wandering around living relics

Ludvo or Luds or Austropol, Ost, my Nana's soft voice struggled with the exact name. We wandered through The Valley of Lost Cities, a modern day memorial to the European cities lost in the first two world wars, searching for the place my Great-Grandfather was born.

With the help of Ido (the best, kindest and most hooked up tourguide in all of Israel...seriously though...on the ball and loving it, every step of the way) my family arrived at the gates to my great-grandfather's village. Lubar and Ostropol are their real names. And those two names, carved into a stone monument, towered above my Nana who stood beneath a black umbrella in the pouring rain. I realized at that moment, after days of wandering through Jerusalem, touching the water source beneath David's City, the ground of the Holy Sepecul, eating tilapia from the Kinneret, and now standing on two frozen feet within the Valley of Lost Cities at Yad Vashem... that my two frozen feet were standing within a modern day relic. A place that would one day be destroyed...and years later its remains would be rediscoverd, reinterpreted and a past would be revisited. Contained in that one isolated moment in time I became aware of an overwhelming span of time... the past, the future and a tiny speck of presence.