Chapter One

Baseball in the bloodlands

A question of survival

How am I going to survive this?

That was the question I asked myself as I boarded the coach at Warsaw Airport. I’d been in a foul mood since my flight landed and I was in a foul mood as I got off the coach at Warsaw Airport a week later. In fact, I was in a foul mood for much of the time I toured the land of my Polish ancestors.

I didn’t expect that I would feel soangry. This was, after all, my chance to get a taste of the good stuff, that addictive morbidity of which Jewish writers’ careers are made. Here I would – finally! – become part of the story. I would walk the streets where my family, the Rojers of Kutno, once lived. I would mourn the ghost of their presence in the traces that remain of Jewish Poland. I would visit the extermination camp where they were murdered. And I would grieve.

But it all felt wrong from the start.

The first warning sign was the convenience store in Warsaw Airport. I’d popped in to buy a sandwich and was distracted by the other Polish products on sale. There was Polish kombucha! When I visit a country I adore exploring convenience store products, particularly strange and wonderful soft drinks. I realised that I was going to enjoy this trip … Until I remembered what I was actually here for. I bought a cheese sandwich and trudged off to find my group at the designated meeting point.

I sat alone on a double seat on the bus, surrounded by excited and nervous Jews (mostly older than me) getting to know each other. I plugged in my earphones. Tonight was the night of the Eurovision Song Contest, the first time I would be separated from my family for the event since my wife and I had children. I tried to join in by listening to the show on streaming radio and texting my kids on WhatsApp. It wasn’t the same. And when I tried to tell a new acquaintance that I was missing Eurovision, she was only interested in how the Israeli entrant would do.

The memorial tour was organised by a group of Jewish descendants of central Poland. Our group included Jews from the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and Israel. Most people were lovely and the organisers had put together a packed itinerary, with the help of local Poles who were keen to commemorate the vanished Jewish presence in their towns.

The people weren’t what annoyed me about the tour. And I couldn’t fault the programme. So what was it that was triggering me? On the trip from the airport I gazed out the window at the Polish branch of IKEA, at road signs, gas stations and adverts, and tried to work out what I was feeling. As the tour progressed, I felt myself yearning for something I couldn’t quite name. I kept being intrigued by shops, the countryside, the forests and rivers, together with the urban fabric of the towns we visited. I kept having to remind myself what I was here to do. On the day we visited Kutno, I tried to focus as we toured what remained of Jewish life – the cemetery the Nazis destroyed, the dilapidated ruins of the ghetto.

Halfway through the week, I took a day off and hired a car. On that beautiful spring day, my heart soared as I drove parallel to the wide Vistula through sun-dappled woods, and onward to the picturesque town of Płock (the hometown of a different branch of my family). I walked around the Jewish district, bought a Polish kombucha and a Polish Kinder Surprise Egg. Then I drove on to Kutno, this time alone.

As I drove into the grounds of the campus on t