The Blaus - South America and Europe

22nd of September - Sighisoara, Romania

Sighisoara is a modern day tourist destination in Transylvania, and it just so happens to be where the Blaus lived for hundreds of years. Billy visited Sighisoara over two decades ago when some of his great aunts and great uncles were still alive and living together in what was the old Blau family home for hundreds of years located just outside the citadel. Billy remembers playing soccer in the streets with neighborhood kids, the trees on the hill in the backyard that his great aunts picked fruit and nuts from to bake cakes and pies every morning, the love and attention the whole family lavished upon him, the handmade goose down duvet one of his great aunts stuffed for him to sleep underneath on cold nights. His mom remembers the sound of horse pulled carts passing by on the street out in front of the old house and the affectionate family members greeting each other with hugs and kisses each morning. Today you can still see horse drawn carts outside of the citadel, but they share the road with cars, taxis, souvenir stands and throngs of tourists. It's easy to understand why a city like Sighisoara attracts tourists. It is majestically built inside a fortress perched on a hill, and it is as breathtaking from the inside of the citadel walls as it is from afar as seen when arriving by train.

Inside the citadel walls the streets are paved with cobblestone and the churches, clock tower, artillery bastions, and homes look as if they haven't changed since they were built somewhere between the 13th and 15th centuries. Sighisoara is peaceful and the pace of life is slow. The clock tower is the icon of the town, it sits atop the entrance to the citadel with its colorful ceramic roof tiles and fanciful parade of characters that dance in a circle at the stroke of the hour like a cuckoo clock. The spooky cemetery at the top of the hill is Gothic with its old tombstones and creepy trees. This is where Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler) was born and the plaza in the citadel was once the site of impalings conducted by this legendary figure in Romania's history. We all know Vlad Tepes as the character that Bram Stoker's infamous Dracula is based on.

We went to Sighisoara in search of traces of the Blau family. We started out by visiting the old Blau family home on Illarie Chendi. As soon as we found a hostel and dropped off our backpacks, we walked directly there to see what had become of the old house. Sadly, it was the only house of the entire street that had recently been remodeled. The cement was still wet and the house hadn't even been painted yet. The edifice of the place was unrecognizable to Billy. Strangely enough in this small, quaint town on this old historic street a "night club" had been built a few doors down from the old Blau family home. At this point we realized that time had changed this place and as the old saying goes, "There's no going home."

Seeing the torn down and reconstructed Blau house was anticlimactic, so we decided to start looking for the graves of Billy's great aunts, great uncles, great grandmother and great grandfather at the Jewish cemetery. The first day we went to the main cemetery on the hill inside the citadel and searched hundreds of headstones for the name Blau, but didn't find any Blaus there.

We asked a local kid where we could find the Jewish cemetery and he didn't know the meaning of the word "Jewish" despite his fluent English. This was not the first time we got a blank look from a Romanian when we uttered the word "Jewish." We started to wonder why no one knew what Jewish meant. Was it because it is still a taboo subject or is there so little knowledge about Jews because they were exterminated from Romania in the hundreds of thousands over 60 years ago? Miriam, a friend of the Blau family who grew up in Sighisoara and now lives in Chicago, suggested that people might be pretending not to understand the word "Jewish." We saw swastikas spray painted in graffiti in various parts of Romania and we wondered how antisemitism can still exist without Jews in Romania.

The local kid told us about a Hungarian cemetery on the hill opposite the citadel, behind the post office. We thought that they may be buried there since this part of Romania once belonged to Hungary, and Billy's family called themselves Hungarian Jews. So, on our second day in Sighisoara we walked to that cemetery and searched each headstone with no luck. We were directed to yet another cemetery outside of town by the concierge at Hotel Sighisoara, and the next day we visited that cemetery, but again failed to find any Blaus there. We finally sprung for a taxi and asked the driver to take us to the Jewish cemetery, but even he had to call in for the location. When we finally arrived there, we found it locked up behind a chain link fence with barbed wire all around. One of the groundskeepers at the larger Christian cemetery nearby showed us how to sneak in under the fence around the back. We crept through bramble bush and into the cemetery and finally found the Blaus graves. It was an emotionally cathartic experience for Billy as he read the names of his family members buried there. At the lower end of the cemetery we discovered a monument to the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, and we found 3 members of the Blau family's initials engraved there. We placed stones on each of the Blau headstones, as is the tradition. Nandor, Billy's great uncle, was shipped to a Nazi work camp in the early 1940s and at the end of WWII he walked all the way back to Sighisoara from the Ukraine to find his wife and two children missing. His family was killed in a Nazi concentration camp.

Leaving the cemetery as we walked back to the citadel we passed a small hospital clinic, out of which a new father exited and yelped with glee about his newborn baby. The proud dad with family in tow crossed the street and hopped into a horse drawn wooden cart and sped home. It was a poignant and uplifting symbol of life, which we appreciated after our solemn visit to the cemetery.

We spent some time trying to track down one of the neighbor kids that Billy once played with when his family was in Sighisoara. We had her name and her photo, which we showed to everyone we met to inquire about her. No one recognized her or knew her name. We went to the German "Gymnasium" school on the hill where Billy's family attended high school to ask if they had a register of names of former students, but we came up empty handed there also.

After we had exhausted all possibilities of tracking down ghosts of the Blau family in Sighisoara, we spent our last afternoon there on a park bench out in front of the house we rented a room in. It was a sunny day, the first of its kind in weeks, as it had been raining almost everyday since we arrived in Romania. We sat there drinking homemade red wine that Marius gave us and watching the routines of the neighbors. One neighbor was passing time chatting with other neighborhood folks while his ducks were feeding on seeds in the grass and bathing in a small tub of water outside of his home. Another neighbor let his chickens out of his yard to feed, and we giggled as they sprinted out of the gate as if they were running in a race.

Before long an old lady named Berta came and sat next to us on the bench. Neither Berta nor her young companion spoke English, but we assessed the old lady's age (94) and we figured that she may have attended school with some of Billy's relatives. We asked if she knew the name Nandor Blau and it seemed to sound familiar to her as her young companion shouted it into her one good ear. In a town as small as Sighisoara, everyone knows everyone that lives here, as we were told by a cafe owner in the citadel. It was a stretch, but we had finally found someone who remembered the Blaus, right there on that park bench completely by chance. Unfortunately all we could exchange with this link to the past were smiles, small talk about the chicken and ducks, the plane that delivered us to Romania from America, and the phone she uses to call faraway places like San Francisco to say "halo."

With that stroke of luck we were off to our next destination in northern Romania. The countryside in this part of the world is so attractive, especially between Sighisoara and Dej. We took in the scenic view through the train window on another sunny day in Fall. There were green sloping hills and golden corn fields growing so high that you can just barely see the silhouettes of horses or men's heads poking out through their rows. We tried to memorize the images of Hershey Kiss shaped haystacks as big as houses and muddy dirt roads with massive puddles children were chasing each other around and men on bicycles were trying to avoid. We saw dozens of small villages of red tile roofs with the ubiquitous church steeple rising from their centers in perfect valleys. Many of these scenes could have been witnessed by a train passenger 50 or even 100 years ago. Romanian countryside is like a timeless illustration in a romantic storybook.

posted by The Blaus @ 12:30 PM