WARSAW, 4/23/98
The forests in Poland will haunt me for a long time. The pines have thin, tall trunks with hardly any needles on their lower branches; green only on the very top. Encircling these forests are birches with their white and gray bark.
It is spring now. Brand-new buds are dancing on their thin branches. The woods are transparent. We walk from the village of Ticoncyn to the Lophochowa Forest, a place like many others in this cursed land, and find huge areas free of trees, surrounded by green metal fences--mass graves of murdered Jews. There is a headstone on one of these mass-graves with an inscription which says nothing about the horror that took place here not so long ago--in my lifetime--and certainly in the lifetime of many villagers living nearby--inhabitants who must have known, must have heard the sound of the guns sending bullets into the bodies of women holding their babies; into old men and young girls, who hadn't lived their lives yet, snuffing out their dreams with a bullet aimed at their heads. Yes, they must have heard the screams, and the smell of burning flesh, later buried here in mass graves covered with this cursed earth which today grows grass and smells of moss. The flowers next to the gravestone are artificial, lifeless.
If one dared to dig here, one would find bones, intermingled, of nameless people who lived here peacefully in large families; grandfathers and grandmothers, parents and children, laughing and crying, learning and playing before the heavy boots and the rifles came to destroy this life. In my dream, I see my mother as a young girl, playing with her sisters, whispering secrets to one another. They aren't even buried here; nothing remains of them, no grave, no bones, not even ashes anymore. Just what their love produced: Me.