feature stories

Have family, will travel

by Anne Millman

Nov 3, 2005 3:08 PM

Like many teachers, I’ve had a lifelong passion for travel. To help pay for this extravagant pursuit — a big expense, even if you’re traveling on a shoestring budget — I began pitching article ideas to editors, hoping my writing would become my ticket to adventure.

It wasn’t a bad plan. But something unexpected happened as I was globetrotting: I discovered my family. Let me explain.

As the child of Holocaust survivors, I knew my parents had lost nearly all their relatives. My mother had no one left and only two of my father’s seven siblings survived. As luck would have it, his brothers wound up in Israel and Australia. Togetherness was not in their cards.

Like many survivors, my parents didn’t talk much about their families, and I hesitated to ask and possibly open their wounds. Then a friend got me interested in genealogy. He urged me to quiz my parents while I had the chance, and encouraged me to learn how to do genealogical research. So well into adulthood I began to learn about an assortment of distant relations who were scattered hither and yon.

Of course, I had to meet these remnants of my family. Gradually, I devoted more of my travels to finding them. But since my retirement last year, I’ve been on an almost endless marathon of discovery and reunion.

In one year, I traveled to Colorado, Israel, California, Florida and Chicago in pursuit of kin. I’ve collected countless stories and just this summer hooked up with some computer-savvy cousins who helped create an electronic family tree of my mother’s side of the family.

But the high point of the year came in June when I went to Poland and other parts of Central Europe with seven relatives on my father’s side. Three generations gathered to make this pilgrimage: my father’s cousin, a survivor herself, who was our family historian and guide; four in my generation; and three youngsters in their 20s. We came from three continents: North America, South America and Australia.

Some of us had never met before, but we shared a past we wanted to explore, beginning with a visit to my father’s home town of Demblin, located about 70 miles southeast of Warsaw.

We were not sure what to expect but we were not prepared to be treated like foreign dignitaries. The youthful mayor of Demblin invited us to his office and greeted us warmly. He arranged for a group of children to sing and dance for us. A local historian guided us around the town with a young teacher of English translating and a journalist feverishly reporting on our visit.

While the town had few marks of its Jewish past, except for the old cemetery, we got to see where my father’s house and other family homes had stood. I saw the lay of the land and the public places my artist father had sketched for me.

In conversations with our hosts, it became clear that they knew very little about their town’s Jewish past, but they also seemed very eager to learn. We spoke about their plans for a Day of Tolerance as a way to encourage area schoolchildren to become accepting of those who are different from themselves. Since our visit, we have exchanged information by e-mail and we hope this will lead to increased knowledge and renewed interest about Demblin’s recent Jewish past.

Unlike most travel experiences, this was not an easy trip to make. But we didn’t go for fun and games, though we surely enjoyed being together. We went to learn, remember and witness.

It took an emotional toll to visit so many places of loss, tragedy and destruction: death camps, cemeteries, abandoned synagogues and memorials at every turn, as well as the ghostly remains of places of personal significance to my parents.

Being with my family — my long-lost family — made a huge difference. While nothing from my family history is still standing, we, as a family, are still on solid ground.

We may have had few opportunities to share our lives as we grew up, but the members of my far-flung family have found each other. Thanks to the miracles of modern communications technology, we stay in touch and we plan to see each other again as often as possible.

In fact, I’m already looking at brochures for next year’s reunions in Israel, New Zealand and Brazil.

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Anne Millman is a retired New York City high school English teacher and a freelance writer. Besides her many magazine articles, she is the co-author of eight books on travel, nature, gardens and flower photography, including “Focus on Travel.”