Susan J. Gordon

"But you won't see anything," my aunt said, when I told her I was going to Ukraine to visit our family's ancestral towns. "It's all gone, every bit." Then she smiled and added whimsically, "Who knows -- maybe you'll find modern shopping malls!"

Born in Manhattan in 1920, my aunt was the youngest daughter of immigrants who came from Eastern Europe at the turn of the last century. She has always supported my work and my ambitions, and I'm sure she didn't mean to disparage my plans. But she didn't understand that I almost didn't care if I found "nothing," (which I strongly doubted) or even shopping malls.

For hundreds of years, a vibrant Jewish way of life had endured in Galicia and Bukovina. Now, I needed to find whatever remained of synagogues, cemeteries and Jewish neighborhoods, or stand before what was there now. What mattered most was to show up, bear witness and remember.

In Lvov (formerly Lemberg), Zbaraza, Skalat and Chernivtsi (formerly Czernowitz), I would walk the streets of what had been the Jewish parts of town, and imagine shopkeepers in their stores, mothers tending children, boys studying in cheders, and people chatting in the streets. And maybe, if I was lucky (or unlucky, depending on your viewpoint), I would find traces from that long ago time.

I headed east toward my own personal heart of darkness. In Lvov, I touched notches in doorways where mezuzot had been affixed, and pressed my hands against stone walls where, from the 15th to 19th centuries, iron gates had slammed shut every night to close off the Jewish ghetto. Even so, drunken rowdies broke in periodically and besieged the little neighborhood with fierce pogroms. At the rubble-strewn site of what had been the Golden Rose Synagogue, erected in 1537, is a plaque describing its destruction by the Nazis in August, 1941. Scrawled in black over the inscription was a swastika, attesting to undying anti-Semitism, even today.

Memorial signs implore us to remember. At the edge of Lvov, all that remains of the notorious Janowska concentration came is a series of windswept hillsides. Beneath them are the ashes of more than 200,000 Jews, buried in mass graves. "Passerby, STOP. Bow your head!" a sign demands. "Here, the ground is suffering!" According to survivors' testimonies, bodies of the dead were exhumed before war's end so every last piece of value could be extracted from the decaying corpses which were then burned to nothingness and buried again. "Let the innocent undone victims be remembered forever! Eternal damnation on the executors!"

I stared at railroad tracks that had surely strained under the gruesome weight of relentlessly moving cattle cars, and train stations such as Kleparov. A sign facing the tracks stated that it "served as passage for all Galician Jews on their way to death. About 500,000 Jews passed here in trains from March 1942 till the beginning of 1943."

In Zbaraza and Chernivtsi, I peeked in the windows of synagogues that had been torched, seized, and eventually converted into factories, storehouses and movie theaters. In Skalat, the Jewish cemetery had been totally obliterated and was now a soccer field. Where could I say Kaddish? Everywhere.

As my eyes scanned the site of the wartime "transit area" for Lvov's Jews, I thought of a friend of mine in America who had recounted the story of her deliverance from here. She was barely 3 years old in 1941 when her newly widowed mother hurled her over a barbed-wire fence and then climbed over after her, because she had figured out that this place was the gateway to their deaths. In the 66-year-old haze of childhood memories, my friend recalls being wrapped in a thick shearling coat to cushion her fall, and that the hem of her mother's coat ripped on a wire, and diamonds fell to the ground. Her mother scooped them up, grabbed her daughter and ran. For the next four years, she worked as a cook (with false identity papers) for unsuspecting German soldiers, and paid farmers and nuns to care for my friend. Only later would she be called a "hidden child."

Usually, the memorial signs I saw were written in English, as well as Ukrainian. At first, I was just thankful that I could read the words, but then I realized there was a bigger message here: we are writing this in English not for the local people but for you -- Americans especially, and others of the widespread English-language world. Read this, the memorials demand, and remember.

One day in the not too distant future, the very last Holocaust survivor will have died, and it will be our responsibility as witnesses to tell the stories of their lives, their deaths, and of their homelands, again and again.

I saw plenty. And I will remember everything.

Published April 20, 2007 in The Jewish Week of New York. (C)copyright Susan J. Gordon, 2007.