For years I tried to find out
what happened to my father’s uncles.
All I had were scraps, words, names,
floating in front of me like leaves
falling off trees:
Oscar,Martin,Metz, route de Thionville,
Dentist, clockmender…
One day, my cousin in America wrote:
a distant relative had died.
In his papers
there were two letters
from one of the uncles, Oscar,
and two letters
from his sister in Poland, Stella,
all written during the war
and asking for help.
I pored over the letters
trying to give the words
a voice that I could hear.
Now that I had addresses,
the internet
and books
and museums
were kinder,
they gave me more and more.
Now I could make maps:
where the uncles went,
where they ran to,
where they hid,
where they were seized and taken to.
Then, one day, another email
arrived from my cousin in America.
His father and step-mother had died
and he had just been in the house.
“I noticed there was a closet,” he said.
“It was locked, so I opened it. I could see
it was full of photos. There was a sealed up box
in there. On the box, it said, ‘Family Photos’.
I cut it open and inside there were old black
and white photos with names on them:
Oscar and Martin. And many more.
They’ve been there for years and years.
I’ll send them to you right now.”
And he did.
Now I could see Oscar and Martin.
I could see their faces
and what Oscar looked like
in his First World War Army uniform.
There were more places, like Bielitz,
more names of brothers and sisters,
and photos of their father and mother.
These were my great grandparents
in New York
over a hundred years ago!
Pictures I had never seen.
Pictures my father had never seen…
“But why,” I said to my cousin in America,
“was the closet locked?
why were the photos in a sealed-up box?”
I had sat in that room with the closet
behind me and I had asked his father
about Oscar and Martin,
what did he know?
And all the time the photos were sitting
just a few feet away.
And all he had been able to give me were
falling leaves.
