My father’s parents were born in a Polish town called Łuków (roughly “woo-cough”), some 75 miles southeast of Warsaw. When I was a kid, any time I asked them about the place they came from, they’d simply say, “It doesn’t exist anymore” in the heavy Yiddish accents they never lost. In my youngest years, I imagined that meant it was a magical place, like Atlantis. As I got older, I understood that they just didn’t want to talk about it.
The elders in my family did not converse freely with the children. Even my father and his three siblings had scant knowledge of their parents’ origins. Growing up, I felt rootless, with absolutely no sense of family continuity. Who were we? Where did we come from? Easy questions for so many other families I knew, who had family heirlooms on their mantels and sepia-toned photos of Victorian ancestors on their walls. I was already in my 40s the first time I even saw a photo of my grandparents as children. My Uncle Howard once told me he felt like a stork had dropped his family from the sky, a whole clan just appearing in Williamsburg, Brooklyn out of nowhere. But I put together bits and pieces of the story over the years, culled from what I overheard at family gatherings and what I managed to wring out of my father and his siblings.
Aunt Sondra was the one who told me about Łuków. I hadn’t even known the name of the place until I was an adult. I learned that my grandmother’s family was fairly well off, in a small-town way, but left Łuków en masse for America in the late 1920s, looking for a reprieve from the hostility they experienced even as secular Jews in Poland. My grandfather’s family was less affluent—they owned a modest bakery—and rather religious, which tracked with my experience of my grandfather at holidays, in his tallis and yarmulke, reciting Hebrew prayers at machine-gun pace.
As a youth in Łuków, my grandfather was desperately in love with my grandmother, who wouldn’t give the baker’s son the time of day. When she and her family left Łuków for New York, my besotted grandfather followed, leaving his own family behind in Poland. He never saw them again. According to family lore, at some point in the early 1940s, after he and my grandmother (who finally gave in) were already married with four kids, he received a phone call from Europe that sent him to lay immobile on the sofa for days. His family was gone. The only relative to survive was his brother Nathan, who had somehow managed to escape the Nazis that took over Łuków. To my grandparents, Łuków had effectively ceased to exist.
For my 50th birthday, in 2018, my husband arranged a trip to Poland to trace my ancestry. Łuków, in fact, still existed and we found it on the map. I’d be the first in my family to set foot there since the 1940s. As we drove through the Polish countryside, we remarked on the similarity to Vermont’s rolling hills and winding roads. An ancient wooden sign, in an ancient apple orchard, pointed the way on the final stretch and I wondered how many times my ancestors must’ve passed that very spot, maybe even ate apples off those trees.
Łuków was ugly. There was no denying it. It wasn’t some quaint European village with cobblestone streets and charming houses. It was a jumble of Soviet-era concrete, soulless and dehumanizing. There were just a few traces of the town my grandparents would’ve known, among which were a Baroque church and an old building across the street from it that now houses the local history museum. We’d heard there was still a Jewish cemetery in town and had already driven around fruitlessly searching for it. Maybe the history museum could help us. It was worth a try.
The museum was closed, but we rang the bell and a young woman came to the door. She didn’t speak much English, so we used the voice function on the Google Translate app to ask in Polish where the cemetery was. She signaled for us to wait a minute. She came back with another woman who turned out to be the museum’s director. She spoke serviceable English and explained where the cemetery—really, a memorial to what used to be the cemetery—was located but also generously invited us in for a private tour of the museum, which, she said, had an exhibit on the lost Jewish community of Łuków.
Photographs of old Łuków and its Jewish community filled the walls of a few rooms. Artifacts were arranged in display cases, including the Torah from the synagogue where my grandparents would’ve prayed. Perhaps my grandfather had once touched this scroll, I thought. It was a strange sensation to see, even if just in photos, where my grandparents came from, the actual buildings and houses they would’ve seen every day.
But there was one photo that stopped me in my tracks. It was of a Jewish man on his knees in the street, staring straight ahead, his face frozen in fear. A German soldier stood beside him, smiling casually at the camera as if there were nothing unusual about the scene. The museum’s caption translated as “Deportation of the Jews of Łuków, October 5, 1942.”
I don’t know who that Jewish man was. But he was someone, a human being, whom some other human being decided had no right to exist. In fact, to that German soldier, to the regime he represented, that Jewish man was not even human. He was “vermin.” That’s the word that Hitler and the Nazis used to describe the human beings they believed were “poisoning” their land. The man on his knees was almost certainly killed. The vast majority of Łuków’s Jews died at the hands of the Nazis. I would learn that my grandfather’s sister was shot in the back as she tried to run away. She died in the street. Except for Nathan, I don’t know what ultimately happened to the rest of my grandfather’s family other than that they didn’t survive.
The Nazis didn’t just kill the Jewish population of Łuków; they attempted to erase all traces of them. They even ground up the headstones in the Jewish cemetery and used the rubble to make roads for their troops. I was stunned by the viciousness of that act. The few Jewish headstones that remained after the war were fashioned into a memorial—the one we had originally sought when we arrived in town. We finally found it after we left the museum, hidden from view behind the parking lot of a convenience store. The ground around it was littered with empty beer cans presumably left behind by .
Language is powerful. The words we choose matter. When leaders use words like “vermin” and “poison” to describe other human beings, there’s a purpose behind it and it’s never benign. It doesn’t matter who says it; it’s wrong. It’s dangerous. It can lead to terrible things.
Last week, I heard those words in a political speech given by an American political leader. Like that photo in Łuków, they stopped me in my tracks. There is no justification for that language, ever. And when we hear it, we must resist it and keep in mind that those who use it do so for malign purposes. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to it. Those words open a path to brutality and barbarism. And we’d be wise to recognize where it can lead before we get there.
