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happened, where history exploded, and it's my
history. To dream that the ground was heaving
doesn't seem far-fetched.
We drive to the center of town, where the
market square used to be and where my grandmother
used to have her restaurant. The streets
along the way are dirt or cobblestone, the houses
made of timber that juts out at the corners to form
a crisscross pattern. They're painted white with
brown shutters.
They have TV antennas but no indoor
plumbing. Geese walk in the streets, single file.
Men and women ride their bicycles through mud
and puddles.
The streets in the center of town are paved.
Most of the old shops are gone, replaced by dour
Soviet buildings. The market also is gone, but
while a shady green park has taken its place the
basic outline is the same.
More people have joined the group. When
we sit down for lunch the table has 18 place settings.
The check comes to $2.
After lunch, Bernie leaves the table abruptly,
toting his video camera, heading for the square.
My father follows with Victor.
The men identify familiar buildingsthe
Catholic church just beyond the park and a barnlike
structure made of narrow wooden slats that
used to be a drugstore and still is, it turns out.
An elaborate war memorial with a grand
staircase crowned by an obelisk stretches along
one edge of the square.
Victor Gershengorn finds his old home, a
boxy cement structure once considered luxurious
by Luboml standards. Now it's been divided
into four apartments, and a couple who lives in
one of them comes out to meet us. The woman's
front teeth are a solid row of gold.
My father's house is gone. The street names
have been changed along with the house numbers,
so it's hard to know for certain We take a
picture of the spot where he thinks it stood.
The old Jewish cemetery is now completely
overgrown with trees and brambles. There must
be thousands of graves here, but only three or
four headstones are standing. The rest were stolen
by Ukrainians, says our guide, rubbed clean
and reused.
LUBOML
The men tramp further into the woods, past
a garbage dump, to the spot where the first batch
of Jews was shot by the Germans. It was a group
of men who were told they were needed for work
duty. After the men were shot, the Ukrainians
went to their wives and told them not to worry,
everything was all right, but their husbands
needed a fresh change of clothes. Then they sold
the clothes for pocket money.
Nothing is the same, not a thing, not one percent,
people keep saying. Anne Gershengorn can
barely stand to lay eyes on the place. It's like
someone took a map, she says, and then they took
a crayon, and went like this! She makes a wild
gesture with her fist. Then they took the map and
ripped it to shreds!
She continues with her eyes fixed straight
ahead. You know what they sayany city without
Jews is a dead city.
Only my father seems to feel just the opposite
is true. The way he sees it, nothing has
changed. Even the horsedrawn carts are the same,
the same bow-shaped wooden carts.
It is business as usual in the streets of
Luboml. Women sell tomatoes off the back of a
truck, kids walk on the main street eating sweet
rolls from the bakery. The place seems light-years
away from Moscow.
The Jews in Luboml felt roughly the same
way in the 1930s. Their lack of concern seems
mindboggling today. Anti-Semitism was nothing
new to them. People had time to get out before
war was declared, but it's still a mystery to my
father why his relatives never emigrated when
they had the chance.
The next morning, my father decides we
should pack up now, take our things to Luboml,
and drive from there to Warsaw at the end of the
day.
Day two in Luboml and Hannah has cooked
a tremendous lunch. She's standing in the
kitchen when we arrive, a pile of potatoes on the
floor next to her feet, a pot of soup cooking on
the stove, and a sponge cake baking in a sort of
tin box near the door.
My father can't get over how similar her
house is to the way his house used to be. "This
is it! This is it exactly, how it was!"