I won't tell you where. You wouldn't find it in your textbooks anyway.
And if I told you, you still wouldn't believe me.
I remember as a small child looking at the sky. When we were leaving. I remember the cold air and I remember the constant smell. I remember that road and your devotion and focus as we made our way out of there. I remember you holding my hand as we crossed the muddy courtyard on our way outside. It's still there. I remember my curiosity about a world I knew nothing about. It looks the same. Everything we know today, pushed back in time by about 40 years. I remember all the buildings and streets we passed when we left the city years ago. They look the same. I took a bus ride through the city recently and passed every one of them.
When I saw the sign at this angle, I had to get a shot. It reminds me of the snake gaiters we used to wear when deer hunting in West Texas. I learned to hunt deer the proper way: safety first. And I learned it from some of Texas' most well-known residents, long-time Texas families. But if you keep driving, you'll find plenty of folks who are into beer and guns. That's not advised. Guns on the ranch when there's beer or anything else around is very dangerous; that's what I've always known. Gun safety and eat what you kill are the two rules I first learned. Deer hunting is a formal process for many. Get up at an early hour, suit up, and climb into the blind, scope and rifle in hand. Dead silence. Many folks hunt with thermal scopes, Sigs, and other types of equipment. For me, just the old school way, sighted in at the range beforehand. I once knew a guy that could hit a target a mile away. From what I hear, it gets complicated at those distances because everyone wants to take home the trophy. And if someone hits the wrong deer, maybe a 9-point instead of a 13-point, it's hard to figure out who did it.
If you're gonna feed the whole family at Thanksgiving and stuff it for the living room afterwards, you wanna make sure you hit the right buck. Especially if you are using a laser. Although, there are different types of lasers. Some are designed to blind the target while others penetrate different layers. It seems like cheating, to control a target.
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It hangs in Frankfurt behind glass. Gouache on paper, painted by hand in 1859, signed S. Thenle. Sixty-six by forty-nine centimeters. Not much larger than a folded newspaper.
It was made to hang on an eastern wall, so that whoever faced it faced Jerusalem. Crowned lions. The Ark of the Covenant painted below. On it, in Hebrew and in German, the prayer that begins Shema Yisrael. Hear, O Israel. The word for such a thing is mizrah. It means east. A direction you can hang on a wall.
But it is paper. Fragile, flammable, the first thing that should have burned.
No one knows where it hung. The record goes blank in 1859 and stays blank for a hundred and thirty years. No congregation, no synagogue, no street. A witness on paper, silent about the exact years it was needed.
A person can be raised in a Christian house, can bow to a cross, can know every hymn by heart, and still, standing before that painted Ark, feel something ancient splinter open in the chest. The first word that comes is blood. Stubborn. Unreasonable. It was there before the name was given, and no amount of Sunday school washed it out.
But watch that word. Blood is not the tradition's word. The tradition counts by lineage and covenant; it is law, not marrow. Blood is the word the murderers used. Their definition did not ask what a person believed, or what house raised him, or what he bowed to. It counted backward through the body and called the result inescapable. So the arithmetic is this, and it is unbearable: the only framework that would have claimed me without asking is theirs. To say the summons lives in the blood is to answer the mizrah in the language of the people who burned the walls it was made for.
And the pull is real anyway. That is the trap. It is a terrible and lonely thing to mourn a congregation that never knew your face. To grieve a wall you never touched. To stand half-orphaned to your own faith, holding a feeling whose only easy vocabulary is poisoned.
The paper does not ask. It accuses. You belong to this story, it says, and it does not say how.
This is all I have of how. A house on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, where two sisters were measured against the wallpaper and the pencil lines climbed until August 1944, then stopped. I had a birthday on that canal once. A couple of years old, thirty years later. Geography and arithmetic. One canal, two childhoods. Their lines stopped climbing. Mine didn't.
A mizrah has one job: to point east. This one reached Jerusalem, a dealer's stock in 1989, and was sold back west to Frankfurt. Behind glass it has lost its wall, its town, its east. Now it points at whoever stops in front of it.
