I forgot to mention that in the woods on the way to jozefow, between cars blasting past, we could hear a cuckoo bird in the distance across the road. i tried to record it but there was too much traffic and it became shy at every passing car. you can believe me when i tell you they sound exactly as you might imagine except a little ghostly in the middle of a forest with no clocks around to house them.
we finally found our way to the small market square in the middle of the old town, but at that point it was close to two oclock and my toes were killing me especially when i panicked because we only had an hour to do everything we had planned: find the recent memorial plaque commemorating the families that had once lived in this forest village; look for family grave stones in the cemetery; and visit the memorial of those shot in the forest. we only had an hour because the train to zamosc was at four and it would take me an hour to hobble through the woods back to the "station" where we had jumped from the train. unless of course we could find a cab.
here's a picture of the former synagogue which is now a library and hosts the recent memorial plaque to the original families of the village. i was also hoping to find the well my grandmother told me that in winter she would slip and slide around on the ice that surrounded it when she was getting water. but we didn't have time for finding that.
it's nice that they did this plaque but its missing at least two family names on my grandmother's side that lived here and were probably victims of the massacre in the forest.
now that i look through my photos i guess i didn't take one of the entire building. it's actually really pretty and very simple and bright inside. we spoke to the librarian who only moved to town in the last couple years. she's not from there but her husband's family is so they moved back to poland from the uk to jozefow. A told her we were here because my grandparents had lived here before the war, hint hint. she suggested we go to the tower where you can get views of the town. i would have liked to do that but i felt like i should see the cemetery and look for some family graves. she also told us when we asked that there were no taxis in jozefow and intimated none of these villages offer that service (another missed business opportunity for locals and global monopolies like ew-ber and gryft). at that moment i knew this trip was kind of a failure: i had no time to even be here. i might as well have just looked at pictures online. and my cousin was right: the cemetery is in very sad shape, very neglected, like so many of the jewish cemeteries in the former Pale of Settlement. the gravestones are illegible. covered with moss, the inscriptions of most are worn away. Also, they are written in hebrew and don't include surnames, only first names making identification of family members extremely difficult, especially with almost no time to spend searching for a familiar word or phrase or family name. these are the entry gates at the edge of the old town:
and the overgrown grounds within the walls:
another important thing i wanted to do in jozefow was see the plants that grew in and around the cemetery but this was also impossible because it was alreadythree oclock and we had to start walking back to the train that was three miles away along the highway. i did manage to spot a patch of wild strawberries, and two artemisias (wormwood and mugwort) near the gates. these seem like some clues to the mysteries of my grandparents' life here before the war. my mother told me my grandfather would accompany my grandmother into the woods when she went to collect berries. when i asked my mother what kind of berries they were she didn't know. now that we've been here for a while and have seen so many of the plants that grow here it's dawned on me that this story was not about a single kind of berry, but a really extensive variety of berry plants including vacciniums, ribes, rubus and others i don't even know about. these wild strawberries (pozemkes) grow everywhere and are only now starting to flower:
and growing rightnext to them under a pine tree is Artemisia absinthium (wormwood) that "poyelen branfn" is made from:
by the time we got to the platform i was half dead and realized i'm no spring chicken anymore. here are some chickens that were ranging freely on the way out of town... they're probably the descendants of the chickens that have been pecking in jozefow for centuries:
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