I had such confusing feelings about arriving in Warsaw. As with every new destination I’ve landed in, I felt a level of excitement. Grandpa visited Poland in 1999. He is the only person in my family to have visited his hometown since the beginning of World War II. Knowing I would be visiting these towns as well, I felt nervous. My grandparents fled Poland to survive. They left everything behind. Sometimes they look back longingly at life before the War and other times they speak of Poland as a very bad place. In a way, I felt like I was betraying my grandparents by visiting Poland. It’s almost as if I was testing them because I needed to see these places with my own eyes to prove it was all true. I felt curiosity and trepidation. How many questions would I be able to ask the people I meet about what they know about us? I would learn, as an overall theme in Poland, that my Poland experience would be about the individuals. Overall, Poland does not know much about us. In the five weeks I ended up spending in Poland, I would meet incredible individuals who welcomed me like I was family. I would also see some things that I am going to have a hard time writing about but I might write about them because they are what I saw.

My bus ride from the airport was simple enough.  When I arrived in the city, the avenues were incredibly wide and devoid of traffic   The sidewalks had complicated designs facilitating bicycles, pedestrians and the handicapped.  Crossing signals had long wait times even though there were so few cars.   When I checked into the hostel, I shared my reason for being there with Dalia, the worker at reception.  I’ll sharw it here too: I went to Poland to visit the towns my grandparents are from.  There may be a very strong possibility that a righteous family hid my grandfather’s family before they head east to Bialystok.  The descendants of this family is my age and he contacted me on JewishGen and we will be meeting for the first time.  It is all a huge deal   for me and my family.  Dalia was very moved by my story.  My roommate was also a local guy showing his friend around town.  I told him the same story and he was quite supportive.  I knew from this point onward that I had to judge my experience in Poland based on the individuals I meet and not what I read in the news. 

My goals for Warsaw were to do the walking tour, see the remnants of the Warsaw Ghetto, see the active synagogue and eat a ton of Polish food.   I had read that the Jewish Historical Institute has some family history research center so I emailed them about my arrival but I didn’t get a response   Because they also had an exhibition, I figured I would just stop by one day.

I was able to do the Old Town walking tour, visit the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, walk through the remnants of the ghetto and see the remaining pieces of the wall within a day and a half.  The Polin Museum is architectural in many ways. It is clear that the design was thoughtful. The exterior resembles a box with holes in it. The inside is a wavy, open and bright gallery. The main exhibition is a walk-through timeline. It seemed like it would be very personal but there very few moments of the exhibition that I ended up identifying with. In particular, I felt that the language chosen to talk about Jewish wealth was not sensitive enough. Given the antisemitic propaganda about Jewish people controlling world banks and the like, I felt like the museum had an opportunity to sensitively discuss the reasons why Jewish were merchants and bankers to begin with (because Christians couldn’t be). Instead, there were quite a few references to wealthy Jewish families of the given era. Pointing out Jewish wealth for the sake of it just did not sit right with me. I understand the intent was to show that Jewish people arrived in Poland and became very successful, but as many of us know, not all Jewish people in Poland were successful and most actually lived in some form of poverty.

Food

Why do we call my paternal grandmother “Sabta”? I’m sure it’s from some uncorrected mispronunciation during the childhood of me or one of my brothers. Safta is “grandmother” in Hebrew. It’s also pronounced savta. However, my grandma is Sabta or “Sopta”. My first cousin calls her “Supta”, so there’s something in my family with taking this very regular word and making it our own.

Sabta does not cook anymore but her cooking used to be a staple of our family visits to her house. She made dishes that I had never eaten anywhere else. When I would visit friend’s family’s houses as a child and grandma was cooking a big meal, those grandmas would make different food. Chicken soup, stuffed cabbage, apple strudel-cake-pie, boiled chicken, tuna salad and horseradish salad might not sound that crazy to you but they were not prepared in typical American style. We are talking no salt, no fat, no oil. The flavor mostly came in the form of love; maybe I’m just referring to the boiled chicken. The other stuff I never really had an issue with. I guess it’s just that these were not typical American hearty meals. Sometimes we’d get excited when she said she prepared hamburgers but they were really ground chicken patties that looked like weird meatballs. We would eat eggplant salad (garlic, egg and mushed eggplant) and Israeli tomato-cucumber salad too. It just seemed like a weird mix of stuff to me and I had decided long ago that this was some sort of weird ethnic Jewish food that Sabta had kept as tradition in the family.

My maternal grandfather, known simple as Grandpa, was the guy who ensured we had herring, lox, and whole whitefish at the table. Of course we’d all of this stuff with bagels and bialys. It was also weird but at least I knew it was associated with Jewish food in America. Grandpa would also bring home kielbasa from the Polish butcher in Brighton Beach. At least I knew that was Polish. In the supermarkets on Staten Island, they sell onion rolls, an excellent option for a sandwich. I never knew where these came from.

