainly covered the range.
The highpoint was being able to stand with our great-grandparents’ souls, knowing they had all died of natural causes and had been peacefully buried in an identified and once-sanctified place.
The reality that the cemeteries had been trashed or, at best, severely neglected, was, of course, infuriating and depressing.
The worst aspect of the journey, however, was the fact that anti-Semitism is alive and well in Poland.
Poland has, historically, never had to deal with its population’s complicity in the Shoah, fed by ages-old and virulent anti-Semitism, a huge piece of Polish culture and history.
The communist takeover after World War II simply allowed everyone to blame the destruction of Polish Jews on the Nazis and fascists who overran Poland in 1939 and never left until their defeat.
To my knowledge, there has been no significant attempt by the Poles to even admit to or atone for the pogroms which continued against a tiny and enfeebled Jewish population after the war.
I have been asked what the purpose of the journey was. It certainly was not to seek “closure” because that term is absurd in the context of the Shoah. This was not meant to be a death-centered trip.
Rather, I think it was about re-connecting with the only “normal” lives and deaths in my mother’s extended family, and attempting to be in her original community for even a few days.
More than that, and I think I would have choked. Poland is no place for this Jewish woman to linger.
Nancy Ettenheim is a retired criminal prosecutor. She and Ginny Prince are compiling an extended maternal family history of life and death in Poland and Germany.
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