Chapter 8: The Pages in the Wall
The Pages in the Wall: 5 parts to Follow
Haunted by a box. First of Six parts
Book of Trees on Substack
This darn box haunts me.
(All images are created by hand, by me, without computers unless otherwise noted as archival.)
NOTE to my DAD: Don't read this one - it's about the Shoah. SKIP IT. Love you.
My peculiar mother hid a box in an 18th-century basement, where a creek ran through it. Each object sends me into research frenzies. I have read thousands of documents related to objects in this damn box.
So far, none has affected me as much as this one:
This is my great-grandfather’s last manuscript, written while he was incarcerated in the Lvov Ghetto, before the g-ddamn Nazis murdered him. He hid it in a wall, and his son, my grandpa, risked his life journeying back through post-war central Europe to find it. Grandpa carried it through DP camps, across the Atlantic, through Ellis Island, and it ended up in a box for 60 years.
Before being haunted by this box and everything in it, I’ve lived in many landscapes haunted by war. My hometown is Washington’s Crossing, where I worked at the General Store, serving BBQ beef to Revolutionary War reenactors who were drunk before 8 am on Christmas. From there to Alberta, to New Mexico, to the Mojave - there were war ghosts. And now I’m at Fort Ord, where 1.1 million soldiers, most of them drafted, were trained - including those who fought to save my family from the g-ddamn Nazis.
Fort Ord is mostly abandoned. It’s the largest decommissioned Army base in the American West. And it’s the size of San Francisco.
A soldier mural in an abandoned barracks at Fort Ord, CA, from PlanetOrd.com
I often give tours of this place to history buffs and veterans groups, because I wrote a book about Fort Ord: specifically, its murals. Layers of murals painted by enlisted soldiers are palimpsests of the 20th century, enclosed in abandoned buildings.
A soldier mural in an abandoned meeting room at Fort Ord, CA from PlantOrd.com
I haven’t posted much lately. After months of research, I confirmed that the manuscript in the box comes from what is now Lviv, Ukraine.
Lviv had several names during the 20th century. For the Poles, it was Lwow. It became Lvov under the Soviets. The g-ddamn Nazis renamed it Lemberg when they invaded. Once it became Ukraine, it became Lviv.
Each occupying force tried to erase the culture of the last.
So, like Fort Ord, Lviv has wartime palimpsests too: called ghost signs. Long hidden under layers of plaster or paint, sometimes history resurfaces as palimpsests in Polish, Russian, German, Ukrainian, and Yiddish. You can see more here.
from Forgotten Galicia
When I see this ghost sign with the hats…
from Forgotten Galicia
…I think of my great-grandpa. Because of this photograph, taken of him and his two daughters, walking in the Jewish section of Lwow in 1935, near this very hat shop.
My great-grandpa, Szymon, with his two daughters, Yanka (Yanina) and Hanka (Anna).
Szymon was a celebrated mathematician and educator. He published a five-volume series of books that schools across Poland used for instruction.
He won national medals for his work. Poland wrote love letters to him.
But, it didn’t matter once the g-ddman Nazis came.
Szymon was incarcerated in the Lvov Ghetto. Only 0.5 - 1% of Jewish people imprisoned there survived. Approximately 135,000 Jewish people were murdered in the Lvov Ghetto. It was one of more than 44,000 incarceration and extermination sites created by the g-ddamn Nazis between 1933 and 1945.
“A new life began …The normal world ceased to exist. What was left was only darkness.”
- Ignacy Chiger, who was also imprisoned in the Lvov Ghetto.
Szymon’s Lvov Ghetto registration card.
“Each of us was carrying around his own death certificate, from which only the date was missing.”
— Simon Wiesenthal, who was a slave laborer in the same ghetto as Szymon and his children.
Szymon’s last manuscript,
scribbled on scraps of paper, is about forty-two pages of mathematics written in the Lwów Ghetto, hidden in a wall.
In it, Great-grandpa Szymon writes: "If a and b are stars..."
Perhaps he was describing how to navigate using the sky.
The last time Bronisław, my grandpa, saw his father, Szymon, was when he was cleaning a gutter in a striped prison uniform.
He told his son to run.
Bronisław took his little sister and ran.
I’ll post five more fragments of this epic story as soon as I can, featuring Szymon’s two daughters:
Hanka, Szymon, Yanka, 1938.
One was a spy for the resistance…
The other, the CIA surveilled long after the war.
Coming next:
Part 1: The Linden Summer: Why the Bladers stayed in L’wów as the world collapsed around them.
Part 2: Camera Obscura: Why a mathematician writes mathematics in a ghetto.
Part 3: Any Child Who Cries, Dies: What survival actually looked like.
Part 4: The Translator: The daughter who escaped.
Part 5: What happened to Marta? I don’t know the answer to this question, but I won’t give up.
Enid Baxter Ryce is a professor and the author of the 5 books. Her newest is Plant Magic at Home. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally, including at the National Gallery of Art, the Getty, and the Library of Congress. She’s a goofball mom and wife, and makes her art supplies from plants in her garden. Her parenting substack is: Go Dig a Hole
