Exequiel goes quiet in front of the evidence. I watch him and the Polish guy, both hunched over the screen, in a café in Krakow. It's not just any café, and what they're looking at isn't just any document. It's an old café, a little dark, in the Kazimierz neighborhood, the Jewish quarter of the city. The Polish guy with us is a genealogist, and he's the one who points to the name of the town. That's the moment Exequiel discovers where his family was from. He came to Poland for this, for the first time. A grandchild came to do the tribute with me. We were going to go together to Chełmno, his grandmother's town. We had everything ready, until Joanna, a girl from Krakow, crossed our path. I'm rulodeviaje, and this is Homages on La Ruta de las Bobes.
The idea for the tribute came up several months earlier, when Sebastián contacted me about a tribute to his grandfather Rachmil. His cousin Exequiel found out and wanted to add his grandmother Ruchla. A tribute from two cousins to two grandparents who were siblings.
Exequiel tells me the town was called Gemdgdow. That's how it's written in the Spanish-language archives. And I explain to him that name doesn't make sense in Polish, that I don't know what city it could be. Exequiel, who's in Italy, says he wants to travel, come to Poland, and do the tribute with me. He arrives in Krakow on a Tuesday. We're three days out from the tribute, and his grandmother Ruchla's town doesn't exist. It's been gone for months. But now the grandson is right beside me, and I'm nervous, because I barely know him, and because for the first time in the history of La Ruta de las Bobes, a grandchild is traveling with me. I feel the pressure of being a host in a place that isn't mine. Exequiel sets foot in Poland for the first time, and I watch him — I watch how he looks at the buildings, how he takes in the smell of the food. It's pure euphoria and sensitivity. So I need the things that usually happen when I go to these towns alone to happen now too — I need everything to go well. The week is chaos. The tribute overlaps with a talk I have to give in Krakow and a friend's visit. The dates are packed tight. We have to get to the town on Friday, and there's no margin for error.
It's Tuesday, and we don't know where to go. There's no tribute yet. I try to decode it phonetically, put myself in the ears of an Argentine from 1920. I break the sounds down, soften the word. I go from Gemdgdow to Geumdo, from there to Chełmno — because someone who doesn't speak Polish and reads the name in Spanish would read it as Chełmno. We ask Polish people what Gemdgdow sounds like to them, and everyone says Chełmno. It has to be there. The thing is, if we go and it's wrong, there's no time left to go anywhere else. Do we gamble on Chełmno? Exequiel says yes. That night we go to a wine bar. We start planning the trip — maybe the most important trip of his life. It's pure emotion. And I invite Joanna. Joanna is like a guardian angel — she always helps me, always listens to my stories. We tell her the plan, how we cracked Chełmno, all proud of ourselves.
She toasts to it, then hesitates. And then she tells us no — don't go to Chełmno. Better to talk to a friend of hers, a genealogist. She calls him, and out of nowhere, the guy sets up a meeting with us at a café the next day, Wednesday at nine in the morning. By eight fifty we're already at the meeting point. A Polish guy walks up to us on the street without even saying hello. "Are you the ones for the meeting?" he asks. We say yes. And since the café he suggested is closed, we propose going to the one next door. Jakub, that's his name, says no — let's wait here until it opens. The three of us just stand there. He barely talks to us. He doesn't ask what we think of Krakow, nothing. We don't know if he wants to help us or if he's planning to charge us. At nine on the dot, the café opens and we go into Alchemia. Jakub asks us for information.

"What do you have?" he says. We know there were six siblings. Rachmil and one more were born in Zawiercie. Ruchla and the other three, in Gemdgdow. We don't know why the family moved partway through. The genealogist takes out a sheet of paper, sketches the family tree. Then he finally opens his laptop. It's like a roots-finding machine. He's deep into a website of digitized historical archives, scanned pages of old cursive handwriting. He goes year by year, searching for names in the towns of that region. He looks for any of the six Wajnrajch siblings. Chełmno is already ruled out. Now we think the town is Jędrzejów. We think that because it turned up in a document belonging to the great-grandmother and it's in the same region, and because Gemdgdow and Jędrzejów sound so similar — both equally unpronounceable. And Jakub asks us for patience. He needs proof, needs to find the exact detail. An hour goes by, and the moment catches us off guard, because these things never happen when you're paying attention.
