Failed chronicle
about the war in Ukraine
Paulo Faria
Translated by Patricia Anne Odber de Baubeta
Revised by Peter Josyph
It’s Easter Monday, an official holiday in Poland.
I leave Lodz at one o’clock in the afternoon with my friend Stanislav. He’s driving me to visit outlying villages where there are traces of Jewish communities devastated by the Holocaust.
Before leaving the hotel, I send a message to Yuliana, a Ukrainian refugee with whom I had coffee yesterday in Warsaw. A university lecturer from Kyiv, she is a woman of my age who told me a convoluted story of her escape. It was a conversation in which the English led to a few misunderstandings. The war and exile have left Yuliana feeling touchy about a simple word that she considers out of place, an affirmation on the historical past of Ukraine that sounds wrong to her... or an effort to understand that strikes her as an offensive generalisation.
The first stop with Stanislav will be Brzeziny, fifteen kilometres to the east of Lodz. Before the war, seventy percent of the local population was Jewish. There they had one of the most beautiful synagogues in the central region of Poland. Stanislav tells me that until recently, when someone said “before the war,” everyone knew which war they were talking about. Now, when someone says “before the war,” everyone asks: “Which war?”
The road from Lodz to Brzeziny has been cut. There are two cars flattened against each other, completely burnt out. The traffic ahead of us turns around. Stanislav walks around a tanker whose driver cannot carry out the manoeuvre. He asks two firemen how long the blockage will last. They respond wearily, not taking their hands out of their pockets. Stanislav tells me it will take at least three hours. In the middle of the asphalt there is one of those tents that shield us from the dead or the badly injured.
After a number of rural dirt roads, we rejoin the main highway to Brzeziny. The beautiful synagogue, destroyed by the Germans, gave way to a commercial site selling building materials. As for the Jews, they were all slaughtered. While I photograph the houses where the Jews used to live, Stanislav tells me: “If someone sees you taking photographs they will probably think you are a descendant of Jews who has come to reclaim the family’s property from before the Holocaust.”
Last night I stayed up late writing Yuliana’s story. In a message I sent to her a while ago I had asked her to explain to me what damage her apartment had sustained under the Russian bombardment. It’s the only detail I need to complete the text. Yesterday, in Warsaw, I asked her if she wanted me to change her name. She only asked me not to mention her surname.
In Brzeziny, the Jewish cemetery, located on a gentle slope, was vandalised by the Nazi occupiers. They did the same throughout Poland: broke up the gravestones, the matzevot, and used them to pave paths and roads. After the war communist authorities in the village decided to turn the Jewish cemetery into a gravel pit in order to make cement. The gentle slope gave way to a deep ravine where a pine forest now stands. It’s full of rubbish, mainly bottles for alcoholic drinks. There are the remains of a bonfire. It’s a place for night-time entertainment. We climb up the steep hillside, we slip, we almost tumble back down. The new neighborhood of Brzeziny can be seen from on high. Stanislav says: “In the period after the war the apartment buildings in this city were mortared with the bones of the Jews.”
In Ujazd, where we stop next, Stanislav knows that there is a Jewish gravestone in the Catholic graveyard. Although it still bore the Jewish engraving on the back, it was reused for a Catholic who died in 1970. When we reach the cemetery Stanislav has no difficulty finding the gravestone but the back has since been filled with cement to disguise its origins. A little girl walks past holding her father’s hand and asks him something. Stanislav tells me she wanted to know why that man was taking photographs. Her father explained to her that the man was photographing the flowers.
Ujazd was also a Jewish settlement. It had a great synagogue. The Germans killed the Jews but didn’t blow up the synagogue. After the war it was converted into a fireman’s barracks because there were no longer any worshippers. Stanislav points out, on the facade and on the gable wall, the outlines of the huge windows that were bricked up. The barracks is closed, you can’t go in. There is a greyish patina on the walls and floor that no light is able to brighten. The Jewish cemetery here was also vandalised by the Germans. On the land, left abandoned, a pine forest has also grown—spontaneously. It’s next to a cement factory. People have been digging in the middle of the trees, raising up hillocks of sandy earth for motorcycle jumps and stunts. There are empty alcohol bottles everywhere. There are heaps of human excrement and soiled toilet paper. After work the workmen have a drink in the pine grove before returning home. There is no sign of the graves or headstones. In the middle of the rubbish and the excrement, among the pine trees, a long protrusion in the ground hints at a wall, perhaps. The bones are in the earth, among the roots.
In Tomaszów, a town of 60,000 inhabitants, the Jewish cemetery is next to the Catholic cemetery. Stanislav parks the car in front of the gate of the Catholic cemetery.
“There are two ways to enter the Jewish cemetery," he says. "There is the correct way, which is to look for the caretaker who has the key—but he is never there so it can’t be done. And then there is the wrong way, which is what everyone does. We’re going to do things the wrong way.”
Tomaszów was an industrial centre, famous since the nineteenth century for its artificial silk, textiles and rugs. The workmen were Poles who lived in the poor part of town. The Jews and the Germans—some of whom owned the factories—tended to live better. We walk along the outside of the wall of the Catholic cemetery, go round a corner. Concrete patches cover old holes in the wall of the Jewish cemetery. But there, at the back, someone has opened up an enormous hole with a pickaxe, and it is recent.
“Who did this?”