It was on my first night in Poland when I went to a traditional Polish restaurant and had schmaltz, potato pancakes and ghoulash when, after my experience eating more ethnic food in Vienna, it really hit me: Sabta and Grandpa’s food is Polish. They are from Poland. Polish food comes from Poland. They also do not identify as Polish. I’m pretty sure the Polish do not really identify them as Polish either and they are referred to as Jews. My grandparents relationship with Poland ended very poorly and I never thought that my entire family cuisine was actually Polish in origin.

Genealogy

The Jewish Historical Institute had a museum-style exhibition about the documentation found in the Warsaw Ghetto by the insurgent Oneg Shabbat group.  I met a docent and told him about my Poland trip and how I will visit Pawel and then probably go to Yosefov and he was moved to tears. He became very teary eyed and choked up when he responded to me. We shook hands. I made my way back to the lobby and asked the worker if there was some genealogy office, in broken Polish.  She pointed to a door in the rear. I peaked my head in and said hi. A young orthodox guy, with a client at a computer, acknowledged me and told me that I can make an appointment via email. I told him I emailed but got no response. He said oh, just write back with some availability and we’ll make it happen. That was a Tuesday, I think.  I had an appointment for Friday morning, before I would visit Pawel.

The appointment at the Jewish Historical Institute was poignant and set the tone for the rest of the genealogical research experience for the trip.  Noam, my caseworker, immediately crushed a decade worth of visions of what I thought the shtetl was. When he asked me where in Yosefov the Grafs lived, I told him in the shtetl.  He gave me a pointed “no, no, no” response. There’s no such thing as a separate shtetl from the town. There might be more Jews living in one place than in another place but it was not a ghetto, big difference.  These were multicultural, pluralistic, mixed towns. That’s how it worked before the War. Holy shit. The JHI has a collection of fascinating private records from DPs where parent’s names, relatives in foreign countries and the list of places lived during the War were archived.  These were called “Survivor Registration Cards” and they were completely voluntary to fill out. We found The Grafs. The Grafs with father Eliezer and mother Resha. That’s us. Eliezer’s records were special because we were able to get his parent’s names (my great-great grandparents). There’s more info on there too: we know where in Ukraine their escape path was (eventually to Uzbekistan) and we know the post-war resettlement towns: Sczezin, Posnan and Legnica.  Those resettlement plans failed. There is also a section where they could list any relatives outside of Poland. It seems my great-grandfather listed Graf cousins in the US and Israel from before the war. So much more research to do.

From Eliezer Graf’s parent’s names, we were able to then use the public records (100+ years old) index on JRI-Poland to connect our family tree.  Noam showed me how to find the digital scan of the birth/marriage/death record and pointed out some are in Polish and some are in Russian, both written in cursive.  He told me learning Russian cursive was no big deal and it’s something you just have to learn how to do to continue this research. Just by looking at a few digital scans of birth and marriage records, we saw how my relatives (language-alphabet) Polish-Latin names differed from the Yiddish-Hebrew names.  Some relatives used multiple names in Hebrew. Sometimes spelling of Graf differed with addition of letter Alef or with a double-Yud, making the name “Grayf”. This coincides with the usage of the German word graef.

Leisure

Of course after such great, affordable meals I naturally wanted to explore today’s Warsaw and really grasp what it means to be from Warsaw today. I wanted to understand what is cool and what people do on the weekends to relax. Warsaw has recently completed building a promenade alongside the Vistula River. Bars, art galleries and music performance spaces line the entire path. I also attended a bonfire party on the opposite bank of the river. It’s the only place in the city where you are allowed to light fires and all the young people come out to drink and eat kielbasa along the river. I did a little bit of dancing and drinking as well. It seemed that Wednesday night was the best night of the week for a good dance party, surprisingly. I also spent quite a bit of time in the main train station Warsawa Centralnya. It’s got a quirky design inside and out. I enjoyed my experience inside but the outside is surrounded by parking lots and I simply hate that.

Conclusion

Fast forward: when I found time in Gdansk, after visiting Pawel (stories coming soon), I put all of the pieces of the puzzle together and created a family tree of Grafs of Yosfev back to 1830.  Before this meeting, I was only able to trace Grafs back to Eliezer’s birth in 1883. I have evidence from 1846, that the spelling of the name changed from Grayf to Graf, in both Polish and Yiddish.  The same great-great-great grandfather, Itzik Grayf/Graf signed the birth certificate of his some Ruvym in 1846 as Grayf and then a few years later with another child as Graf. He also had lovely penmanship.  The days I spent in Gdansk reading Polish, Russian and Yiddish/Hebrew really made me feel alive. I felt international and unstoppable. However, it was my experience in my first few days in Warsaw that really set me up.