One hundred years ago, all the villagers drew their water from the town well. Today there is still no running water in the village, but people draw water from their own wells in front of their homes. All the homes do have electricity.
Throughout my childhood, although we lived in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, my father told us how lucky we should consider ourselves. We could take a hot bath or a shower at a moment’s notice. The Emperor Franz Josef, living in the palace in Vienna, had to wait for someone to heat the water in order to bathe.
In his visit to Maydan prior to our arrival, Alex had located the oldest man in the village, 85-year-old Ivan, who turned out to be a fount of information. He recalled playing with my uncle Avram’s children in their home and remembered the tavern. Ivan invited us into his home and we sat around a long wooden table, drinking vodka at 11 a.m. as the stories flowed.
Then Ivan took us to the site where my family’s tavern stood. The house had been rebuilt, the only new one in the village. The sturdy tin roof of the tavern was now on a neighbor’s house. The family that resided in the house on the site of the tavern came out to the yard. Nothing could prepare me for this meeting. Upon hearing my aunt’s name, the woman cried in recognition that her mother, who died 20 years ago, always talked about her best friend, a girl named Chana. They had gone to school together across the street from their homes, the very school we had just stepped into.
That evening, in Lviv, I called my aunt and told her we met Haska’s daughter. She was stunned. She said she had not heard that name in 80 years.
Later that day we visited the nearby town of Gologory. It was a devastating feeling to stand in the destroyed cemetery where my great-grandparents were buried. One or two fallen pieces of a Hebrew-lettered gravestone served as reminders that this was a hallowed place. Empty pits remain where Jews were executed in the 1940’s. It was a moment of deep reflection for all of us.
The next day we visited the larger town of Zloczow, which, prior to World War II, had more than 5,000 Jews representing nearly half the population. Our family would travel from Maydan to Zloczow for the High Holy Days.
The once impressive synagogue in the center of town had been destroyed by the Nazis; today the site is a parking lot for buses. The large Jewish cemetery has a memorial to the Jews who died in the Shoah. No tombstones remain; the Nazis used them to pave roads. The absence of Jewish life is haunting. Only memories and memorials survive.
Throughout our travels in Eastern Europe, we observed a powerful commitment to sustaining Jewish tradition and culture by a small number of Jews still in living in Lviv, Krakow, Prague, and especially Warsaw. There, the 3,000 remaining Jews sponsor annual Jewish film, music and book festivals, as well as a very active Yiddish theater (with simultaneous translation into Polish and English).
Unexpectedly, we encountered an even more vivid example of Jewish continuity. We journeyed from Warsaw to the extermination camp Majdanek, just outside of Lublin. Unlike Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the Germans had an opportunity to destroy most of the killing apparatus, Majdanek was left in great haste. The gas chambers and crematoria remained intact.
Compared to Auschwitz, which seemed to have thousands of people when we visited, Majdanek seemed empty.
