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In 1904, my grandparents, two small boys and a baby- my father- left Russian-occupied Poland and never returned. My grandfather was an army deserter, which explains the evasive, contradictory accounts of our family history during my childhood.
What was our real name? Who could remember? My Polish past was a coded history I had no interest in deciphering. The moment my grandparents set foot on British soil, we ceased to be Polish. When my father died 14 years ago, there was nobody left for whom that country meant anything.
Besides, Poland was the land of Auschwitz, two post-war pogroms - in 1947 and 1968 - martial law and Solidarity which, though splendid in lighting the spark for eastern European democracy, was led by Lech Walesa, a man who proudly told supporters he was a "true Pole." Everyone in Poland knew this meant a politician with no rootlessly cosmopolitan Jewish antecedents.
Yet here I was at Lomza - an undistinguished county town in the northeast, between Warsaw and Bialystok - looking at the place where, according to an old photograph, a vast synagogue once towered above the heads of a population which was 70 percent Jewish. According to family lore, my father was born here. Curiously, it was a late 20th-century invention that had brought me.
Months earlier, on the Internet, I had stumbled upon a group called Jewish Genealogy. All I knew from my grandfather's alien registration book was that he was born in Ostrova, which was not in my atlas. So I posted an Internet message asking if anyone could identify it, adding that my father had been born in Lomza.
On the Internet, I found groups of people like me - just like the groups of Jewish immigrants who once formed self-help organizations in foreign lands. I was part of a virtual community of Lomza and Ostrow Mazowiecka descendants. Through them, I discovered that Jews from my grandparents' area were revisiting Poland in droves. After communism's collapse, the Polish government made visiting easier, and the success of Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" provoked an interest in the original Schindler factory in Krakow.
Why not me as a visitor too? My guide and I set out for Lomza on a wet Saturday morning from Warsaw....