The Ghosts of Zambrów
Three years ago, when we were still living in Warsaw, we were visited by very good friends from Argentina. Like most Argentines, Susana is descended from immigrants from Europe, and wanted to see the place from which her grandmother came from: a small town called Zambrów in north-eastern Poland.
I had never heard of Zambrów, but we soon drove the 120 km from Warsaw, to look at the town and find the Jewish cemetery. Susana’s grandmother Feigue had escaped from Zambrów one night in the 1920s and thus avoided the fate of many of the Jewish residents when the Nazis arrived.
In the 1960s, survivors of Zambrów, mainly in the US, Argentina and Israel, produced The Book of Zambrov, published in Tel Aviv in 1963, containing over 600 pages describing the Jewish life in the town. Included in the book is a handwritten map showing the cemetery which was our guide.
Sadly to say, we found the cemetery in a pitiful state with many gravestones damaged. This was the inspiration for my poem:
Zambrów
Bottles smashed
Sprinkled splinters of glass
Teenagers drinking in the ghosts
Gathered in the darkness
On the edge of town
Around the stones
Broken and sticking out of the ground like the teeth in an old crone’s mouth
Uneven and randomly spaced
Hebrew words spilling out of the carvings
She has come from far away
From the city
At the end
Of the world
Searching
Among the tombstones
On the edge
Of a small town
Searching
In the misty past
With arms stretched out in the darkness
Reaching across the years
Towards a girl of twenty
Who ran away one night from this place
Her grand-mother
