Unlike some other sites of the Holocaust, what strikes you in Chełmno is the emptiness. That's partly to do with the limited number of visitors, but it's also because very little remains.
Estimates vary, but at least 200,000 people were murdered at Chełmno, most of them Jews, but also Roma, Sinti and others. Operational between December 1941 and April 1943, then again between June 1944 and January 1945, it was purely an extermination camp, rather than a concentration camp. Chełmno slightly predates the other extermination camps at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor. The camp also used a different method of murder: gas vans rather than execution chambers filled with cyanide. Those to be murdered were loaded into the vans at one site, and then driven to an isolated spot in the forest to be buried or cremated. A small number of Jewish slaves kept alive to assist with disposal of the bodies but they were regularly culled.
The 'loading' site in the village of Chełmno houses a purpose-built museum, together with the now-refurbished granary in which the Jewish slaves were housed (and whom burned most of it down in January 1945) and the ruins of the manor house from which the vans were loaded (which was destroyed in 1943). The 'burial' site is quite different. The Nazis planted trees to conceal the site but in the post-war period they were cleared and the perimeter of the death pits have been marked out. Other than that, there are memorials, a few crumbling remains of buildings and tools, and not a whole lot else.
The emptiness is helpful in appreciating the scale of the slaughter. The marked out burial pits are up to 200 metres in length and stretch ahead into the distance. There is an absoluteness to them; a silent void from which nothing can escape.
I visited Chełmno as part of a tour organised by the Association of Descendants of Jewish Central Poland. The extermination camp was the 'climax' to several days of visiting towns and villages that once housed large and thriving Jewish populations and are now free of Jews. We visited memorials, recited prayers and explored the remaining traces of Jewish life.
Some people on the tour had close family who had survived or been murdered in the Holocaust (including at Chełmno itself). They came to mourn individuals whom they either knew personally or knew a lot about. That wasn't the case with me. My three Jewish grandparents were born in the UK (as was my one non-Jewish grandparent). All of them were the children or grandchildren of people who had emigrated from Poland between the 1880s and the First World War.
The specific reason I came on the tour was to commemorate those branches of the Rojer family (from which I am descended) who never left Poland. The common ancestor was my great-great-grandfather, Avram Aljesz Rojer, who died in the 1930s. He and his wife Sura had seven children. He lived in the town of Kutno, north-west of Warsaw (today a couple of hours drive away), which we visited on the trip. Today, it’s a pleasant place to visit but some of its Jewish sites are voids like Chełmno is, such as the site of the Jewish cemetery which the Nazis destroyed; nowadays it is a just a green space:
Three of Avram Aljesz's sons emigrated from Poland in the early twentieth century, one to the US and then Israel, the other two to the UK. In the process the surname Rojer was anglicised to Roer. Israel Moshe Roer, one of the two brothers who settled in the UK, was my mother's paternal grandfather.
Of the four other siblings who did not emigrate, we know very little. My mother's father had told her their names and a few other details. He and his cousins had attempted to trace them after the war via the Red Cross and found nothing. In the last few years my mother has been trying to fill in the gaps. Building on the information she already had from her father, and with the help of genealogical researchers, she has managed to glean some names, addresses, birth and death dates for at least some of our missing family members.
However, as to their ultimate fates, we know almost nothing. One of the seven siblings, Hinde Chaya Ajke, died in the Kutno ghetto of a heart attack in March 1941, and we also have evidence that suggests her son died of typhus in the same year. We know that another sibling, Henoch Rojer, was listed in the Kutno ghetto records, as was his wife and (probably) his children too. I visited the site of the ghetto, then an old sugar factory, now an old warehouse. It’s bleak and empty (although there is a memorial plaque):
We also have a record that Szymon Rojer, the son of the fifth sibling, Itzek Mejer Rojer (who had moved from Kutno to Wloklawek at some point, possibly after a family rift), was listed as a prisoner of war in 1940. Of the final sibling, Blima Ada Rojer, our knowledge ends years before the war. And all of this is on top of the children of the four siblings, only a few of which we have names for.
The possibility that any of the siblings whose fate we do not know - or their children and other close family - actually survived the war is negligible. I guess there is a theoretical chance that a small Rojer child might have been hidden with non-Jews and grew up not knowing their true origins. Post-war Red Cross enquiries might have missed family members whose surname was not Rojer or variant spellings of the nam. Really though, we have to assume that the lineage of the Rojers of Kutno was completely extinguished, other than those who had left in the early twentieth century.
Where they met their end is something we will never know. As I looked at the burial pits in Chełmno I was painfully aware that, while the Jews of Kutno and the wider region were deported from local ghettos to be murdered at the camp, that wasn't the only way that a Jew in Poland could die. We already know that Hinde Chaya died in the Kutno ghetto. Others might have been worked to exhaustion on labour details elsewhere in Poland or been executed in some other way. Chełmno likely claimed some or most of them, but I couldn't be sure who I was mourning as our group said kaddish together.
