Germany – Carwil without Borders

In the summer of 2002, I went on a winding journey from Berlin northwest to Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania in Germany, then east through Gdańsk and Białystok in Poland, to ultimately reach the town of Suwałki in northeast Poland. This route had been charted by my mother to follow our family tree, seeking out each place named among her Christian German ancestors (via her father Carl) and her Polish Jewish ancestors (via her mother Ruth). My fascination with the Polish labor-uprising-turned-democracy-movement Solidarity had added Gdańsk to the itinerary.

My mother’s genealogical travelogue for the journey is fabulously detailed, naming each place we visited, meal we had, and fruit we tasted. After sharing a dinner of bread, cheese, and fruit in a park, we took a late night train from Gdańsk at 12:50am. It being the Corpus Christi holiday, the train car was crowded with late-night revelers and we had to step off the train at another stop to find our sectioned-off sleeper car. Traveling no more than 35 miles per hour, and changing trains in Bialystok we made it Suwałki by midday.

My grandmother Ruth, her five sisters and one brother, were born in Cleveland to Kalmos Rubenstein and Minnie Gottlieb Rubenstein, from 1901 to 194. Their parents, in turn, had been born in the late 1870s in the Suwałki governorate, both Jewish subjects of the Russian Empire. The records my mom compiled indicate they married in Russia in 1900 before embarking on the journey across the Atlantic. A history of the Jews of Suwalki suggests many ups and downs as Jews surged into the area fleeing pogroms deeper in Russia, played a major role in the economy, and built dozens if not scores of community institutions in the town. South of Suwałki, the Russian Empire helped organize the vicious Białystok Pogrom of 1906. But the great looming disaster of the region was of course the Nazi invasion of 1939 and the extermination campaign against Jews that followed.

In Vorpommern, near the Baltic Sea, my mother and I had stopped in the churchyards of a handwritten list of towns. In their cemeteries, often small plots that were used again and again over the centuries, we scanned the gravestones for familiar surnames. Often we found these most by the low stone walls on the edge of the cemetery, where the oldest headstones were moved and stacked up once they were on the verge of being forgotten. In Suwałki, however, this was a different experience. As my mom recorded (all text is purple is hers),

We returned to Suwalki and went to the Jewish cemetery. There are a few grave markers left in this very large field. However, since the Nazis destroyed most of the cemetery and used the stones for roads and walkways, there were few stones left. The people of Suwalki did take the remaining ones and created a wall of the stones to honor the Jewish people. The only other Jewish structure remaining in Suwalki was the Yeshiva.

This cemetery stood as a metaphor for just how close we had come, and just how far we stood from her family, to her second cousins (she was born in 1936) and relatives beyond murdered in the Shoah. So did the presumably Catholic Poles who shared the weekend sunshine with us that late May day:

This is a very beautiful area of Poland. There are many lakes and it is now a great recreation and camping area. We arrived there on Corpus Christi Day and the train was very crowded with people coming to vacation and many to camp. Our guide […] met us at the train and drove us around the area. We went first to Kaletnik where the Gottlieb family resided. We went through beautiful forests with mostly fir trees and then farmland. Kaletnik is a small town with a Catholic Church and cemetery. The graves were all decorated with flowers. The town overlooks a lake. We were very close to the Lithuanian border, but could not cross it because we did not have a visa. Since this was a holiday, the people were walking on the roads, riding their bicycles, or picnicking with their families. We were not able to talk with them.

In Kaletnik’s graveyard, all the graves we found were marked by crosses. The faces, their “blue eyes and blond hair” did not read as Jewish and seemed, as she wrote, confirmation that “Hitler achieved what he set out to do.” The rural lives we saw being lived didn’t match her expectations.

Even though I was not able to find any new information on our family (I did not expect to), I felt close to them. I was able to picture the area they came from. However, I cannot picture them as farmers. Maybe they were shopkeepers or something else in town.

Four years earlier, we had sought out the town of Suwalki in a book of survivors’ names in Washington’s Holocaust Museum; there had been no entries beneath it.

At the furthest point of our travels, then, we reached the abyss, still craving some recognizable way to envision the lives we could never reach.

Until a few weeks ago, in my living room.

In 2002, my mother Carolyn James (1936–2023) and I traveled to Berlin, to Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania, to Danzig, to Suwalki, to Warsaw, and to Auschwitz in search of our ancestors and relatives. This essay, from 2002, reflects on what I, a descendant of these lands but also of Africa, found.

There is a different view of Europe when you look at it as if it were North. The month I spent this spring crisscrossing the continent was not my first encounter with semi-post-imperial Europe as an African. But it was definitely the first time I was traveling to find my way home.

The trip was something my mom had been dreaming of for a long time — back through months of Saturdays we spent tracing the pathways of our family before microfilm machines or hitchhiking her amazing record-keeping on my computer skills. I inherited or learned the need for detail, for stories, for a map to the past, and threw in history, sociology, and mysticism.

I needed these tools not just to assist my mother’s effort to create an almost-encyclopedic genealogy of both sides of my family, but to truly get a handle on what I inherited from the past. Jewish, Polish, German, and African; Kabbalah and animism, goddess and Christ; resistances and fascisms: by high school I would summarize my background and then add “Most of them one of wanted to kill each other.” When you know your most intimate identities are a battlefield, walking about on disputed territory is almost a sacred experience — pushing these forces out of your head and into history.