Children's Mass Grave in Tarnow - Eve Levy

We have no pictures to add to this blog. Anyways no picture would come close to showing what this place was. What this night was. It will forever be etched in our hearts and minds.

It was late at night, maybe even close to midnight. It was dark outside, pitch black and cold.

We were on our way from Lancut to Krakow. The bus pulled over. We were told by our guide to bring a jacket or sweater and a flashlight. That's all. Without a word we walked. We walked and walked down a path. It was cold but the shiver that ran through me was not just from the cold. It was the cold laced with fear. Fear of the unknown. Where were we going? We heard wolves and hyenas howling in the nearby forest. My hairs stood on end. It felt unsafe.

We walked for a bit...down a dirt path and then finally turned left into a field. We saw a blue fence. We came and stood around the blue fence, still unsure of where we were. Chana, our guide, then told us. We were at a mass grave where 800 children were shot in one day. Dates? 

In the area there were other mass graves, holding 10,000 bodies total. But this grave was just for children ages 2-12 approximately. We were shaking out there in the cold. Picturing young children, perhaps siblings holding hands. Helpless. Scared. Crying for their mothers. In that forest. In that very spot. 

We stood there. We sobbed. We held each other up. We sent out a prayer to those holy souls. We thought about our own children. About how much we love them and would do anything for them. About what we would do to protect them.

Chana read us a moving letter that a mother wrote in the hours before giving away her only child. (Add letter here).

We listened to a moving song by Abie Rottenberg about the children being the future of the Jewish people. We cried. We lit candles in their memory.

We walked back to the bus, holding each other up. Without a word. There were no words to be said. No words. We got onto the bus and sat in our thoughts. We wrote letters to our children. From a place of pain and love we poured out our hearts to our children. We mailed those emotional letters the very next day.

It was so real. I felt like the fear of not knowing where we were going showed us a glimpse of what it was like for these children. 

It was a disturbing stop. I won't deny that. But powerful beyond imagination. Non of us will be the same mothers to our children after this.

The scenario with the darkness of night, the cold air, the animals surrounding us in the Forrest, the unknown...made it feel so real. It gave us just a touch of an inkling as to what the children felt as they walked to the unknown.