Jedwabne

I haven't yet started writing up my notes about my trip to Poland.

It's all a bit of a blur right now, but I made sure to write notes to myself every day about the things we saw, the people that we met, and the strange familiarity that I felt there-the Jewish influence, or should I say the ghosts of Jewish influences? The foods, the smells, the people assuming I was Polish.

It's hard to understand the vastness of the loss of human life until you have seen certain things personally. It's going to be hard to explain how many resources the Nazis dedicated to exterminating every living Jew in Poland. You can't imagine the small places that they got to-and then when the Jews were all dead, the synagogues were burned down and the cemeteries desecrated, stones used randomly for building projects. There was no element of human existence that was unexploited by the Nazis. Human bodies, human kindness, children, Jewish property, art, insurance, gold teeth, human hair-it's unimaginable.

It's going to be hard to explain the open spaces at Birkenau.

Hard to explain how our totally randomly selected Polish taxi drivers went through the bushes, fields and marshes with us to find the Jewish cemeteries. How they wouldn't stop in each town until they found where the synagogues had been, and where our families lay, and the moments when we sadly realized together, Pole and Jews, that not even in death were my people allowed to rest in peace.

How can I begin to explain the seedlings of Polish-Jewish reconciliation, or my realization that in Poland-Hitler posthumously enjoys a great victory-99% of Poles have grown up without knowing a single Jew.

How can I explain the palpable cultural and intellectual and artistic vacuums that were created in the wake of the Holocaust, and that I felt that there was a perceptible yearning in Poland for those Jews.

I need time to process it all.

In the meantime, here is a photo of the memorial in front of the Jewish cemetary in Jedwabne.

There is not a single complete stone, only fragments, and a lonely, deep green tree ring around the graves. It's hardly a cemetery anymore, just a patch of overgrown forest near the memorial to the Jews burned in the barn. I guess I should say 'at least it is there', but that's not much consolation.

The sounds were as they were during the war, farm animals, the sound of the wind in the trees. But the ground cries out, the town is depressed. Spirits linger.