POLAND 2023
Why Poland?
Scanning the travel brochures that arrive in the mail or the Sunday Travel sections in our newspapers, we noticed that few itineraries include Poland. Perhaps Krakow, perhaps Warsaw, perhaps the German death camps, but nothing very thorough. So we thought we would like to look more carefully at the country that produced Nicolaus Copernicus, Fryderyk Chopin, the three Singer siblings, Arthur Schopenhauer and Günter Grass (both born in Danzig, Germany/now Gdansk, Poland), Pope John Paul II, Leck Wałęsa, Ignacy Paderewski, Isaac Stern, Joseph Conrad , Maria Salomea Sklodowska (Marie Curie), Czeslaw Milosz- to name only the most obvious – and decide for ourselves. The first thing we had to get our heads around was that Poland is a relatively new country, having only lately emerged from totalitarianism. World War II only ended for Poland in 1989; after six years of the protracted horrors of the Nazi German occupation and then over forty years of Soviet Russian control, the country, newly democratized and independent, occupied once again the center of Europe’s map, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Czech Republic.
In order to make any sense of what we were looking at, we realized that we would have to come to some understanding of Poland’s history, at least some basic knowledge. As we came to learn, these borders had been highly unstable for centuries. Always a crossroads, it was wedged in between Prussia and Russia, two hungry neighbors, not to mention the target of aggressive Tatars, Czechs, and Swedes whose invasions and sackings must have been everyday events for centuries. Beginning in the eighteenth century it was overrun and partitioned by Prussia, Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Another partition followed in which more and more of Poland was gobbled up, and Poland as an independent country disappeared only to re emerge as a result of the peace treaty after WWI in 1918, an independence that ended with the Nazi German invasion of 1939. The aftermath of that war included more border shifting and “population transfers” – that sinister euphemism – and German-speaking Breslau became Polish speaking Wroclaw, more or less, and Danzig became Gdansk – a few examples among many national transformations. So this country’s self-image, we realized, was extremely complex, and informed by historically multi-cultural and multi-lingual shifting populations. A complicated place.
But our particular focus on this trip was Jewish-Poland, to understand the role Poland has played in Jewish life, to become more aware of the vibrant Jewish communities in pre war Poland – once home to the largest Jewish community in the world – as well as to witness the burgeoning interest on the part of many Poles in their own historic, cultural, and familial connections to Judaism. Many scholars point to today’s complex social realities: “both the inchoate yearnings of and the actual grassroots efforts by non-Jewish Poles and Jews in and beyond Poland to reclaim and expand Poland’s Jewish spaces” (Lehrer and Meng). We came to better understand that claim on the tour when we met many people, Jewish and non-Jewish who were involved in Holocaust Studies, deep dives and micro histories that were bringing to light the past cultural and historical realities of Polish Jews.
Tuesday October 24, Warsaw 9 Cheshvan
Who would have thought that the rubble of 1945 Warsaw, bombed out of recognition, would become a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and yet such is the case. But now the Vistula/Wisla River – Poland’s longest – runs south to north through a beautifully reconstructed city. Of all of Poland’s war-torn cities, Warsaw’s damage was the most extensive. In angry retaliation for the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 in which thousands of Polish insurgents lost their lives in a brave but finally unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the occupying Germans, Hitler ordered the complete annihilation of the city, and annihilated it was. No stranger to lost causes, Poland since its liberation from Communism celebrates the heroism of those days in the new Museum of the Warsaw Rising that features interactive exhibits that engagingly document the underground Home Army’s struggle. Some of these exhibits take the form of typewritten sheets of paper – Polish on one side, English on the other – each narrating a crucial step in the events that led up to the action of August 1944. The medium is part of the message here, because a significant part of the on-going struggle was achieved through typed and printed samizdat publications, of course strictly verboten. Some of those typewriters and presses are on display here also, emphasizing the power of the written word to move and inform an occupied population. The multi-floor museum captures through such artifacts and exhibits of sound and light the feeling of insurgent life and celebrates the lives and courageous deaths of those who died during the rising. [Isaac’s War is a rich source of information about this multi-faceted insurgent movement.]
