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.

Near the gate, I photographed a man whose face seemed to contain the history of an entire people. With chalky white hair and a ruddy complexion, he had a gaze that was serene, almost without emotion. Images of Nazi soldiers, assigned to the desecration of the cemetery filled my mind. I saw them fired up, cursing the Jews and urinating on the peaceful site of my grandfather’s grave.

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