Żychlin

As I was photographing this former synagogue in Żychlin, I met a number of neighbors curious about what I was doing. Among the neighbors was a woman who watched me closely. Eventually she came over to me, and we talked a little despite my very rudimentary grasp of Polish. She told me her age, and then she explained through my interpreter that she remembered when the synagogue had been a place of worship used by the Jews of the town. She said that one day, on her way home from school, she looked inside. She described this action as though it required considerable courage, as no doubt it did for a young Polish child. She painted a beautiful picture of the interior; beauty that had been destroyed forever.

It was late in the day, and I was hurrying to get the photographs done, and I did not pay enough attention to the woman’s story. I operated from my American perspective that found nothing particularly unusual about going into the place of worship of a different religion; not stopping to consider how extraordinarily unusual it would have been for a Polish Catholic child to venture into a Jewish synagogue, and failing to ask about the circumstances that would have allowed the child’s visit. Only after we left Żychlin did I stop to do the math, taking the woman’s date of birth and her age when she looked inside the synagogue to understand that when she visited the synagogue, the Jews of Żychlin had already been deported to their death. The synagogue was open because the Jews were gone. And the question lodged in my mind is why neither the lady nor I saw fit to mention the fate of the Jews of Żychlin.