WE FLEW TO POLAND and I shuddered a bit while they played “Taps” at the memorial for the Warsaw Ghetto. Part of my family had been Polish Jews. During my first trip to Poland in 2001, just a few months before 9/11, I’d come to Warsaw as a twenty-three-year-old backpacker and took a bus out to the town where they’d been from. Working off a guide book, I found a boarded-up synagogue and then a Jewish cemetery. Some of the headstones had been defaced with swastikas and excrement, along with the names of death camps. A few empty vodka bottles were smashed, suggesting it was the kind of place where
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