Jews there are none, nor Germans either (Poland, 2023)
Paulo Faria
Translated by Patricia Anne Odber de Baubeta
1.
The stranger emerged in a distant spot, walking towards me along the path that cuts through the pine wood. I hastened to take my camera out of its case and focus on the image, but in the end, I had plenty of time to photograph that man. Seen from afar, on flat ground, people take endless minutes to approach us. It was along this path, on rail tracks that have long since disappeared, that the trains broke through, packed full of people, twenty wagons each time, pushed by a weary locomotive at the back. On flat ground, the perspective creates an optical illusion that seems to hold time in abeyance. Seen from far away, the trains took endless minutes to approach Treblinka.
2.
In a very, very old village called Wolbórz, near Lodz, there is a white house with a Mercedes parked by the garage door. The little dog is barking, a child is playing, making the metal gate rattle with furious football strikes. The owner of the house allows me to take photographs. The Jews of Wolbórz were killed in the Holocaust. The homeowner thinks I am descended from one of them. When the people disappeared that way, torn from the world like drowsy children that someone has kidnapped in the middle of the night, we always hope to see them return. The house wasn’t always a house. When there were still Jews, people worshipped here between these walls: it was the Wolbórz synagogue.
3.
In Ujazd, the synagogue became the firehouse. Ghostly windows are outlined on the façade, blind eyes whose lids someone has sewn up. Without their knowing it, the sound of the sirens evokes the victims. Perhaps they hold dances inside, on feast days.
4.
In the Roman Catholic cemetery of Ujazd, there is a depression beside the wall, a corner for babies that die unbaptised. Separated from the other dead, in their mass grave, they seem defenceless, a little stupefied, unable to understand this ostracism, condemned to eternal bewilderment.
5.
In Brzeziny, we parked in front of some yellow buildings, covered with black veils, where Jews lived before the war. On the other side of the street, on the plot where the synagogue stood, which the Germans demolished with great effort, because it was huge, there is now a commercial site for selling building materials. Enormous and pretty, the synagogue. I know this because I saw an old black and white photo. Hardly anyone survived. Next, we went to the Jewish cemetery. It stood on a slope. After the war, they dug into the slope to make a gravel pit since cement was needed for buildings to grow out of the earth. The dwellers of the new Brzeziny went to live in apartments kneaded out of the crushed bones of the Jews. The buildings overlooking the spectre of the synagogue, once luxurious, are now derelict, because the criteria for what constitutes luxury have changed considerably, and well-being is always relative. And certainly it pains one less, our being visited by ghosts in an apartment with a bathroom and central heating.
6.
Such a dense sadness permeates Lodz that one might say that it fell to every person who lived there to add a new coat of melancholy to the city walls.
7.
After the Second World War, Poland’s frontiers were redrawn, and all Germans found to be living in Polish territory were expelled. In the Lodz region, there were German families who had lived there for four, five or more generations. They all had to leave. All that remained were the farms, the country houses, the palaces. Holding his mother’s hand, as a child, my friend Sebastian would stop in Wólczanska Street, in front of the chalet built in the nineteenth century by a German industrialist, and try to find the animals hidden in the stucco foliage of the façade. Birds, squirrels. And a fox, peeping out of a lair in the roots of a tree, ready to hunt them.
8.
Every time that a couple in love kiss each other on the mouth with genuine tenderness, it is as if a tiny portion of the evil that exists in the world has been redeemed. It is as if for a few, brief seconds, for the duration of the kiss, indifference, the coldness of hearts, hatred has been suspended. People avert their gaze, spy on them discreetly, avoid disrupting that moment. Then, the kiss ends, and it is necessary to start all over again.
May 2023
This spectograph was created under the auspices of the project GHOST — Espectralidade: Literatura e Artes (Portugal e Brasil), of the IELT (Nova FCSH).
Accessible at: https://www.ghostprojecto.com/