Bialystock, a sad town in Poland

Barbara Moser

From Vilnius we moved on by train to Bialystock. We were on our way to Budapest, where we had a plane to catch for Israel. We planned to go back through Warsaw and take a train from Warsaw to Budapest. Then we would spend two weeks in Israel. We decided Bialystock would be a good place to spend a day or two. We had grown up hearing the name although we had no family roots there. We were interested in seeing another Polish town, one where many Jews had once lived and flourished.

Bialystock is a town that looks like the heart has been cut out of it. It's pleasant enough. There are cafés and a modern hotel right in the middle of town. There are pretty streets and people living out their lives in peace, but the town is too quiet, too calm.

Seventy thousand Jews lived in Bialystock before the Holocaust. There was a town square where they traded, whole neighbourhoods where they lived, a fish market, a massive synagogue. Now there is a lot of empty space.

We took a tour with young lady who knows all about the Jews who once lived here. She is not Jewish but she is interested in how our people lived and died in this town. She and her friends do their best to look after the cemetery which is on the outskirts of town. There is hardly a gravestone that has not been desecrated. We walk through the shambles, the tombs stretching out in their jagged shapes as far as the eye can see. She tells us that the "neighbours" have stolen as many grave stones as they could carry to be used as foundations for the apartments they have built in the area surrounding the cemetery.

The children of these Jews, buried on these grounds, cannot look after their graves. They are the victims of the Nazis and they have no graves. She takes us to the site of the synagogue. On one night, the Nazis forced 2,000 Jews into this synagogue. Then, they set fire to it. They tried to climb out of the windows. They were pushed back in. Men, women, and children, burned alive.

We stood on the site of this synagogue. It is in an apartment complex. There are gardens for children to play. There is a twisted structure, a memorial to the 2,000 who perished here where we are standing. How can we be standing here so peacefully? Where are the ashes? Where are the graves? The memorial has some graffiti on it. No different from Vilnius, we think.

It's hard to know what to feel.

We walk along the main street. In one of the windows of a tourist shop we see paintings of Chassidic men counting money by candlelight. Men wearing prayer shawls counting gold coins. I enter the shop. I ask the man behind the counter if he understands what he is selling. "You Jews caused us trouble for hundreds of years. What do you want from us now?" I leave the store. I am angry, can't speak, don't know what to say, what to feel, what to think, except: They still hate us. We're gone from this place, we're all dead here. What or whom do they hate?

We walk through streets of wooden houses. She tells us these were once the houses of Jews. They are to be torn down to make way for a new shopping centre. This was the site of the fish market.

Bialystock is a sad place. There is a heaviness here. It is everywhere.

We have a quiet dinner at the hotel. We try to pretend we are tourists. But what we have seen is never far from our minds.

Why have we come? We have come to bear witness to the dead, to those souls who died in that torched synagogue. But we will not go back to Poland. It is enough. It is too much.