A Strange Email Led Me Back to Poland
Reconnecting with my heritage and discovering long-lost secrets
This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.
My parents survived ghettoization, concentration camps, and many more unspeakable Holocaust horrors. Each was the sole survivor of their family of origin; their nearest relatives all perished in Auschwitz or Treblinka. My parents met and married in a displaced persons camp after the war, and I was born in Germany, 18 months after my mother’s liberation from Bergen-Belsen. We immigrated to the U.S. in 1947—early in the refugee wave. Growing up, I often heard my parents’ negative (to put it mildly) view of their home country, Poland.
My father grew up in Kielce, a moderate-sized city that was known for a 1946 pogrom in which more than 40 Jews were slaughtered—a year after the war ended. So, I had some sense of Kielce as a “real” place.
My mother came from Garbatka, a much less well-known village southeast of Warsaw. Wealthy Poles, drawn to its clean mountain air, bought summer homes there, while the local Jews were dirt poor. My mother often spoke about her difficult childhood, but Garbatka never seemed real to me. I was in my 50s before I saw a photo of my maternal family. I felt fundamentally alienated from Garbatka—but also curious. Where were my roots? What was this place that had shaped the identities of my mother and my ancestors?
My mother died in 2003, my father in 2005. In 2012, out of the blue, I received an email from some current residents of Garbatka. They were organizing a ceremony to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Nazi “pacification” of the village, when Jews where forced into the Pionki ghetto or else deported to Auschwitz or Treblinka. While researching the Jews of Garbatka, they had stumbled on my novel, which mentions my mother’s hometown—and they wanted to learn more about the fate of my ancestral community.
My first reaction to the contact from Garbatka was, “Hell no! I’m not telling them anything.” I was channeling how I thought my parents would react. But upon reflection, I realized that Garbatka must have evolved in the decades since my mother’s expulsion. I even felt a kinship with them; their curiosity and search for knowledge was a mirror image of mine.
I decided to cooperate, and tell them what I knew about my mother and her family. I also contacted cousins and family friends with roots in Garbatka, inviting them to take part in the conversations. Some were happy to be involved; others wanted nothing to do with the project.
The exchange of information went both ways: the local historians in Garbatka sent me photos and—most significantly, to me—copies of my mother’s and cousins’ school enrollment papers. Thanks to those documents, I learned that my mother—who was known as “Gertrude” in the U.S.—had been called “Gitla” as a girl in Poland. And they contained an even bigger reveal: she was five years older than she had told everyone, including my father. A secret she had guarded for 58 years.
Garbatka was becoming a very real, concrete place for me. To close the gap, I hope to soon experience it in person. My young grandson will be teaching English in Poland next spring, and my husband and I hope to visit—enabling the younger generations to follow the footsteps and breathe the same air as our departed ancestors—and, at last, to have a greater sense of our roots.
Learning English at age five (and abandoning Yiddish then) sparked Esther Erman's lifelong passion for language, which led to a passion for literature. Esther lives in the California Bay Area with her husband Lee and travels as often as possible to see her daughter Caryn in NJ and her son Greg and grandsons, Ben and Matthew, in England.
This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.
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Esther, thank you for writing this, honoring your parents and also local Polish activists trying to restore stories and experiences of Jewish citizens who once populated their towns. I hope you write another piece after visiting Poland! My advice: go with an open heart and mind. While your parent’s perceptions and experiences were horrific, (as were my mother’s and grandparents’ ), it’s an opportunity to learn about their lives before the war, interacting with younger Poles who are genuinely interested and who will capture their stories for future generations.