roadtrip

As we travelled from Warsaw to Auschwitz, watching the green Polish country-side pass by, I could not ignore that I was tracing my grandfather’s journey so many years ago, following his evolution from a child of Warsaw to ghetto resident to concentration camp prisoner. I felt it every step of the way. Because there he was, by my side, shadowing his own experience at the same time.

Travel writer Khadijat Oseni asked me to guest blog for her series Jetsetter Problems, based on my previous trip to Auschwitz with my grandfather. Her blog offers a variety of perspectives from travelers and the places they visit, and how those places affect them. My entry set a much different tone than many of her other essays. But i’m grateful that she asked me to contribute and that she felt this specific story was an important one to share. It’s a small sample of what we experienced, and also a sense of what was to come. CLICK TO READ. 

We drove down to Auschwitz from Warsaw in a private van with one other passenger, Zofia Posmysz. Even though we could barely communicate, I liked her from the moment we picked her up. When she got in the car, she took off her awesome vintage 1920’s hat and gave me a Werther’s Original. Zofia had become a prisoner of Auschwitz some time before my grandfather, arrested for handing out leaflets for the Polish Underground resistance. Germany was intent on taking over Poland, and many in Poland were determined to put up a fight. Although Zofia was held in a different part of the camp with other Polish nationals and political prisoners – away from the Jews and other undesirables, my grandfather asked her a few names, to see if they knew similar people. There was some vague overlap, but nothing too revealing. Auschwitz was a huge camp, and I imagine it to be a monumental task to try and unearth faces and names from over 70 years ago, from an era that you spent so much of your life trying to block out. But, for orientation, there is always Your Number.