Our first afternoon in Warsaw we went to the Progressive synagogue, Beit Warszawa, in its new location to meet with Bogdan Bialek., a Catholic Pole and a psychologist. Some of us had already met him in Los Angeles on the occasion of the showing of his film, “Bogdan’s Journey,” the result of his investigations into the Kielce Pogrom of 1946 and his determination to revive its memory in the minds of his fellow citizens of Kielce, and beyond. He had also served, we learned, as President of the Jan Karski Society, named after the Polish soldier, courageous resistance-fighter, and diplomat during the war. The Society’s self-professed purpose is “to promote attitudes of openness and respect for individual groups of different ethnic, national, and religious affiliations, and to combat all forms of anti-semitism and anti-Polish attitudes.” A worthy goal, one at the heart of our inquiries.
Bogdan spoke to us about the new Museum in Kielce of the History of the Jews. It features Jewish culture and – a more difficult subject – the violence in Poland against the Jews. He went on to speak of the 1965 published document of the Catholic Church’s Vatican II “Nostra Aetate” (In Our Time), the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions, and said that it “disabused the world of several beliefs concerning Jews,” chief among them that the Jews killed Jesus. It seemed to me that the document does cast great doubt on that belief, but with some ambiguity. That Abraham Joshua Heschel was friendly with a Cardinal who was close to the Pope helped bring about this aspect of the document, Bogdan said but he noted that the problem was one of transmission since Polish priests were generally not interested in it.
He went on to refer to a painting in the Polin museum, the recently built museum of the thousand year history of Jews in Poland, that depicts Jewish students participating in the patriotic demonstrations that accompanied the 1863 uprising and the Warsaw rabbis who also supported the Polish cause. When we arrived at the museum the next day, we saw the painting and read in the description that Warsaw Rabbi Ber Meisels in an 1861 sermon said
Thus I declare that it is our duty to love the sons of the Polish land
and not forget all the good that they have done for us.
This pledge seemed to us a kind of wishful thinking as we thought ahead to the years that would follow, into the twentieth century. Yet, here it was, a public declaration of Jewish loyalty to Poland.
After our meeting with Bogdan, we still had time to walk to the Old Town, rebuilt beautifully and convincingly after its devastation in the war. One of the first sites we came upon was a monument to the Katyn massacre when thousands of the 21,892 Polish generals, military commanders and intelligentsia killed by the Soviet NKVD in 1940 were found buried in the Katyn forest, in Russia. The Polish Army officer class was representative of the multi-ethnic Polish state, all “sons of the Polish land” apparently. The murdered included ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, Belarussians, and 700 – 900 Polish Jews including the chief Rabbi of the Polish Army, Major Baruch Steinberg. The Soviets blamed the Germans initially, but to no avail. The evidence against that assertion was, and remains, overwhelming.
Still a bit jet-lagged, we enjoyed a leisurely stroll through the cobbled streets of the old town, becoming a bit more familiar with this foreign country, and with each other. After flagging down a taxi, we returned to the hotel and an impressive welcome banquet – our first pirogues! Dominika and Marek Jezowski, the former President of Beit Polska, was there at the restaurant to greet us when we arrived. They joined us for dinner and brought us all – Haim especially – up to date.
Wednesday, October 25 10 Cheshvan
Today we went to the Ukrainian Refugee Center where we met Jonathan Mills; his card reads “Chief of Strategy and Development.” Here we saw the housing for the refugees, mostly women and children, from Ukraine, an expensive commitment, I’m sure. The ground floor of what looked like the space for an immense Amazon warehouse was divided into 100’s of cubicles, each for a separate family. Intermittently down the corridors between the cubicles were restrooms and laundry rooms. Not only are the refugees fed and sheltered and clothed here and given medical and psychological care but also upstairs in this immense Center, the children are in preschool classes. Visiting with the children and their several attentive adults was that day’s highpoint for me. We also were taken by a well-supplied crafts room upstairs next to the school rooms where beautiful textile goods were being made, by some of the resident women for profit. We bought several of their good looking, well made book bags.
