The Past is Such a Curious Creature

“She died of a long illness,” they told me when I asked about my great-grandmother Anna.  My mother remembered her from when as a child she lived in Poland.  “Oh, she was wonderful.  I had typhus when I was six, your age, and she brought me back to health. My fever was so high she had to put me in an ice bath to lower it.  They thought I was going to die.”  I could not imagine such a misery.  It was 1957 and we were sitting around the big dining room table in Montevideo, Uruguay with some of my family’s Polish friends. Even as a young child, I loved their stories and the word-pictures they would paint of that old world they had left. In 1930 my grandmother had managed to escape the horrors of Poland with her two small children in tow, but not before having to say a painful farewell to her beloved mother-in-law.  My mother remembered (in Polish) her grandmother’s parting words, “Sara, you be a good girl and listen to your mother.  She will help you to a better life.  It is not safe for us here.  Be very brave.”  She knew she’d never see her grandchildren again.
The 1940s brought horrors to the extended family in Poland with many killed in concentration and labor camps and many others simply murdered in their homes. All communication had stopped. It was not until many years later, the early 1950s, that several of the remaining relatives and friends were able to emigrate and some came to Uruguay and now, here they were, sitting around the big wooden table talking and laughing.  “Remember that time Solomon was so full of beer that he couldn’t get up the stairs and Herman tried to help him but they both ended up rolling down? Achhh, what silliness that was, they chuckled.  And then, “We didn’t know how bad it was going to get later.  No one really knew,” as they grew suddenly solemn and quiet.
I took that lull as an opportunity to ask about my great grandmother and was told of her death. And then they continued, “But it was an amazing thing when she died. Back then, in 1939, it was instructed that Jews were not allowed formal burials. They were just dumped into graves. But not your great-grandmother.” “Why not?” I asked. They continued, “Because all of her life she helped the poor. If she had one piece of bread left she would give half of it to the poor and half to her family and she herself would eat nothing. If she had two pieces of cloth she would sew a dress for a desperate child.” “So, she helped the Jewish community,” I mused. “No,” I was told, “Not just that community. She helped everyone who needed her help. The poor people of the village of all religions loved her so much that when she died, they found a way to buy a coffin for her and then they carried  it in a long procession to the cemetery. There must have been more than a hundred people walking together. Even the soldiers on watch did not disturb the ceremony. No one had ever seen anything like that before. A Jewish woman carried with so much dignity! We knew, all of us, we knew that this was the last moment we could all honor goodness in the world.” And then these old Polish people, survivors of unimaginable suffering and grief, cast their heads down with long, heavy sighs.
Even as a child I felt their sighs in my bones. I feel them still.