– Paul Celan, 1968 THREE BABUSHKI, STOUT and sturdy as ponies, wiggle their spades under a rectangular flagstone and heave it over. The underside is inscribed in Hebrew: ‘Here lies buried a righteous woman, Sarah, daughter of Shmeor. She died on nth October 1929.’ The next stone in the search also bears traces of lettering, but is too worn to read. I am in Ivano-Frankivsk, a nondescript town in south-western Ukraine. The tombstones have been here – in a yard round the back of the railway station – ever since the war, when German troops demolished the town’s Jewish cemetery and used the remains to pave what was then an army repair-shop. Locals had always known that the stones came from Jewish graves, since some lay face-up, with the inscriptions showing. ‘It wasn’t normal, having people walking all over them,’ says one of the women, wiping her hands on her fluorescent orange apron. ‘They should have been back in the cemetery where they belong.’ ‘So why didn’t you do anything about it earlier?’ ‘Because nobody told us to.’ The man who chivvied the city authorities into action is Viktor – or, in the Hebrew version he prefers, Moishe-Leib – Kolesnyk, the town rabbi.