We are made aware of the abundance of evil in the world in many of the places we visit here of Jewish devastation, (and of on-going world events), but also there are people like these, the volunteer teachers, social workers, psychologists and medical people, and also Jonathan Mills and other donors, fund-raisers, and organizers who do such good work. He spoke specifically of the Humanitarian Innovation Group (HIG) as well as the Jan Karski fund, as contributors to these projects. We also learned that Mills organizes the outfitting of schools in trailers to be placed in Ukraine.
After lunch today we arrived at the long anticipated Polin Museum which stands on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto and prewar Jewish neighborhood. Our first encounter here was with the artist, Monika Krajewska, who spoke with us about her Jewish papercuts that formed an impressive exhibition entitled “Burning.” A centuries-old traditional form of Jewish folk art, papercuts usually were made to celebrate holidays or decorate ketubbot (or contemporary Kar-Ben Calendars), but she incorporates political statements in her intricate, beautiful papercuts. In her art she questions why there are so few material traces of Jewish culture today and what that tells us about the history of Jewish communities living in the Polish lands for over one thousand years. We will come to understand her art and much of what we will see in the next few weeks as part of the general rescue work going on in Poland today. While “Holocaust tourism” has its skeptics, it is engaged in the important work of keeping alive the memory of vibrant Jewish communities that not too long ago made up over 10% of the population and helping us understand more carefully their place in Polish history.
The museum itself is overwhelming, informative and moving. Built in 2013, it is a massive and beautiful pale green glass and copper building designed by Finnish architect Rainer Mahlamaki. It houses an extensive collection of artifacts and photos and innovative exhibits that illustrate the depth and significance of one thousand years of intertwined Jewish-Polish history. Unlike the many Holocaust museums and memorials, it celebrates the way Jews lived, not the way they died. At the center of the museum, down some stairs, is the carefully, faithfully and colorfully reproduced dome and bima of one of Poland’s 18th C wooden synagogues, the Gwozdziec synagogue, which was in what is now Ukraine. It is stunning, and while being in its presence is a moving aesthetic and emotional experience, watching the film “Raise the Roof” can deepen your understanding of what you are looking at here. The museum occupies one end of a large square, roughly that of the former Warsaw Ghetto, and faces the granite Monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Heroes. It commemorates all those who fought and died in the Ghetto Uprising of April 1943, “the first major urban resistance to German rule in Europe,” according to historian Timothy Snyder. “The rebellion led to the physical destruction of the Warsaw ghetto…and the end of the most significant Jewish community in the world.” We walked around to Mila 18, (made more known by Leon Uris’s novel of the same name), the headquarters/ bunker of Jewish resistance fighters underneath the building at ulica Mila 18 (18 Pleasant Street), from which a few of the fighters (20?) escaped through the sewer system. We passed the Umschlagplatz afterwords, the collection area for Jews from the ghetto to be loaded into trains bound for the Nazi death camps. Too many scenes from too many movies and books helped populate these areas in my imagination. The day was getting late, it was grey and cold; the warmth in this Umschlagplatz came only from my thoughts of the people I had met today, the stories of bravery we had heard, and the monuments to Jewish life, not just death, in Poland we had seen.
Thursday, October 26 11 Cheshvan
A daytrip to Lodz
Today we took a small bus/van to Lodz. Another grey, rainy and cold day, somehow appropriate for visiting the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe, and still in use. The woods that surround the graves and mausoleums were autumnal reds and oranges and yellows; the paths underfoot were littered with the fallen leaves. The largest mausoleum was that of the Poznanski family, a wealthy Jewish family of Lodz. Izrael Poznanski was the owner of a very large textile factory that we would see later that day. The contrast couldn’t have been greater between that Jewish success story and where we were now walking, for as we entered we passed a wall dedicated to those who had died in the Lodz ghetto. We thought of Chava Rosenfarb’s three volume work about the Lodz ghetto, The Tree of Life, and later at the Mark Edelman Center of Dialog we discovered we had just missed her daughter (and translator) who had spoken there at a conference the week before. Much in those books came back to me as we walked around what had been the ghetto area and the Survivors Park. The cherry tree from those stories apparently hasn’t survived. We went on to visit what remained of the Radegast Train Station which served as the Umschlagplatz for this, one of the largest ghettos in Europe. A few old freight cars remained on the tracks as a reminder of their human cargo and their tragic destinations: Chelmno and Auschwitz.
