When the Nazis destroyed most of the cemeteries of Poland, they robbed us of the opportunity to say Kaddish at the graves of our ancestors, to clean up the Matzevahs, and to connect in this way to our past. But some cemeteries did survive, including those in Lódz, Bialystok, Czestochowa and Warsaw. However, in the case of Warsaw, even though the Nazis didn’t cart off all the gravestones and plough over the land, they did destroy all the registers. At the end of the war, there was the huge Warsaw cemetery with more than 250,000 graves, but only those who remembered the exact location of a grave could go there to honor a parent, a grandparent or even a distant cousin.
