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Many times when we arrive in a town or village, we do not know where to look to find a cemetery or a Jewish site, so we have to ask the local people. They are invariably polite and quite willing to stop what they are doing to talk to us. Normally we try to speak with elderly people who would be the most likely to have first hand knowledge of former Jewish sites. Over the years I have heard some common themes expressed. For example, if a person is old enough to remember the time prior to 1939, she will frequently say to us that she played with Jewish children, that she had Jewish friends, and that she went to school with Jewish classmates. But almost as frequently as we are told these things, we are not told the surnames of the Jewish friends, only their first names.

I am still pondering this phenomenon. I am not as old as the ladies with whom we speak, but I did grow up in a village even smaller than most of the places we visit. I remember the names, first and last, of all of my classmates. Is it reasonable to expect these ladies to remember the complete names of their Jewish friends? If someone was really a friend, would you not you remember their name? I am trying not to be skeptical, but I am puzzled by this inability to remember the names of friends. And then I recall that in my small village, there were African American children whose names I did not and do not know. We lived in the same village, but they were virtually invisible and unknown to me. But, I cannot say those children were my friends; rather, we were simply not known to each other. And so I am left with the question of whether or not one can be expected to remember the names of one’s childhood playmates.

Let me tell you a brief related story. Last year we stopped in a small town in Ukraine to look for a cemetery. We did not know where it was located, so we asked an elderly lady if she could help us. She turned out to be quite talkative. She told us about her Jewish schoolmates and about a Jewish man who had emigrated to Israel, presumably before the Shoah. Then, in reference to the Jews who formerly lived in her town, she observed that “they must be living somewhere” as though they had simply moved or perhaps gone to Israel like the one man of whom she knew. In a five-minute conversation, she used the phrase “they must be living somewhere” three times. All of us standing there talking knew that the Jews of her town were not living anywhere else. We knew they had been murdered in the Shoah. So what are we to make of the lady’s observation that the Jews must be living somewhere?