Walking Where My Father Walked
In May 2025, I visited Częstochowa, Poland — the city where my father once walked as a young man before World War II. He was born in Kamyk, a small village nearby, into a Jewish family of modest means. His father, like many Jewish men in Kamyk at the time, was a butcher. Before the war, my father would travel to Częstochowa to sell souvenirs of the Black Madonna to pilgrims visiting the Jasna Góra Monastery.
Over 80 years later, I walked those same streets with my camera. Much has changed, and much has not.
The Black Madonna of Częstochowa, Poland’s most venerated icon, enshrined at Jasna Góra.
The crowds still come. At Jasna Góra, I watched as worshipers kneeled, prayed, and wiped away tears in front of the Black Madonna — a 14th-century icon believed by many to have miraculous powers.
Pilgrims at Jasna Góra kneel in reverence before the Black Madonna.
No photograph can truly capture the intensity of devotion in that room — but I tried.
But just outside the monastery’s walls, the contrast is striking.
A fenced lot in Częstochowa under stormy skies. The past is never far.
I don’t know exactly where my father stood. But I walked where he walked — on some of the same cobblestones, past buildings he might have passed and beneath the same sky.
This visit was more than just a return to a place. It was a return to memory, to family, and to a world that war tried to erase.