After a short sobering walk in the cold afternoon, we sat down to a beautiful lunch (more terrific soups!!), after which we passed the Poznanski red brick factories that seemed to go on forever and employed thousands, now housing various restaurants and shops. We then visited the Poznanski Palace, a large mansion that beautifully preserves a sense of how a wealthy Jewish family at that time lived. A glass-ceilinged winter garden, a chamber of mirrors, and a huge ballroom; the Poznanski’s were great lovers of music, and they often hosted Artur Rubinstein, a favorite of theirs.
We then went on to the Lodz JCC and the small synagogue of Lodz where we met with Dorota and Baruch Ciesielscy who used to run the Jewish school in the city. The Center now serves as a hostel that is welcoming Ukrainian Jewish refugees and other traveling (wandering?) Jews. We noticed a few residents passing through from time to time, and it looked as though dinner was being prepared in the adjoining kitchen. Also at the synagogue site we met two young men, visitors from Brazil. I’m not sure why they were there, but it helped me understand that this JCC was a place of welcome to young pilgrim travelers and refugees alike.
Friday, October 27 12 Cheshvan
We started the day, (after another bountiful breakfast buffet) with a visit to the Nozyk Synagogue, the main still-in-use Orthodox synagogue in Poland. It is the sole surviving pre-war Jewish house of worship in Warsaw which was left intact because the occupying Nazis found it useful, particularly as a stable. Unlike our visit in 2015, the rabbi (the Chief Rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich) wasn’t there to greet us, but we got a good look at the beautiful synagogue.
We then went on to the Korczakianum Institute, the Dom Sierot orphanage for Jewish children, opened in 1912 by Janusz Korczak, the penname of Henryk Goldszmit, a pediatrician and progressive educator. He had opened this orphanage along pedagogically enlightened lines that valued children’s rights to justice, love, and security. When the orphanage was closed in 1940 by the Nazis and the children ordered into the ghetto, he went with them voluntarily. In the ghetto he was their constant support – parent, brother, friend, doctor, teacher – and when their deportation was ordered, he chose to enter the trains to Treblinka along with them rather than leave the ghetto unharmed as was offered him, repeatedly. For our visit, we sat in a large room the end of which was a wall covered with a blown up black and white photograph of the children. That photograph was of the room we were sitting in, which gave our experience a strange immediacy. A woman who works there, Marta Ciesielska, spoke to us for about 40 minutes and answered our many questions. She recommended a book about Stefania Wilcznska, the closest person who worked with Korczak and the children, written by Magdalena Kicinska – Pani Stefa and the Orphans: Out of the Shadow of Korczak (2021). The big room, probably where the children played and took their meals, was pleasant and over the doors illustrations from Milne’s Winnie the Pooh and from other children’s books were etched into the plaster. Those attempts at brightening the children’s lives contrasted grimly with their fates; only one of those children pictured would survive the Holocaust. This visit was a highlight of the trip for me and led to my re-reading, once we had returned home, Betty Jean Lifton’s The King of Children: A Biography of Janusz Korczak, 1988. Enlightening and well-written and researched, Lifton’s book tells the story of this heroic figure and of his orphanage, a story too little known.
Our bus then took us to the Jewish Cemetery, inside the ghetto. Another survivor of the devastation of Warsaw, the Gensa Cemetery was established in 1806, the largest Jewish cemetery in Poland. It’s strange to speak of a cemetery as a survivor, but the stones here do speak, and the headstones that are still legible amid the decay of years of abuse and neglect help us remember the lives of over 250,000 individuals. Here that hopeful eye doctor/philologist Ludwig Zamenhof of Esperanto fame is buried, as well as chess masters, tailors, teachers, ghetto fighters, theatre directors, actors, writers, merchants, politicians, rabbis and yeshivah students, the observant and the assimilated. Here a cenotaph and monument mark the life and death of Janusz Korczak.
