Berlin 16/12

I told myself I wasn’t looking for a neat story. A perfect pocket of history I could tuck my longing for nostalgia into. I told myself I wasn’t trying to walk right up to the past, wasn’t going to be irritated by today spoiling my reunion, spoiling my illusion about beginning where they left off.

A friend of a friend I just met said they feel like a ghost, haunting this place. Said they came seeking their families pain and instead found the pain of those who are still here. Another friend of a friend I just met told me a story about a visit from an American Jew who sat across from him in a crowded Berlin cafe ranting loudly about how terrible Germans are…. how he had no idea where to place his discomfort, his irritation… the holocaust memory here seems to always be placed in a meticulously constructed maze or an immaculate and cold basement, and I’m not sure where I want it to be, but not there.

there’s a cemetery in the old Jewish quarter that was created in the late 1600s, when Jews here were first permitted an official place to bury their dead, it’s a small patch of land that takes no more than 5 minutes to walk the perimeter of, a sign says they estimate 10,000 bodies were returned to this soil, long before it was destroyed by nazis it was taken from the Jews and used as if empty, then returned, the dead lay in layer upon layer as if unwanted history can be crowded out by enough new bones

I find myself wanting to walk up to total strangers who are drinking cappuccinos and eating pastries and whisper in their ears, ‘there used to be so many Jews here.’ if any one of them were to reach through the absurdity of it and respond, honestly, to ask me ‘so what?’ I would say that’s all. I just want to keep saying it because it’s true.

I’m learning I’m not the only one with a story about Poland, that she was a little more kind to us, a little more safe, a little more gentle than some of her neighbors, that it was the ground of some refuge that was turned torment, that there are connections between a place so kicked around by history that both held us and crushed us

I don’t think I was taught to be any good at facing history, at anything more than pick pocketing through fallow battlefields for what serves me

i don’t think I was taught to be any good at facing the infinite befores that each burrow their own infinite width and breadth, at accepting complex human lives will never offer up cover for any of our choices, only an underbrush of questions that we must measure carefully how deep we have the fortitude to journey inside, that they will only ever transport us into new voids of unanswered wondering

since I arrived in Berlin I have been furiously googling, finding out things I could have learned sitting at home in Minneapolis but wouldn’t have, I like how the need for details about my ancestors lives feels freshly urgent, how I feel I can almost glimpse their outlines, almost smell the warmth of their skin, how it feels like just a few more details would spontaneously re-animate them. my googling has also brought me closer to our people’s stories about the dangers of trying to bring back the dead, of trying to tether oneself to what needs decomposing, and release.

there is a Facebook group I am a part of, for the descendants of Jewish rava ruska. This is the town my Bubi was born and raised in. It was Poland for most of the years she lived there and is now Ukraine. (It became Poland when she was a year old, before that it was part of Austria/hungary.) Many years ago I got an invite to this group and I still have no idea how someone there found me. I don’t have much of an ancestral research internet trail. There are about 150 people in the group. There were about 5,000 Jews in rava ruska when it was occupied by the 3rd reich. While doing some sleuthing through this page the other day I found a document someone posted, it was a list of names of the judenraete of rava ruska. Judenraete were the nazi formed Jewish police tasked with carrying out their orders within Jewish community, usually in the ghettos. There were 17 names on the handwritten list, in this photo of a yellowing piece of paper. My Bubi’s fathers name is one of them.

In a comment below the post it says if you find your ancestors listed here don’t rush to any assumptions about what it means. Yes there were many who joined the judenraete, who harshly upheld nazi policies to try and gain themselves favor or pardon, usually the only favor they gained was being on the last round of transports to the death camps, but often anyone in an existing leadership position was forced onto the judenraete, wasn’t given a choice. Some did their best to protect people for as long as they could.

beside the trickle of shame and heartbreak creeping up as I considered the possibility that my bubi’s tata, my mama’s Zelda was a nazi accomplice, I wondered how many of the 150 people in this Facebook group had found their people on this list, I considered the likelihood that I was the only one, the possibility that this offering of help to make sense of this confusing moment was created just for me. I looked again at the photo of the aged paper, at the tight neat cursive carrying the names and saw that beside the names was a column that listed addresses, that beside my great Zeida’s name was the address of the home my bubi grew up in.

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