My next visit was completely unplanned. To get to Kalisz, I had to change trains in Łódź, so I thought I might just make it a longer stop on the way back. Otherwise, I would have just gone back to Warsaw.

In JRI-Poland, I found a marriage record that was possibly my great aunt Reizel Halpert, and the couple were buried in the Łódź cemetery. I was able to get the image from JRI without going to the archive, saving me the archive visit.

My hotel was just off of Piotrkowska street, which is a bit of a tourist attraction. I walked up and down it a few times. The street is sprinkled with statues and a Walk of Fame for Polish cinema, along with a few impressive murals (and some I saw on other streets). I went out to Manufaktura; currently a mall, a cinema, a museum; but once the site of Izrael Poznański’s textile manufacturing complex.

And then I caught an Uber out to the Jewish cemetery. I was looking for four people but didn’t find any of them. My biggest problem was that JRI would not work on my phone, so while I was at the section, I couldn’t look up the stones I was looking at to figure out the location of my people in relation. Most of my people were on the right side out in the forest area. One was probably covered in ivy. Another just looked like an overgrown forest with no signs of stones, and two were in sections I never actually found. Still, I wandered around the cemetery for a few hours. Then I headed a little north to the ghetto area and Radegast railway station. The museum was closed for renovations and fenced off.

Checking online just before I left for anything else to do, I noticed that I had already taken a picture of the archive without even knowing it. One Uber driver knew English and suggested that Łódź was boring and I should visit Wrocław. I guess I’ll have to try that my next visit to Poland since I only had a few days left before my flight home.