There are many sections that look quite ordinary; a lot of noteworthy tombs are renovated, and the main alley was paved with the help of donors. Inside, you can still hear the faint sound of trams passing on Okopowa Street, the sun reflecting in the windows of a massive apartment building located across this busy artery. Buses, cars, passersby, children playing nearby: the life of Warsaw doesn’t let you forget where you are. And yet here you get to see the life of Warsaw long gone, the traces of it frozen in time.
So you continue your walk, but strangely, it’s unlikely you will see the other walls of the enclosure as the cemetery seems to seamlessly blend into the woods. Suddenly, all you can see on the horizon are graves overgrown with ivy, sturdy low-hanging trees and thickness of the vegetation. Once you turn the corner and go deeper and deeper into this wilderness, the sounds quiet down, no more trams, no more children playing nearby, just you, forlorn graves, greenery and silence, occasionally pierced with the sound of a bird chirping. The sun punctures the green foliage, illuminating chunks of this otherworldly garden. All in all, everything is so still and quiet, you can practically hear the sound of your own heartbeat.
For someone who, like me, grew up in a Polish Catholic household, the sight is particularly harrowing. When I was a kid, I watched my grandma taking care of the grave of her own mother; picking out flowers and bringing candles. I remember the exact moves of her cotton cloth wiping the dust off the granite tomb. When she died years later, I saw my own mother taking care of grandma’s grave in exactly the same way – cotton cloth, flowers, candles. Despite being slightly cynical about the process myself, perhaps not too convinced what these gestures do in practice matter to those who are no longer here, I inevitably join in, every time. As if driven by some primordial force, I am accepting the burden of responsibility of those who are still alive, believing that by visiting the graves and by performing all these rehearsed moves, I am engaging in the process of keeping the memory of those who have passed alive. Despite knowing that some of these acts of remembrance may differ from Jewish customs, here I still look for various signs of presence – searching for pebbles on the tombs or makeshift paths leading to less accessible graves – often in vain.