Even if we did know how my Polish family was wiped out, we will never know who they were as people. There is very little to go on. The only one we have a photo of is the paterfamilias Abram Aljesz, taken in 1926 when he was an old man.
The photo is accompanied by a letter to Israel Moshe, my great-grandfather. It briefly recaps family news and explains he had the photo taken because his grandchild in New York had sent him money to do so. The letter doesn't really tell us much other than that the various branches of the family across the world were, at the time, in touch with each other. The lack of mention of his son Itzek Mejer Rojer is why we think there might have been some kind of family rift, but there is no hard evidence for this. My mother remembers that, per family legend, Itzek Mejer had many children and was, perhaps, quite wealthy. That's all we have.
The emptiness of Chelmno mirrors the sparseness of my Polish family story. It felt impossible to grieve as I could not know who or what I was actually grieving. Instead there was a general sadness about...nothing.
***
It is the fate of all of us to be forgotten, to become unknown. Even the famous and powerful eventually become unknown to anyone but scholars and history buffs - just ask Nelly Melba, Andrew Bonar Law or any number of Babylonian monarchs. For the rest of us, personal memories of who we were will last a generation or two. Eventually, all that will remain of us will be our names, our dates and maybe a gravestone. That gentle fading into the historical background is not to be feared or bemoaned; after all, if everyone were to be remembered, human society would collapse under the weight of grief.
Perhaps the first things about us to be forgotten is our mundane side - our posture, our idolect, our trivial likes, our peevish dislikes. My last grandparent to pass away, Kitty Roer (my maternal grandmother), died when I was in my late twenties and, by that time, I had come to know her very well. I remember how she ate, the sound of her laugh and what her shopping basket looked like. My children know a few things about her but it's the more memorable parts that stick (such as the song she and her sisters made up when they were kids, 'The Hoppity-Poppity Sweet-Stuff Shop'). My grandchildren might remember some of what I and my children pass on. But my great-grandchildren will likely know her only as a node in a family tree.
Having published books and articles, I will leave more behind me than most do. Short of total global collapse, it is likely that some of my written work will be preserved in some library or online archive somewhere at least. Yet people will have to think of looking for it and, as I am not famous or massively influential, they will be unlikely to do so. But even if some descendant of mine is interested enough to read my work in 200 years time, they will only know part of me. They will not know my personal hinterland, the unspoken things that make me me.
And that's okay. That’s how it should be.
What isn't okay is the forcible, sudden and total forgetting that the Kutno Rojers were subjected to. They did not slowly melt away into history, as I will hopefully do, they were violently extracted from it. So complete was their erasure that the Nazis even robbed their descendants of the ability to mourn. All the Nazis left of my family were barely visible shells, at the very most.
My trip to Poland taught me that the Holocaust worked, even though the Nazis did not manage to kill every single Jew. It worked because even many of us Jews who weren't personally touched by it were also left with absolutely nothing. And the ultimate sign of it having worked is the urge that many of us have to research our family histories, to visit our ancestral towns, to take part in memorial trips. We seek to fill the void with something, but most of us find almost nothing. To read the thousands of books or the many documentaries about the Holocaust you would think it was a font of stories. And yes, there are stories told by survivors or written down by Jews at the time. The truth is though, that most of us haven't been bequeathed any kind of narrative to grab hold of.
So don't seek to comfort me - or any of my fellow descendants of the Kutno Rojers - for my loss. I cannot grieve. I cannot mourn. And that’s not because I am too traumatised and numb to grieve or mourn; it’s because what I lost is somehow too abstract to feel as a personal loss. Because that's the irony: That a cataclysm as massive as the Holocaust leaves, for many of us, just a vague sadness for something we don't even know we lost.
The Holocaust as void
Thanks for this moving and thought-provoking piece, Keith. You hit on something that is difficult to articulate about Holocaust memory and a memorial trip like ours. The thing that sticks with me is that in the normal course of things we wouldn't expect to know much about our great grandparents, but because of the way their whole world was torn from them and destroyed that absence matters more.
I have read and re-read your excellent article. Chelmno and other places we visited on the tour keep going round and round in my head. I went for a walk with my wife in our local park this morning. I explained to her that it was not unlike the burial grounds at Chelmno with the exception of the fact that there are not 200,000 buried underneath and it does not display all those memorials. That fact was difficult to get one's head around. Many of my relatives died there but, like you, I never knew any of them. A member of my grandmother's family, Mordechai Zurowski, was at Chelmno and escaped keeping a diary of the atrocities. He was later a key witness at the Eichmann Trial in 1961. His name appears on a number of the notices around Chelmno. It was the same with the shtetls. It was always difficult to believe my family ever lived there. Despite the hospitality of the local people towards us, how does one form an emotional attachment to a place of which one has had no previous experience?