The History Before Us
Visitors to the Museum pass under this gate, a cast taken from the original entrance to the Auschwitz death camp, inscribed with the ironic phrase Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes One Free). Photo: US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
There, on the corner, beside a bin of potatoes and a basket of onions, a merchant sells flour by the kilo. It’s a beautiful spring afternoon in 1910 Vilna, a city whose nation changes like the weather: Lithuania, Russia, the Soviet Union, but—in this moment, on this afternoon—Poland. So it is a Polish merchant who stands on the corner with two barrels: one for everyone, and another for the Jews. No fool, he has sifted gypsum into this second barrel to tip his scale. One-to-one, one-to-two, who knows how much of the flour my great-grandmother carried home was instead grains of cutting earth?
She gets home; her two toddlers are hungry; she bakes them bread. Pushing and molding the heavy dough, does she ignore the feeling pricking the back of her head that insists the flour feels different, feels not-quite-right? Does it rise like normal? Brown the same? I imagine her sons clamoring for a piece before the loaf could cool, imagine a warm slice placed in each of their tiny reaching hands. How much did they eat before they began to cramp? Before their stomachs swelled? And my great-grandmother, did she know the name of the man who sold her the flour? Did he know hers? How long before she realized it was his flour, her bread that killed them?
She crossed an ocean to get away from these answers.
Behind her, she left the only home she’d ever known, a city heralded as the Jerusalem of the North: a cradle for thriving yeshivas, synagogues, theatres. And