"The Judenrat let it be known that all ... had to come out at 4:00 a.m. the next day"

[A departure from my usual themes, prompted by my traveling in Poland]

In September 1939 there were 3.5 million Jews living in Poland; today there are five thousand.

Today my mom and I visited Czyzew, Poland (pronounced approximately "CHIH-zhehv," and sometimes called Czyzewo or "CHI-zhehv-uh"), the village of 2,500 where my great-grandfather Josef Schwarz spent his first twenty years before leaving for the United States in 1913. In New York he worked in the garment trade, where he met Eva Gorski, the Russian Jewish woman he married and my mother's grandmother. Today we met the mayor of Czyzew and learned a bit about its history, thanks to the assistance of an English-speaking guide from Warsaw who is used to helping American Jews who want to find their roots in the ruins of the communities, now destroyed for some sixty years, where their relatives lived. We made some essentially unsuccessful, but still rather fascinating, efforts to track down a record of Josef's birth. This meant visiting the village hall and the regional archive in Lomza, and watching the archivists pore over turn-of-the-century Cyrillic script in yellowed record-books, which the local synagogue (apparently only quite intermittently) maintained. My mom was a little disappointed that we didn't find the real paper trail of her grandfather, yet there was nonetheless something fascinating about simply learning how difficult such things are to track down. It's quite amazing that the records we saw today even survived the upheavals of World War II, when so little of Poland, and especially of Jewish Poland, did so.

We have had a lot of trouble determining the number and names of my great-grandfather's siblings. At least two seem to have stayed in Poland and later emigrated to Palestine; perhaps two may have stayed in Czyzew, in which case they were almost certainly killed in the Nazi death camps. Czyzew is located in the same gubernia as Jedwabne, the site of the episode described in Jan Gross's 2000 book Neighbors. Gross's book concerns an episode long well-known locally but until recently totally ignored by historians, in which (as the book jacket bluntly puts it) half of a small Polish town murdered the other half, killing some 1,600 Jews in an afternoon, less than a month after the Nazis invaded this then-Russian-occupied part of Poland. Gross argues that, Polish national narratives to the contrary, the Germans in fact played hardly any part, at least in this town and he thinks in many others, in the killing of Jews.

In a Yizkor or memory book collected by survivors and descendants of Czyzew residents, one man tells a small-town variation on the familiar themes of Gestapo and Judenrat: "The work lasted for three weeks. And when it had ended, the Judenrat let it be known that all people, craftsmen and women had to come out at 4:00 a.m. the next day and to assemble in the town square. This was the 28th day of the month Av, 1941.[...]" After we saw Czyzew, where no Jews live today, we drove out to the edge of town and along a dirt road to check out a large tombstone. The inscription, in Hebrew and Polish, said---roughly---"Here is the tomb of the 5,000 Jews from several towns [including Czyzew] who were murdered here by the Nazis in August 1941 for the sole crime of being Jewish." According to Neighbors, a similar plaque in Jedwabne claimed, until just a year or two ago following the book's publication, that it was the Nazis who had murdered the Jews of Jedwabne.