There was just time to visit the Jewish Historical Institute before Shabbat. Created in 1947, it’s now called the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute for at its center is the Warsaw Ghetto Archive, collected by the Oneg Shabbat under the direction of its founder, the Polish historian Emanuel Ringelblum. Clandestinely this group from within the ghetto documented Nazi crimes and the daily lives of the ghetto’s residents, collecting as much evidence as possible, from scholarly essays to children’s drawings, to the testimonies of the newly arrived from other Polish ghettos. Everything was buried in the ground in 3 large caches; only two have been located so far and exhumed and are now preserved in the Jewish Historical Institute where we could read extracts from those buried documents, letters and diary entries and drawings. Documentation, the Oneg Shabbat knew, was a powerful form of resistance especially when little else was possible.
It was time to go to Beit Warszawa again, this time for Shabbat. After the small space was gradually filled, a young woman stepped up to the piano in the shul and announced she would be playing some pieces by – Chopin. Yes, we were in Poland after all. A young talent, she played with great authority. This music that had nothing to do with the horrors of October 7 in Israel and the ensuing and still on-going tragedies of destruction and death, nor with the events of the Holocaust we had been remembering, reminded us now of beauty. It was a transformative half-hour. The handsome new dark blue siddurs were handed out and although they were only partially useful to us, they served the Polish speakers well. It was good to sing again, even though singing Hatikvah at the end of services with that Polish congregation was somehow a strange experience for my troubled heart. Afterwards….food, of course! The congregants had brought plentiful portions of salads and cheeses and desserts, wines and good talk. We all had been enjoined to speak with one person we didn’t know which we (mostly) did. Another woman and I started speaking over the cheese plate and while my Polish was non-existent, her English was pretty good. I wish I could remember what we talked about, but whatever it was we were both engaged. Shabbat shalom, indeed!
Saturday, October 28 13 Cheshvan
Our guide Jagna Kofta mentioned that these are the days in Poland when people visit the cemeteries with flowers and buckets and cloths for cleaning their loved ones’ graves, and candles to light. We noticed whole rows of flower kiosks lining the cemeteries selling plants and brightly colored flowers – mostly pots of yellow and russet chrysanthemums. As our bus passed the Catholic cemeteries, on our way out of Warsaw en route to Lublin, we could see how busy and peopled they were, so many of the living and caring among the dead. The contrast couldn’t have been greater, and yet the many small stones we saw on the graves in the Jewish cemeteries we visited attested to a continuing desire to connect to and honor the Jewish past in Poland.
On our way south to Lublin, we stopped at another town on the Vistula river, Gora Kalwaria or, interestingly, Calvary Mountain, the seat of the Hasidic Ger dynasty. Mateusz Blicharz-Prajs met us, a man in his 40’s perhaps, bundled up as we were, against the cold that morning. His card read “Specialist of International Groups” which told us little but since he is the grandson of the last rebbe here, he had the necessary keys to this cemetery. He spoke with us for a bit about his grandfather, his “court,” and the cemetery and led us to the Rebbe’s ohel, a metal “tent” into which we tossed our prayers. We lit the small candles he gave us and hoped our prayers for peace were being listened to.
We went on to lunch at a hotel that Mateusz was somehow connected with: again, delicious hot soups, zucchini this time, and mushroom perogies.
We then drove on to Kazimierz-Dolny, a beautiful little town founded by King Kazimierz the Great. He built his castle here in the 14th century and developed the small village surrounded by fields of grain into a major mercantile town on the Vistula. Because it could ship its produce up river to Danzig, it was called, at the time, “little Danzig.” One of the many legends that surrounds this town concerns King Kazimierz’s love for Esterka (Esther), the Jewish daughter of a local tailor. His love was such, so the legend goes, that he built for her the local synagogue and conferred many favors on the town’s Jewish community. The synagogue stands – as does most of the town – although now it is a small museum that houses exhibits of old photos of Jewish life in the area and paintings from the pre war period. We learned that it was also the site of the 1937 filming of the play written by Solomon Ansky in 1914, “The Dybbuk.” The town still attracts artists and most recently many tourists. An ancient covered well occupies the center of the large and very beautiful Rynek, surrounded by cafes and shops that occupy the ground floors, in many cases, of the old handsome houses of the town’s former wealthy merchants. The afternoon we visited, it grew very cold and we went inside one of those cafes to take refuge from the cold with tea and cakes. Very snug. Next time, we will return in late summer and climb the hill to visit that castle and take in more of this place, a country retreat that resembles a travel poster of rural, pre-war Poland.