Jakub slams the table and shouts: "Here they are." We jump. He found a sibling of Ruchla and Rachmil. Everything matches. "They were from Jędrzejów," he says. That's where the family came from. I watch Exequiel come undone — watch him see the names on the screen and fall apart. He sees his history in an archive from a hundred years ago. After a whole lifetime of not knowing, now he can say: my grandmother was from here. He cries in front of the screen, in a café in Krakow. Then he hugs us, hugs Jakub, who, for the first time, laughs. Two days left until Friday, until we go do the tribute, and now we know where to go. It feels like we've taken a giant step, but we haven't actually done anything yet. We have no idea what's waiting for us in Jędrzejów.
Federico arrives in Krakow the same morning Exequiel discovers his family was from Jędrzejów. Fede has nothing to do with Exequiel. They're not family, they don't even know each other. He's a friend of mine who lives in Spain and wanted to take part in a tribute. I told him yes. And now I have doubts, because for the first time, the tribute means producing the trip for other people, and on top of the logistical complexity, there's the pressure of whether they'll get along. I realize how different they are. Exequiel is kind of a hippie. Fede comes from the marketing world and talks to me about the project's business model. The three of us are going to share the apartment. The three of us are going to travel together. And right from the start, I try to manage how they interact.
Turns out I don't need to. From minute one, Fede asks for the whole story, wants to see the family tree, the family photos. Exequiel is dying to talk about his grandmother. Fede has no interest in sightseeing in Krakow — instead, he puts himself entirely at the service of the tribute. "I came for this. I'm here for whatever's needed," he says. We debate the tribute over little coffees, plan it out in wine bars. We try to pronounce Jędrzejów and can't get it. We try a thousand times and laugh at ourselves for not getting it. The three of us are idiots laughing at everything, celebrating everything. At a restaurant, a waitress drops a plate, and the three of us cheer. We ask for the broken plate. "It's fate," we say. "The chosen plate." She has no idea what's going on, and at first she's offended. Then I explain the project, and she gets emotional. We tour Krakow with a broken plate, with a bit of a graduation-trip spirit.
And I introduce them to my friends, make them part of this traveling life across Poland. I share what's hard about it and the know-how, open up the secrets of La Ruta de las Bobes. And it feels so good to travel like this — for memory to be this too, and shared. In just three days, Krakow already feels like ours. Café Alchemia is a classic. Karolina's wine bar, our sanctuary. We're in the middle of Jewish festival week, surrounded by concerts and events. The city vibrates in Yiddish, and we sink into that ancestral connection. There's a festive atmosphere around us, but one that cuts deep into identity. It's like a parallel reality, an unimaginable Poland.
Exequiel drifts through places, not knowing that La Ruta de las Bobes has already started turning its gears. Because Joanna comes up to me at a concert and tells me she found Klaudia on Facebook — a girl from Jędrzejów interested in the town's Jewish history. Klaudia is in Krakow and wants to meet us. "When?" "Now," Joanna says. "She's arriving in ten minutes." And since Exequiel isn't around, we talk privately with Klaudia — Fede and I. She gives us a contact, a guy named Jan. "Message him right now," she says. "He can help you." And since Jan doesn't speak English, we chat using the translator. We don't tell Exequiel anything about what we talk about with Klaudia and Jan.
Friday morning we catch a train to Jędrzejów. Halfway there, Exequiel pulls out some handwritten pages, a story he wrote about his grandparents. He reads it to us, we listen. Inside the train car, it's as if there were no one else around. Outside, little houses and fields. Outside, Poland. With ten minutes left before we reach the town, we decide to tell him. "Look, Exequiel, here's what's going to happen in Jędrzejów. At the station, a history teacher from the school is going to be waiting for us — a guy named Jan. Since he doesn't speak English, he's bringing a student. They're going to take us to the town museum, then to the street where the Jewish community used to live, where the ghetto was. We're going to go to the cemetery, and to the school." We lay out the surprise we've put together for him in a single day, thanks to Klaudia's help. Exequiel looks at us and can't believe it. Two days ago he didn't even know where his family was from, and now there's a teacher waiting for us at the station. There's also a street where we know his family had a shop. What there isn't is time to wait, because the train brakes, and the town is right there, on the other side of the glass, coming into view on the platform.
