From Warsaw we drove to Radom, a small city an hour south. My maternal grandfather owned land there, and one of the goals of our trip was to research that property. To my mother, this land, which her father may or may not have owned, represented an unspoken promise, kept alive by her naïve sense of justice.
During the war, much of Radom was leveled, and as in other cities in Poland, headstones from the Jewish cemetery were uprooted by German soldiers and used to pave broken sidewalks and streets. At the cemetery, I left my mother talking with our guide and walked the length and breadth of the burial ground. The space was vast, acre after acre of weeds and wildflowers sitting motionless under a lowering sky.
