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Prologue After more than fifty years I have returned to Poland. I sit in the back of a taxi, riding the six miles from Rzeszów to Tyczyn and looking out the window at the bleak familiar roads. As we approach town, I recognize the places that marked my childhood. The forests give way to streets bordered by shabby houses stooped with age. I see the homes and shops that once belonged to friends and neighbors. The taxi drops me at the center of town, the market square. It is lined with the same narrow houses and small stores. Today I will just be a stranger in the square, a foreign tourist taking pictures of rundown houses and overgrown gardens. In my rusty Polish I try to converse with an old man walking down the sidewalk. I greet him and say that I used to live here before the war and that I have come back after so many years. He walks away before I can tell him my name. I approach other elderly people, hoping someone might remember my family. No one wants to bother with a tourist. Nothing is said about the war or the Jews who once lived here. I cross the market square, determined to find a narrow cobblestone alley that led to the old stone synagogue. I stop to ask a shopkeeper how to find the old Tyczyn synagogue, and he shrugs his shoulders as he tells me that the town has never had a synagogue. I walk to the street where I lived with my parents and my brother. I stand at the top of the sloping, crooked hill and feel my heart beating and tears welling up in my eyes. I turn a last corner and see my house. It is an old abandoned wreck. The gardens are trampled and barren, and the giant tree that stood in front of the house has been cut down to a stump. It is my house, with its sienna tile roof and cream stucco walls. I see the original door handsomely carved from dark wood. Without touching it, I can feel the doorknob in my hand. I remember the house as it used to be. I see my father, tall and handsome in his lawyer’s robe, 3 rushing off to the courthouse in the morning. I remember the afternoons that I played in the streets with my friends, and I hear my mother’s voice calling me to come for dinner. I remember how my brother, Manek, always left his bicycle leaning up against the front of the house. An older, heavyset Polish woman steps out onto the second floor balcony and looks down at me. She does not know that I played up there, outside my parents’ bedroom when I was just a child. I call out to her in Polish that I lived in this house when I was a small boy and ask if I might come inside for a minute to look around. “No,” she tells me, “the house is being remodeled and I cannot let anyone in.” She slips quickly inside and shuts the door. In an instant my chance is over. I had not dared to hope that the house would still be standing, and here I am, crying and fumbling with my camera. I walk back to the market square, turning to look at my house, to capture it in my mind. I get into the taxi and direct the driver to take me back to Rzeszów. He drives down the hill, past the park where I played and the pond where I skated when the leaves had fallen from the trees and the water had turned to ice. We pass the shops and homes of people I once knew and who once knew me. Everyone is gone. I remember how I was chased from this town and realize that I will always be a stranger here. I can never escape the memories, never leave them in some house or town, and they shall never let me go. The wall that I have carefully built between the past and present has crumbled and fallen down, and suddenly everything has changed, and nothing has changed at all. 4 ...

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