Andrew Kobos
THE TREE THAT DEVOURS JEWISH GRAVESTONES
ZENON LIS
EVA FLOERSHEIM
- Zenon Lis :
[...] As to Tikkun, it is a story from a very long time ago.
Lubaczow is a small and out of the way town in Podkarpacie District (previously Przemysl District) in south-eastern Poland. Contiguous to the lyceum in that town - my long time ago high school - there is a Jewish cemetery. So many times did I watch this cemetery through the windows on the school's third floor. And on this cemetery there was a gravestone that was being slowly consumed by a tree. It was quite an incredible sight to see the grey stone slab with a few Hebrew letters inscribed being devoured by the monstrous green or grey tree. Most likely, that stone was all that was left of someone, and even that for life itself appeared to have been too much left of a human being to tolerate. Such were my thoughts at that time.
Perhaps I may look at that tree and that gravestone in a yet different way? After so many years of continually weaving, and doing it cautiously, my long time ago begun fabric of thoughts about the disappearing Jewish gravestone into a meaningful conclusion, I realize more clearly than ever that all that is of this world must disintegrate into dust.
This is the axiom of the process of life, you may say. Yes, it is. But is it not so that in the final moment we have to abandon all our images, all we have known about God on this side of the Gate and enter the Garden, knowing neither who the Gardener is, nor how His garden is arranged? Perhaps we also should not despair about the gates of time closing behind us and our civilizations, when all what is left behind us does crumble into bits, and bits to dust, and dust to nothingness, here on Earth?... I, of course, am not advocating here not to take care of what is left of our ancestors. I am referring here to our mental, psychological and ultimate attitudes toward time and toward us within time.
What is left of all of us when millennia have passed? What has been left of all those who had passed away so long time ago?
I think such thoughts of mine have begun then and there, at the school's third floor windows overlooking the Jewish cemetery. Perhaps I had to be there, perhaps I had to stand at those windows for minutes and hours and soak in thoughts and images, so the images might crystallize into questions… And the questions into what? Perhaps, I had to watch the disappearing Jewish gravestone, so that something might have occurred within me? Perhaps, like Siddhartha in a Herman Hesse's novelette did learn his wisdom from the river, I have begun learning mine from the Jewish gravestone?
But that what has been happening in me is practically
untranslatable to others, and still so often to myself. But again, perhaps I
should not try telling it all at once, or insist on grasping it all? Perhaps I
should rather wait and wait and let the gravestone of a long passed Jew to speak
to me again and again?
* * *
Grinning, I sometimes say to myself that perhaps that Jewish person left a gift to me beneath the windows of my high school: his/her own - and now disappearing into a tree - gravestone. It is his or her loan for me for the years that are continually coming. And I would like to think that somewhere there, perhaps in the realm of whirling particles and quanta of energy, the Angel of the Jews and the Angel of the Poles pat each other’s shoulders and both smile to me as I am writing this letter. Perhaps they know something I do not know?
Sometimes everything becomes so strange. - Perhaps purposefully?
Life is a dream and dream is life. And one day this notion becomes close to the
real life, so close that a cold shiver can inundate the whole being.
* * *
Sincerely,
Zenon
- Eva Floersheim :
The Jewish cemetery in Lubaczow in southeast Poland still has
around 1600 gravestones. Just to the right of the original main entrance to the
cemetery stands a tree, a big big tree with a thick thick trunk.
Jewish cemetery in Lubaczow: The entrance as seen from the cemetery.
(Photo: Eva Floersheim, 2002)
On a photo taken more than ten years ago by the local museum in Lubaczow, one can see how this tree [a linden] is embracing three gravestones - one on each side, and one from the back of the gravestone.
Jewish cemetery in Lubaczow: The tree devouring the gravestones, 1991
(Photo: Tadeusz Budzinski, a booklet "Lubaczow", 1991)
Jewish cemetery in Lubaczow: The tree devouring the gravestones, 2002
(Photo: Eva Floersheim, 2002)
At least two of the gravestones are for women. The gravestone to the left is from the year 1913/1914. On the gravestone to the right it says "young in years" and "a mother of eight children".
Now, in the year 2002 (5762), the gravestones have disappeared
much more into the tree. The one with its back to the trunk is just showing a
little 'window' and will, probably in a few years, be completely
swallowed up by the tree.
Jewish cemetery in Lubaczow: The gravestone in the middle of the tree trunk.
(Photo: Eva Floersheim, 2002)
The two on the sides will be visible for some more years.
Jewish cemetery in Lubaczow: The gravestone on the left-hand side of the tree trunk.
(Photo: Eva Floersheim, 2002)
Jewish cemetery in Lubaczow: The gravestone on the right-hand side of the tree trunk.
The inscription includes phrases "young in years" and "a mother of eight children".
(Photo: Eva Floersheim, 2002)
Oh, some may say, cut down the tree and free the gravestones. If it was my own family gravestone, it might perhaps be a matter to discuss, though my basic feeling says no, even then.
For now, it is another symbol for me, how, after the Jewish
community in Lubaczow and other places met such a cruel end in the Holocaust and
no Jews are living there any more, we must hurry up to document the remains of
Jewish life, before nature and time erase what is still there.
Eva Floersheim,
Israel
Photographed by Eva Floersheim, April-May 2002
Photo Copyright © Eva Floersheim, 2002
I am grateful to Mr. Bogdan (Nathaniel) Lische and Mr. Janusz Mazur of Lubaczow for their assistance in establishing the authorship of the 1991 photo of the gravestones in Lubaczow Jewish cemetery. (AMK)
