Why
are there stands of hardwoods in the middle of cities, in the midst of Warsaw
and Lodz? The Jewish cemeteries span out for many acres behind walls. In Warsaw
the Okopowa Street Jewish
Cemetery, established in 1806, is eighty-three acres and the largest Jewish
cemetery in Europe. The walls are brick, much like the Jewish ghetto
walls of that city. The cemeteries are, of course, in once Jewish
neighborhoods. They were part of daily life, part of the compound of Jewish
living. Children played on and near cemetery grounds. I imagine there were
markets and houses at its edges. The dead were close to life, though not part
of it. Life pulsated around them, as Heaney writes, “Everywhere plants/Flourish
among graves.” Those plants then are like people who are always living atop and
alongside the dead. Their dead? Our dead? The dead are tree roots pushing us,
reminding us that we, too, will enter the earth and become nourishment for
plants.
The
dead are both present among and entirely absent the living. I have disliked the
term “the dead,” which marks those who have passed as a group, uniform, and obliterated.
In Poland it was hard to feel that the dead had moved on. They lingered in
history, in the places we visited. We went to them; we sought them out. Rather,
I have preferred the seemingly more human phrase, “those who have died.” Yet,
in writing now I feel that “the dead” is a group that represents all those many
millions, billions, who have passed on before us living. We are always, every
moment, some of us, joining the dead. The dead live among us in memory, but
most of them, at least individually, are forgotten. Those who would remember
them are gone as well. The dead is an idea, an idea that erases individuality,
which is, of course, lost in death. The dead is a thought of all that has come
and gone and that remains, in pieces, among us.
Entering
those Jewish cemeteries takes time. One travels from their outer edges on paths
that lead deep into their interiors, paths that often become increasingly
forested. I had forgotten our small group was in the middle of a city. Once in
the cemetery we were inside a forest, under a canopy, gravestones askew and
angled atop the tenacious rise and push of tree roots. In Warsaw, I felt I had
entered a story, like a child’s fairytale, and was the protagonist lost in a
wood. Around me dwelled the remnants of many spirits. They were like ribbons
haunting my path, circling their energies about my feet and in the air around
me. They induced reverence, caution, attentiveness. Everywhere there were
secrets, small spaces and walks that I could not see. The graves and their
occupants were in relationship to one another. They had developed their own connections
and divergences over the years. They had watched events appear and disappear.
They knew temporality, whereas for me it was only an idea, a wish of
enlightenment and knowledge. Only the graves by the path were visible to me. So
much existed beyond. 
I walked quietly, light of foot and silent, among many who had died and whose markers now crowded and competed for space. Long rows of gray stones standing upright at all angles disappeared into trees with arrowlike trunks. There were small iron fences, both inviting and protective, with motif of curlicue, even filigree, brownish with rust, around family plots. Each fence merited a poem. The fences lived in relationship to the grass, plants, and trees. Sometimes the living things completely obscured the graves; the fence was home to an unruly and unabashedly lush band of plants. There were large, artistic, expressive gravestones heavy with sculpture and verbose epitaphs for famous and wealthy people. Two prominent graves were those of Adam Czerniakow, head of the Judenrat in the Warsaw Ghetto, who killed himself the day before the liquidation and deportation of the ghetto, and Esther Rachel Kaminska (1870–1925), known as the mother of Yiddish Theater; the theater is still operative in Warsaw. These gravestones asserted a command to remembrance, almost forcing it on the visitor. They reminded me how terrible and difficult it is to pass quietly when one has known attention and admiration in life. Others were humble—diminutive, broken, abandoned, their letters erased by time, snow, wind, and vandalism. A Jewish star carved into stone was more impactful and prominent than a name.
