We hired our third Polish taxi driver in Kielce-where there had a been a post-war pogrom against the Jews (the "tragedy" as our driver called it-ashamed). We needed to get to a small town, in the region of Chestechova, where my paternal grandmother and great-grandmother were born.
The taxi drivers-each one-would not rest until we found the synagogue and the cemetery in whichever town we needed to go to. They were on a mission with us.
We stopped at the small city hall and the driver was again, asking old people where the synagogue was. His persistence eventually led us to the empty lot where the synagogue once stood, but had been burned down.
It wasn't enough to empty the towns of all their Jews, all remaining remnants of Jewish life were destroyed by either the Nazis or the Poles.
But while at the city hall, my father (not a religious man at all) paused and said "I feel my mother and my grandmother here-this is where they lived, I can feel it in my bones, I feel them here".
After a few minutes, he said 'look, look over there' and pointed me toward a horse-drawn old wooden cart-exactly the type that would have been used 60-70 years ago. He said - look, that's exactly how it would have been. The wood was old and dark-just the type of wood that we had identified in the old "abandoned" Jewish homes in other towns.
After, our driver, Stanislaw, asked a few more people about the cemetery, we got a lead. It was down the main road toward Kielce. We were instructed to turn down a stone road, land drive. We drove along the little pebbles and drove on and on and saw nothing.
We kept driving-still nothing but fields. This goes on for several more minutes.
Then, out of the blue, who do we see but the farmer and his son on the horse-drawn buggy.
Stanislaw asks them if they know where the Jewish cemetery is and they say and motion 'follow us'. So, the two Jews with Polish roots, with the Polish driver who has never met a Jew till today, follow the horse drawn cart in slow motion down the dirt road.
Then, they stop and point. "There."
We look toward a circle of trees in the middle of the field. We have found the cemetery.
We get out and start looking for stones. There is nothing but earth and trees and ivy.
Suddenly, my father says-"look". He picks up a ceramic knob-part of a gravestone. Then I look down on the ground. There is a bone.
My dad is a doctor-so he easily identifies it as human, part of the lower spine, which means that the graves have either been desecrated or people were murdered there, left in fields to decompose.
I start to feel itchy and in pain. The ivy is toxic and I have to get out. I am unable to escape the conclusion that this place-some of the evil has grafted onto me physically. I am being instructed to get out. Now.
We climb out of the forest and our driver insists on speaking into the camera in Polish about what has happened. He has not had a regular working day-not in the slightest. He needs to tell people about it.
We thank Stanislaw, promise him a photo and drive back to Kielce quietly to take the train to Warsaw.
