'They all disappeared here': A pilgrimage to Poland, the burial grounds of Jews
How Poland descended into a black box of Jewish extermination led me to visit the homeland of my relatives to learn more about the Holocaust

Article content
POLAND — The afternoon sun broke through northern Poland’s grey skies as we walked into a golden-yellow field hedged by massive evergreens. Birds quietly chirped in the brush. Some in the group were draped in Canadian and Israeli flags as we entered the clearing where Che?mno once stood.
Che?mno was the first death camp created by the Nazis in 1941, a year before the Wannsee Conference where German leaders hammered out the logistics of implementing the “Final Solution” to eradicate European Jews. Six million Jewish people would be killed in the Holocaust by the Nazis and their collaborators.
Che?mno was a testing ground for the Nazi industrialization of mass murder, a place where they experimented with poison gas, piping it into large vans filled with stripped-naked prisoners.
“At some point, they were told not to undress any longer. There’s no more room,” reads the testimony of one Sonderkommando, Jewish prisoners forced by the Nazis to help with manual labour. The man was tasked with digging a mass grave when some of the remaining Jews, still alive, were thrown on top of the death heap.
“And then a truck came from the road and when the truck arrived, it had two big vats on it, and it started pouring something onto them. I thought it was water; that’s what it looked like.”
It was lime, a compound of calcium hydroxide. People were burned alive. The screams were so unbearable for the Sonderkommando that he tore garments from a pile left by the victims and stuck them in his ears to drown out their death cries.
The Nazis sought to cover up their crimes and destroy any trace of Che?mno. Graves were exhumed, bones crushed by massive machines, and the detritus of life burned or dumped in nearby rivers. An estimated 172,000 people were murdered at the killing site (including Romani victims).
Not all the fragments of humanity were disposed of as the Nazis fled the advancing Red Army in January 1945. Remnants of the murdered are still scattered across this bucolic Polish landscape that was once a country estate. We scoured the soft earth for bone chips. I found three splinters and held them in my palm. I wondered who they belonged to and what they thought about before their world was destroyed.

We placed them in a burial site and sang Kaddish, a Jewish prayer of mourning.
We had come to Poland to see the graveyard of our ancestors. We were the lucky ones, descendents of those who managed to escape before most of European Jewry was extinguished in the Second World War. This country of green forests and crystalline lakes that cradled Jewish life for centuries was fondly remembered by those who left in the prewar years as Po-Lan-Ya,?“Here rests God.” Legend has it that when Jews emigrated, turning their backs on the homeland, birds would chirp Po-Lin, Po-Lin, “Here rests, Here rests” in Hebrew, as they left, embodying the beauty and love many Jews had for this land.
How Poland descended into a black box of Jewish extermination led me to join the Living Legacy Experience, a tour bringing Canadian Jews of all ages to learn about the Holocaust. In the group were mothers and daughters, grandparents and grandchildren, and brothers in my case.
I’d come because I wanted to understand what it meant to be a Jew on the eve of destruction; what life felt like for the millions living in shtetls, small towns scattered across Eastern Europe where Jews often represented the majority of inhabitants. I was tired of reaching for dusty family history books, tracing genealogies of people I didn’t know from black-and-white photos.
Leibish Tauber, Chaya Malke, Sheindal Blaff. Who were these people whose names I struggled?to pronounce? What did their lives look like? Where do I fit into this picture?
I don’t know how many family members were lost in the Holocaust. My paternal great-grandfather, Hyman Blaff (“Gramps”), left Grabowitz, a shtetl near the modern-day Polish-Ukrainian border in 1921, arriving at Ellis Island.?He followed in his parents’ footsteps, building a life in New York City.

Virtually all of Gramps’ cousins, uncles, aunts and friends disappeared in the Holocaust. Their little town caught along the hypotenuse of a deadly triangle connecting Be??ec, Majdanek, and Sobibor, three of the six extermination camps built by the Nazis.
“Their total disappearance was a big mystery for which we could find no clues,” Charlotte Bendayan, his 95-year-old daughter, my great-aunt, told me by email. She had spoken to one lady in Toronto who heard rumours Hyman’s sister Rivka “was shot while trying to flee” after a Pole informed German authorities of her whereabouts.
Trying to find out what happened to most Holocaust victims is, in many cases, impossible. My maternal great-grandmother, Jennie Jacobson, left Dorbyan, Lithuania, in 1920, saying goodbye to her siblings, mother, and nearly a hundred relatives. Inspired by the promise of new beginnings, she came to Canada and settled in the Maritimes. As the family joke goes, that’s where the poor Jews stayed while the wealthier ones settled in Montreal and Toronto.
Following the German invasion of Lithuania in June 1941, Jennie’s family was likely murdered by Einsatzgruppen, Nazi death squads charged with exterminating Jewish communities in newly occupied territories, aided by local militias. Before year’s end, all the Jews of Dorbyan were likely killed.

“The Lithuanians used sticks to beat everyone. The second Jew to be killed was Rabbi Isaac Weisberg. The German soldiers with guns went to his house and shaved one side of his face. They shaved off not only his beard but skin and flesh. They then proceeded to beat him until he was dead. They dragged his body to the square where everyone was assembled,” the volume Yahadut Lita, published in 1959 by the Association of the Lithuanian Jews in Israel, tells us.
“The people of Dorbyan are two kinds,” Holocaust survivor Itzchak Yacobi reflected decades later. “Those who stayed there to live their lives to the bitter end and those who left at a young age to live in Canada, United States, and South Africa.”
Jennie kept in touch with her family “through the eventful years,” cousin Deborah David told me, updating them on the milestones in her life — marriage, the birth of five children, the death of her husband in 1933. She cherished those transatlantic letters, written in Yiddish, saving them the rest of her life. At some point, her correspondence went unanswered. It was left for her to fill in the vacuum of history left by the Second World War.
?ód? Ghetto
After Che?mno, our next stop was the ?ód? Ghetto. Many of Che?mno’s victims came from ?ód?, a once-bustling Jewish town a couple hours outside Warsaw. The Nazis had forced 160,000 Jews to crowd into the ghetto in early 1940 until they were shipped off to their deaths. The cemetery in the town’s northeastern outskirts is one of the few sites testifying to the community’s existence.
It seemed as if no one had visited the site since the war, a scab best left forgotten. Giant slugs crawled over the? grounds, where waist-high grass made tombstones unreadable. Several of the paths were a tangle of overgrowth as we plodded our way past the graves of distinguished rabbis and philanthropists.
We gathered in an old synagogue on the property. Yellow and blue stained-glass windows refracted in the warm spring sunlight as Yitzi Kempinski, our Israeli tour guide, explained why there was minimal resistance. “Remember, the Jews at the beginning don’t know what it means, that sticking together is actually going to kill them.”

Majdanek
It was a rainy day when we visited Majdanek, and I was glad of it. How else to tour a death camp? Majdanek, on the outskirts of the city of Lublin, was a concentration camp that was later converted into an extermination camp, claiming the lives of roughly 80,000 people, including non-Jewish prisoners of war.
Majdanek’s a rare site the Nazis didn’t have enough time to destroy and hide their crimes. The wooden floors still creak when you walk through its well-preserved barracks; the pressurized doors to the gas cha