“The locals.”
“What for?”
Stanislav doesn’t bother to answer because as soon as we pass through the opening I see empty bottles of all sizes and shapes piled up on the ground.
The cemetery is enormous, invaded by the grove. Here, the Germans didn’t tear down the matzevot. Perhaps they planned to do it later on. They used the cemetery to bury the Jews from the surrounding villages as they went about killing them.
In one corner of the cemetery there is an enormous pile of matzevot collected in the region after the war. Perhaps the headstones from Ujazd and Brzeziny are here. The headstones underneath seem to have been stacked with care. Those on top appear to have been tossed on thoughtlessly. Perhaps it was the passage of time that made them slide off that way, shifting onto the stones around them.
At the exit to the street, when we go back through the hole in the wall, stepping around the empty vodka bottles, I tell Stanislav that we have big problems with alcoholism in Portugal but, as far as I can see, Poland seems to be playing in another league. He says: “It's been worse. The ’90s were very hard here—people used to drink much more than they do now.”
When we are back in the car he draws my attention to the plaque with the street name: Smutna Street.
“Smutna,” he says. "It means sad.”
We start back for Lodz. Stanislav tells me that we will go through Bedków so I can see a beautiful Gothic church that still survives there. We enter a straightaway with a row of trees on either side and the church tower looming in the distance. Ahead of us I see a man sprawled in the gutter.
“Careful—someone has fallen.”
Stanislav pulls over. It’s a couple. Stanislav approaches them. The man has already stood up, he staggers. They were cycling, the bicycles are lying on the asphalt, their wheels still spinning. The woman looks stupefied, her eyes vacant. I ask Stanislav: “Are they drunk?” He answers: “Yes, they are, but she can still stand.” He exchanges some words with the woman, turns back to me and asks: “Shall we take the man home?”
“Of course.”
I take my jacket and rucksack off the back seat, store them in the trunk, to make space. The man sits down. The woman explains to Stanislav how to get to their house. It isn’t far. In three minutes we can drop him off. The man doesn’t stop talking all the way, making limp gestures. Stanislav stops, helps him out of the car. The man heads for home, pulls up short in front of the low gate of the yard in front of the house, looking. He sways, as if shaken by the breeze. He leans against a tree. When he moved away from us we could see that his trousers were soaked in urine. He has also flooded the back seat of Stanislav’s car. I ask him what the man was saying on our way here.
“He thanked us very much, said we are the best people he has met in his life.”
The woman does not appear. The man keeps walking the length of the fence without going into the yard, seeming to hide himself behind another tree.
“What on earth is he doing?”
“No idea. He can’t be pissing, because he’s already done that in my car.”
“You did notice they were going out of the village, right?”
“Yes, but they soon changed their plans.”
The woman still does not appear. The man staggers backwards and forwards.
Stanislav and I wait in the car which smells of urine.
“What did the woman say when you stopped the car and went to them?”
“That her husband had fallen but he wasn’t drunk.”
“No?”
“No. She said: ‘He isn’t drunk, it’s just that he has a broken leg’.”
“A broken leg.”
“Exactly. A broken leg. Now, I don’t know if you noticed, but in the car, every two words he said kurwa.”
“No, I didn’t happen to notice.”
“Kurwa is the most vulgar word you can say in Polish. He used it to punctuate his sentences."
The man has sat on the ground.
“Every time I travel abroad and people find out I’m Polish, someone immediately shouts ‘Kurwa! Kurwa!’ at me. And waits for me to smile. As if some kind of complicity were being established between us.”
We wait.
Stanislav says: “She should have appeared by now."
“Perhaps she has fallen over as well.”
“Let’s see.”
We drive back, but there is no sign of the woman.
“She’s decided to seize her freedom and begin a new life far from Bedków,” I suggest.
“Well, we’ve done more for them than the vast majority of people. Let’s go.”
He changes direction again. Ahead, we see the woman walking, bent over, pushing the two bicycles, one with each hand.
“So she took a shortcut.”
We overtake her, stopping beside the house again. The car smells more and more strongly of piss. The man has disappeared, we can’t see him anywhere.
“Let’s wait for her,” suggests Stanislav.
She turns the corner, red in the face. Stanislav opens the window on my side and calls to her. She doesn’t hear him. She tries to lean the bicycles against the fence, the bicycles fall down with a bang, first one then the other, as if they too were drunk. Stanislav calls her again, she comes up to the car looking exhausted. Stanislav explains that we left her husband there a few minutes ago, but now we don’t know where he has gone. She speaks in a slurred voice, seeming to be asking Stanislav for something, insisting, moaning, making clumsy gestures as if searching for something in her clothing. Stanislav tells her no, she insists, he refuses her again and he closes the window to end the conversation. She remains there, looking at us. She seems on the verge of tears.
“What did she want?”
“She wanted to give us money for our trouble.”
As we enter Lodz, I receive two messages in quick succession from Yuliana. In the first she gives me a detailed description of the damage done to the apartment by the missile from Putin. In the second one she says: “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to publish my story. If you want to tell people what the war is like you’ll have to see it with your own eyes.”
I am so disappointed and so annoyed with myself that I don’t say anything to Stanislav for quite some time.
“A broken leg,” I finally say in an avenue in Lodz.
“I think it was a metaphor.”
We never did get to see the Gothic church in Bedków.
June 2023