This is survival. Not triumphant. Not loud. Paper should never outlast its people. It did. And the ones left behind carry that weight and have to find an answer that is not blood.
Between five and six million Polish citizens were murdered, three million of them Polish Jews. Much of the killing was carried out on that same soil: at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec, Majdanek, and Chełmno, all of them German Nazi camps and killing centers built in occupied Poland. Whole towns where no one came home. A civilization of a thousand years, destroyed in five.
The ideologies behind these crimes do not disappear by themselves. Each generation must carry that weight, and act on it.
The fields look ordinary now. The forests have grown back. The track is still there.
What remains is the duty to remember precisely. The names. The places. The dates. The silence in those places now is not empty. It is the shape of what was taken.
This is a shared history, and it cannot be told without Poland. For nearly a thousand years, Polish citizens (Jews and Catholics, scholars and merchants) built one of the great civilizations of Europe. From the Statute of Kalisz in 1264, through the academies of Kraków and Lublin, to the printing houses of Warsaw and the streets of Wilno, they wrote in Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew. They fought together in Polish uprisings. They rest together in Polish soil.
To study this history through the objects, documents, and testimonies that preserve it, I recommend:
Dziennik Jadwigi Ankiewicz, prowadzony w obozie koncentracyjnym na Majdanku w 1943 roku, jest jedynym zachowanym oryginalnym dziennikiem napisanym w całości w niemieckim obozie koncentracyjnym. Ta historia zasługuje na pamięć.
(English: The diary of Jadwiga Ankiewicz, kept in the concentration camp at Majdanek in 1943, is the only surviving original diary written in its entirety inside a German concentration camp. This story deserves to be remembered.)
There are some stories that history forces us to remember, and then there are those that seem to whisper to us across time, demanding to be heard. For me, it is Jadwiga's story.
Jadwiga was a Catholic living in Warsaw. On January 15, 1943, she was caught in one of the largest street round-ups the city had seen and taken to Pawiak prison. Two days later she was put on a transport to KL Lublin, the camp the people of Lublin called Majdanek. Yet, in the face of unspeakable horror, she did something extraordinary. She wrote. Her diary, penned between January 15 and May 17, 1943, is the only original diary written in its entirety inside a German concentration camp that is known to survive. Writing materials were strictly forbidden behind the wire, and being caught with them could mean a beating or death, so every word she jotted down was an act of quiet, profound defiance.
She was a talented writer, artist, and painter. In the face of horror at Majdanek, her demeanor was unflinching. What strikes me most is her unique cursive script and, as the museum describes it, her ability to keep her head up. Her writing is not just a historical document; it is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
She was released on May 17, 1943. At the gate she was not searched, and she walked out with the notebook hidden under the lining of her jacket. Back in Warsaw she joined the underground resistance, the Grey Ranks. On January 30, 1944, she was shot dead by the Germans on a Warsaw street. The diary survived her. In 1998 her sister's family placed it in the museum's archives: forty-seven pages in a lined notebook with black covers, written in pencil, in her careful hand.
A Personal Journey to This Discovery
My own journey to this diary was a lesson in persistence. I reached out to several institutions for help with research on related materials, and most showed little interest. The replies, when they came at all, were a single line, with no questions about who I was or what I was working with. It was disheartening.
That is why I am grateful to the State Museum at Majdanek. They answered my emails with kindness and professionalism, and that alone set them apart. It is evident they understand the depth of what happened there, before and after. This year marks the hundredth anniversary of Jadwiga's birth, and the museum is marking it with programs devoted to her story. Their dedication to preserving this history stands in stark contrast to the indifference I encountered elsewhere.
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The third camp of Auschwitz does not exist in the museum. It is a village with houses and gardens, and next to it a chemical plant that has never ceased operating since IG Farben built it with slave labor, mainly Jews. The war ended, the owner changed, the factory kept running. Every morning people clock in there.
No one guards this area. No one stands in line to see it. Eighty years of weather have been working on the brick.
Light only moves forward. I do too. That is exactly what carrying light looks like.
