From a Corner of the Unsafe
I just wrote a hefty check, as did my first cousin, Joe. Not a second was wasted weighing the cost or the merits of the cause. We had agreed long ago that if the opportunity presented itself, we were all in.
No, it’s not a trip or a timeshare we’re considering, though we understand that a trip will be required of us. Joe and I are the self-appointed keepers of our family’s story, picking away at the layers of time that for our relatives are a bittersweet reprieve but for us portend a door that is silently closing.
Joe’s mother and mine were the only siblings of eight to survive the Shoah. During a second trip to Poland, a frustrating exercise in information gathering, I had returned to my mother’s town, Grodzisko, with a son, a daughter, and a niece. A tiny delegation in search of the faintest clues to the murder of our once-large family, we connected with a woman who was among the shtetl’s oldest living residents. The one precious photo I showed her jarred her memory: Not only did she remember my family, name by name. Not only did she comment that my mother and hers were friends. But in an unexpected burst, she told us that she knew where my family was buried!
Soundlessly, we followed as she led us to the edge of what had once been the Jewish cemetery. Once there, she pointed to a depression in the earth. “This is where they were shot,” she said simply. We stood transfixed, committed the place to memory, and quietly intoned the Kaddish.
Now, a decade later, we’ve identified a man in Israel, Nechemia, who has successfully traced and verified victims of the Shoah, long-buried in the criss-cross of Europe’s mass graves. With access to radar and other evidence, he offers the real possibility of ascertaining whether the depression I had identified could be the site where my grandparents and six of their children were murdered.
Weeks of testing are now behind us. Confirmed: one large mass grave and a cluster of three smaller ones. Nechemia, along with an envoy of Israeli rabbis, is in Grodzisko now, overseeing while Polish workmen dig — ever so carefully so as not to disturb remains—the footings that will anchor two granite gravestones. Of the four mass graves, we will never be certain in which lies our family.
The irony is not lost on me. Nor the timing. I’ve devoted a lot of my life to the pursuit of an elusive reconciliation — a reckoning of sorts — with an unthinkable past, only for this moment to have arrived on the brink of a global revival.
As the media veers crazily with minute-by-minute coverage of the Gaza war, the world’s attacks on Jews grow daily. Everywhere, journalists and politicians and the oh-so-intelligent public weigh in, suddenly spokespeople for the downtrodden on a distant, tiny speck of land whose high profile is embedded in (nothing short of a PR stroke of good luck!) their proximity to a historically and universally slandered people.
Naivete and a stubborn avoidance of the details work their magic to un-complicate the debate. We tend to be, after all, a nation attached to its ideas. And to their pithy phrasing. “Free speech,” “the right to bear arms,” “diversity.” And the more recent “Free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea.” Our young don’t reach deep. Attention spans extend no further than the length of a social media post. And a good-looking New York mayoral candidate no more credentialed than an over-age intern is not at all gun-shy about his “Free Palestine” or global Jihad stances. Who are you freeing Palestine from? To become what in freedom?
The public retreats into the comfy information vacuum that has blessedly simplified struggle into something akin to a Yelp review deemed “good” or “bad” and measured in audience hits. How many hits for a defense of Hitler? How many for the most novel justification of the means by which six million Jews were exterminated —“it was efficient.” Newsfeeds become just one more layer of entertainment, which, after all, is what it’s all about. Feeling good. For the stars on stage and for those in the theater wing reserved for the self righteous.
Reserved for the safe.
Because at the end of the day, today’s arbiters of what justice looks like are safe. Safe from Iran’s nukes and sleeper cells. Far removed from missiles and even farther from the air raid drills we rehearsed as kids because we knew to be afraid of Russia. And though we wept after 9/11, we sucked it up to the randomness of Middle East crazies, just as we watched beheadings in horror, only to vindicate the perpetrators.
For as long as they declare all of their hatred and venom as protected rights, and we continue to dismiss the danger they promise as unthinkable, we can all remain blissfully righteous with impunity. And safe from harm. So, Mr. Mayoral candidate, how have you contributed to the cause? Have you bled for the cause?
Adolf Jeske was the young Polish policeman recruited by the Nazis because he spoke fluent German. On a random April day in 1943 he stood at the edge of Grodzisko’s Jewish cemetery facing down a group of what remained of Grodzisko’s Jews. For them, this was nothing random; they had been herded there for one purpose only. Among them were my grandparents and their six young children. Two daughters had escaped into hiding. The older was my mother.
Jeske drew his pistol and shot. The bodies, covered over in haste, continued to protrude jagged limbs, as Joe’s mother recalled decades later.
I know in the marrow of my bones what it is to not be safe. My knowledge of danger is not at all simple. It is layered and complicated and close. It is Joe and me closing a personal chapter to the Holocaust even as the world surrenders to the hatred which ignited it. It is as real as a post-war Adolf Jeske re-settled in Cleveland. Just another Ohio retiree mowing his lawn. It is Jeske who creates the need for Joe and me to retain a man with the tools to locate my murdered family so that we can finally mark their graves. For my mother and his, the two sisters who survived. And for the children who came from them.
And for anyone who lives eighty years after Liberation and two years after October 7th with the delusion that we are safe.
