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Mr. Dzei has amassed a formidable stockpile
of historical documents including old maps, census
reports, newspapers and scores of photographs.
He has pictures of street scenes showing
what the town looked like, and shots of Jews in
daily interaction with their Polish and Ukrainian
neighbors-Jews in the volunteer fire department,
in classes at the Polish school and in the workplace.
Most astonishing is a photograph of the
marketplace in 1926, full of cows, horses and
people. In the distance is a building where my
family's restaurant was located. He also has all
sorts of ephemera, including dozens of little worn
scraps of paperreceipts from many of the Jewish
businesses which prospered in Luboml in the
1930s.
Mr. Dzei had arranged an interview for us
with three elderly women. I asked the women
questions which might jog their memories of
daily Jewish existence seen from the Ukrainian
perspective. Were their families friendly with the
Jews? Did they do business together, Jews and
Ukrainians?
One woman, Lida, said her children used to
play with Jewish children; she produced an old
photograph taken on her daughter's birthday
many years ago. The picture shows a group of
children dancing together, Jews with Ukrainians
posing arm in arm.
We began to discuss the German occupation.
Lida told about the arrival of the German army.
Her family had lived on Listopada even though
they were gentilesand one day a German soldier
told her father they had to evacuate the
house because they were making the street into
a ghetto for the Jews. The family would be given
another house, the soldier said, but the father
refused to comply and the family stayed put. At
this point, Lida began to cry. She said she could
remember the day the Jews were marched to the
edge of town. "It was about ten o'clock in the
morning, I went outside and I saw this group of
Jewish people in the street. Big dogs were guarding
them. The people were very quiet. They
didn't speak or scream."
LUB 0 ML
I taped an interview in Yiddish with a man
named Tzimerboym, one of few Luboml Jews
who has lived in the area, more or less continuously,
since the 1920s. Born in Luboml, he married
a girl from the neighboring town of Shatsk,
where the couple settled and had five children.
On the day the Germans invaded eastern
Poland, Tzimerboym happened to be in Luboml
visiting his parents. When he realized what was
happening he tried to return to Shatsk, but the
countryside was crawling with soldiers. So he
turned east toward Russia, and once he had
crossed the border, he asked a gentile woman to
deliver a message to his wife an d children. I
imagine they were supposed to meet up with him
in Russia, but the message was never delivered.
Tzimerboym survived the war as a soldier in the
Russian army. He returned to Shatsk after the war
and learned, of course, that his family had been
killed.
I asked him why he never left. "Who will
take care of the Jewish cemeteries?," he replied.
Tzimerboym has made himself into a guardian
of cemeteries, familiar with the location of every
overgrown Jewish graveyard and mass burial
in the surrounding countryside. He obsesses with
the idea of building a major monument to the
Jews of Shatsk.
After the interview, Tzimerboym led us
through the hilly fields just beyond Luboml to
the memorial on the site of the killing fields
where the Jews of Luboml were slaughtered. In
this mass grave my grandmothers, my aunts and
uncle and my two little cousins are buried. We
put on taleisim and recited prayers for the dead.
Later, we went to visit the so-called new cemetery.
Graves had been desecrated, a few destroyed
as recently as last year Tzimerboym took
me to the spot, now an empty field of weeds,
where his parents' graves were located. We
bowed our heads and it is the first time that I
have ever said Kaddish for my father (who died