En route to Lublin we stopped along the road and climbed up to another impressive and unusual monument, a wall made entirely of tombstones, whole and broken, that had marked the graves in the local Jewish cemetery since the mid 16th century. These matzevot had been torn out of the earth by the Nazis and used as paving stones at their headquarters in town but are now collected into this wailing wall-like monument. “A jagged split down the middle symbolizes the dismemberment of the local Jewish population [and of Jewish communities throughout Poland under the German occupation] making this one of the most powerful Jewish memorials in the country,” according to Poland: The Rough Guide. I stepped through this crack into the dark woods behind the wall and saw in the half light more tombstones scattered about and almost covered now by undergrowth. Sobered and thoughtful, we returned to the bus and continued on to Lublin. Here was once the largest yeshiva in Europe, now a hotel. In Lublin’s Old Town, our guide pointed out the main gate of the city, the 14th century Krakowska Gate and the other gate, the Grodzka Gate that connects to what was once the Jewish part of town.
As our guides in various Polish cities and towns often told us, “it doesn’t exist anymore but I will show you the place where it was.” Here that phrase was apt, for the large Jewish community of at least 45,000 – 40% of the total population of Lublin – and their homes, shops, streets, synagogues, and cemeteries is now a parking lot which effectively cements over the life that had been here before. Most of its inhabitants were transported to the nearest concentration camp, Majdanek (a visit we would make the next day.) A group dedicated to unearthing that paved-over past is the Grodzka Gate (Grama Grodz). Funded by the city of Lublin, with some EU help, this effort is being made by over 30 employees and volunteers involved in archival work to recover information about the rich multicultural and polylingual life that flourished here and in particular that of the thousands of Jewish citizens of Lublin. Many of the files have a photo affixed, printed from thousands of negatives hidden between the walls of the ghetto and discovered after the war. These were all of Jewish individuals who had lived here before the war. Other rooms are lined with shelves filled with mostly empty files, each representing an address of a household in the former Jewish ghetto; discovering the square footage, the cost, the names of the members of the household, house by house, street by street is a project sponsored by the city itself. Much of the actual research is being done by students from the local university, discovering and compiling information that will go into these empty files. We saw several students in small sequestered computer cubbies at work on their various research projects. Other volunteers and staff have created an impressive website, according to which “the Grodzka Gate Centre is among the ten largest digital libraries in Poland.” And the sources are not only written but also oral, drawn from the oral history project begun in 1998 of Lublin’s inhabitants, who were asked what they remembered from the war years. Sponsored by the local government, the project was undertaken by those citizens who understood that that empty space needed to be re-discovered and understood in order to really know their own history. The pledge to “love the sons of the Polish lands” seems to be reciprocated here since this recovery project is being undertaken by mostly non-Jews. In fact, much of what drives this project is the awareness of its organizers and volunteers and staff that as schoolchildren in Lublin they had known nothing about the Jewish presence in Lublin. It not only was an absence, it had never existed as far as their history lessons and texts were concerned.
Sunday October 29 14 Cheshvan
The next morning, Jadna led us to an old building where we waited outside to get in while the resident caretaker, Pavel, tried his many keys in the old lock. When he finally succeeded, we followed him and his small white dog (Maia) up an old dusty staircase before we got to the synagogue itself, really more of a steibel. The place was full of stuff he’s collected: the morning sun shone in on old, torn Torah scrolls, dusty books, moth-eaten Torah scroll covers, their velvet worn smooth and bare, their colors dulled, and more. He was excited to talk to us and to Haim about Menachem Merski who had studied in Lublin. We were told that sometimes there is a minyan here, but it looks like a place that could use some love and a lot of zlotys.
