Nowy Dror Mazowiewski

On Tuesday morning, I filed into Tomek’s car with Kasia and the boys and drove out to the town of Nowy Dror Mazowiewski. We would spend the morning cleaning an 18th century Jewish cemetery. After a stop at a gas station and a mini-mart, and after my comrades smoked their morning cigarettes along the highway, we arrived in a colorless, dilapidated village. We parked the car, unloaded shovels, trash bags and work gloves, and climbed a sandy hill to where the cemetery lay. From a distance, there were few traces of a burial site save for deeply receded cracked tombstones covered by moss, lichen, snails, and weeds. A closer glimpse of the area revealed a far more tragic reality.

Collecting candy wrappers, empty vodka bottles, shoes, rusted cans, door knobs, wet T-shirts, glass shards, and window frames, we wandered along a grassy plateau which became a sandy slope leading into a swamp. The swamp had become a garbage dump filled with old car parts, hubcaps, sinks, sofas, legless chairs, oil spills, diesel fumes, food waste and feces. Only after close examination did we discover that the grassy plateau, the sandy hill, and the perimeter of the garbage-infested swamp had also become inadvertent depositories for human bones; bones that had been unearthed as a result of poor cemetery maintenance, inclement weather, and by a group of locals who had come to dig for gold.

After three and a half hours of cleaning, we had filled four large trash bags of debris and four large bags of human remains – jaws, teeth, vertebrae, hip joints, shoulder blades, and even skulls, all of which were discolored from exposure to sun and rain. Some had nearly disintegrated.

Near a weeping willow, the boys dug a large ditch as Kasia sat down on the sandy slope and smoked cigarettes while I stared down at the swamp wondering how many more bones were beyond our reach. When the ditch had been dug, we emptied our bags of bones and refilled the ditch with dirt. As is the tradition, we buried the remains of our ancestors and marked the new burial site with stones.

* * *

It is hard to contemplate the turnings of the earth’s history,
the turnings of a people.
The old die off and the new shyly awaken,
uncurling as ferns arching upward toward the sun.
And then there are weddings.
And then there are invasions.
Neighborhoods turn to war zones.
Synagogues become horse stables.

In the 18th century, Nowy Dror Mazowiewski was a Jewish place. One can scarcely see the etchings of ancient Hebrew on abandoned chunks of tombstone and the jagged, hollowed grooves of markings left by mezuzot on doorposts. But now there is no life here; only a polluted swamp and piles of bones put back in the earth.