The Journey Home

How is the desire to see one’s parents’ home connected to a sense of roots? After all, decades had passed. Did these second-generation members not have roots of their own by now, deeply fixed in their own country of birth? Some obviously did, but others still felt themselves in need of a geographical anchor, hoping to close a circle by being able to stand on the same soil where their parents had been born, studied, prayed or played, creating a personal paraphrase of Genesis 3:19, “For you are dust and to dust you shall return”.

One group of second-generation members made the trip together with their survivor or former refugee parents. Others went after their parents’ death. Those with elderly parents, unable to travel, went without them but often communicated to them how they had retraced their family history. Some undertook the journey to help them come to terms with the burden of the past. Others saw it as part of the grieving process for a lost world and family that they would never know.

I undertook such a journey over a third of a century ago, in the days when Poland was still semi-communist, the Berlin wall had not yet fallen and luxury items such as good vodka or imported oranges could only be bought in the State-run Pewex stores with foreign currency, preferably dollars. I had asked my father, an Auschwitz and Buchenwald survivor who was then an active and healthy man in his mid-80s, whether he wanted to join me, but he refused to even consider the possibility. He did, however, give me the address of his former home in Bochnia, where he had been born and lived throughout his childhood, right near the area of the Bochnia Ghetto where his father, sister and first wife had either been shot or from where they were sent on their final journey.

Six months later I was back there again, leading another group, this time in the daylight. Again, I took a picture of the building but did not make any effort to enter. It was only in 2007 when I came to Poland on a belated honeymoon and took my husband to see where his late father-in-law had been born and raised, that our private guide knocked at the door and asked the tenants if they would allow us to look around. Despite the decades that had passed since the war, the house looked much like my father had described it with the big surprise being the enormous garden on a large plot of land behind the house. For the first time I could picture my family as it had been while living there, a well-to-do strictly Orthodox Jewish family. Visiting the local archive, I found the original deed to the house and listings of my father’s birth, his parents’ marriage and that of his grandparents as well. Continuing further up the winding street I came to the area of the former ghetto and newly dedicated memorial for the town’s Jews murdered during the Holocaust.

This was indeed the journey of a member of the second generation in search of her roots. A journey to close a circle and get a glimpse of my origins. None of the locals whom I came across on that visit had any connection to my family, but I wondered whether their parents or grandparents had ever come across mine and if so, when and in what capacity. Some things are better not thought about.

And maybe, in addition to closing circles and looking for roots, journeys of second-generation members to their parents’ former homes are a way of figuratively laying that stone, showing that someone still cares and remembers. “To be unremembered is to die a second death”, writes Rabbi Theodore Friedman in an essay entitled Do you Remember? And so, these visits are actually an affirmation of life, having transmitted the onus of remembrance to a new generation.

Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz