As if suffering through the horrors of the Nazi occupation was not enough, many of those who survived grappled with sorrow and loss when they returned to their home towns and found little or nothing left of the people and places they had known. “Dabrowa without Jews,” from the Yizkor book of Dabrowa Gornicza in Poland, is Juda Parasol’s account of returning to the town where he was born after a 15 year absence. He had been expelled to Siberia and, while there, received a last letter from his father wishing the family could be together again. But they had all died in Auschwitz. “Now I am standing in front of my father's house, and tears of murdered blood wash the windows,” Parasol laments. “The doors in front of me are locked and a cold, distant wind blows from them. The heart no longer wants to believe that here once lived Jews.”