Sometimes La Ruta de las Bobes feels like living inside a dream. Time follows a different logic — the day passes in the blink of an eye, and at the same time, in the town, everything unfolds slowly. That's how it is in Jędrzejów, from the moment a man dressed in black greets us on the platform. He greets us with a "shalom," and once we're in the car, he puts on music in Hebrew. The town rolls by like a film through the window, the music, the two of us with our hands against the glass, in a time capsule, next to this school teacher named Jan. Jan isn't from Jędrzejów, he's from the next town over. He came specially. With him is Mateusz, a fourteen-year-old student who offered to translate because he wanted to practice his English. First they take us to Pinczowska Street, because we know, thanks to Jakub, that Exequiel's family had a notions shop and a produce stand there.
We see a produce stand and get emotional. We take photos of it like we've never seen one before. We walk down a street that's barely changed over the years, and Jan tells us, in Polish: "This door is over a hundred years old. This building is the same one." We all watch Exequiel press his palm against the sidewalk, run his hand over a doorknob. If he could, he'd caress the whole street. We pass through gateways that lead into inner courtyards. It's an old neighborhood, a very old one — a neighborhood where life once flourished and then became a ghetto. Now it's whatever it is. Neighbors see us arrive, and Jan explains to them: "His grandmother was from here." And a man opens a door for us that leads to a basement — a basement used to store firewood, but with hallways, and it must have been, he says, a hiding place during the war. Afterward we go to the museum, to the Jewish cemetery — a jungle of ruins that Jan and his students work hard to maintain.
We go around with Jan and Mateusz right beside us. Jan does everything with a fatherly manner. I speak to him quietly, as if we were Exequiel's handlers. "Let's go slower," I tell him. "Exequiel is sensitive." "He tells me," and I watch it happen, and I can't believe it, because three days ago we didn't even know the name of the town, and now Exequiel and Jan are hugging, walking arm in arm through the streets of the city. A tribute isn't just any trip. At times it's delicate and painful, at times it's a celebration. And you have to know how to move on that ground. For me, for the first time, it's about stepping aside, guiding the tribute and then getting out of the way — being present and not present at the same time. It's also about thinking of the schedule. I'm the only one thinking about the schedule — about when we have to make the plate, choose the spot, catch the last train, manage the intensity of it all. And with Jan, it gets so intense that we need to be alone for a while.
The hardest part of these tributes is negotiating hospitality. How do you tell someone who's given you everything that it's time to go on alone? We do it over lunch, and gently. Jan pushes back, then agrees — only if Mateusz comes with us at the end of the day, all the way to the train station. Mateusz, who eats like a baby mammoth, nods along. Now we're finally alone, and a feeling of vulnerability washes over us, but also adrenaline. We're face to face with Jędrzejów. Exequiel draws the names on the plate. Then we go to the school. That's the spot chosen for the tribute — a school more than a hundred years old, where bobe Ruchla studied. The school is closed for the holidays, we were told that morning when we ran into the principal on the street. "Come back another day," the principal said. There is no other day. Fede walks straight to the entrance, opens the door, and we go for it. Only the cleaning lady is there. "Five minutes," we tell her. "Pięć minut." She shrugs, and for us, the whole thing turns into an adventure.
The school still has tongue-and-groove wooden walls and old class photos on display. We're in a hurry, but we move slowly. In the middle of it, Exequiel sits down on the stairs. "I'm in my grandmother's school," he says. He closes his eyes, breathes in all of Ruchla's recess breaks, breathes again, relives her exams. Now the question is where to leave the plate. Inside a classroom, in a trophy case? Exequiel can't decide, and we go up one floor, then another. We're in an old hallway, lined with photos of students from the 1920s. And there I see a plant next to a window, and I point it out to him. Exequiel walks over, looks at the plant, touches it, looks out the window. "It's here," he says. Fede and I step back, leave him alone with the plant. He sets the plate down among the leaves. We stay quiet for a few minutes and leave.
Just when we think we might get to wander the town for a bit, we realize it's five o'clock, the whole day has slipped by, and we're about to miss the train. Time speeds up again. Jędrzejów ends, eternal and abrupt, like a dream.

This story is a co-production of the Museo Judío de Buenos Aires and the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Buenos Aires, for La Ruta de las Bobes.