We then drove to the far more prosperous looking Yeshiva Chachmej Lublin. Once the largest yeshiva in Europe, it is now a hotel. It was built and dedicated in 1930, a testimony to the fact that Lublin was one of the major centers of Jewish scholarship in Europe, probably in the world. According to Louise Steinman’s rich memoir, The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation, Lublin was known as “the Jewish Oxford.” We toured the small museum in the yeshiva/hotel that told us about its original founder, Rabbi Meir Shapiro, and his intention to establish a modern Talmudic academy. There had been yeshivot in Lublin for a long time, but Rabbi Shapiro wanted to establish a modern Talmudic academy. The entrance requirements were stiff; each applicant had to have memorized 400 pages of Talmud to even be considered for entrance in addition to “a high moral standing.” It was only 9 years later that the yeshiva was closed to Jews and made a Nazi military headquarters. In expelling the yeshiva students and teachers, soon afterwards to be sent to Majdanek along with thousands of Poles, the German fascists also threw the entire library of books – an extensive collection of over twenty thousand volumes – out of the windows into a blazing bonfire, to their shouts of delight and the cries of despair and grief by the displaced Jews.
We went on to the Jewish cemetery where again there was a struggle with keys in an old lock. Here is the ohel of the Seer of Lublin (Yaakov Yitzhak haLevi Horowitz-Sternfeld) where we paused while Haim read the inscription on his tombstone and we lit little candles to once again accompany our prayers and requests for blessings and for peace. The Seer himself settled at 26/28 Szeroka Street. Many years after his death, that street was incorporated into the ghetto.
Later we drove on to nearby Majdanek. On the outskirts of Lublin, it was initially built as a forced labor camp for Soviet POW’s before becoming another Nazi death camp. Much less developed than Auschwitz, and more chilling for its plainness and far less visited, it looks untouched by time as though it could get right back to work again if some switches were activated. It is estimated that of the 78,000 people murdered here, 59,000 were Jews. The sun set as we returned to the bus and just before we climbed in, an enormous red moon appeared, as blessing or judgment, I’m not sure. I wondered if that Seer, Yaakov Yitzhak, reputed to have supernatural powers that allowed him to see great distances in space and time, had foreseen these horrific events and hard-to-believe inhuman sites like Majdanek that would occur 125 years after his death.
These thoughts accompanied us on the long trip down to Krakow where we arrived later that night.
Monday, October 30 15 Cheshvan
In the morning we were free to roam around the Old Town’s medieval market square – the largest in Europe – its central Cloth Hall still, even in November, buzzing with tourists and customers. In fact, the market square is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Undoubtedly the jewel of Polish cities, Krakow was largely untouched by the war since it served as headquarters for Nazi German high commands who took over municipal buildings and large homes.
The market square is surrounded by flower-embowered (in summer) cafes, and as we sat and drank our morning coffee in one of them, we heard the bugler at five minutes before the hour from atop the 14th century Basilica of St. Mary’s Church that dominates the square. And in keeping with the local legend, the tune broke off abruptly to mark the heroism of the 13th century bugler who in warning his fellow Krakovians of the approaching invasion of Tatars, received an arrow in his neck for his trouble, ending his bugle call mid-note.
We didn’t climb the hill to the Wawel Castle but saw it glittering up the hill in the sunshine. Heavily fortified, it sits high above the Vistula River and served as the residence of the Kings of Poland beginning in the 11th century. The Cathedral within the castle’s grounds became the burial place for those kings as well. Jozef Pilsudski, a great war hero of WWI and most responsible for the creation in 1918 of the Polish State, is also buried here although his heart is buried in his native Vilnius.
Tuesday, October 31 16 Cheshvan
This morning we traveled to Auschwitz-Birkenau in a rather changed mood from yesterday’s. I was struck by how many people were there: the parking lot filled with tour buses, the passage ways and pavements thick with groups of people, each with their own guide holding a flag with his or her group’s language – I counted 11different countries represented. (And there are those who still deny the Holocaust??? ) Initially we had to walk through a tunnel, the names of the murdered sounding as we walked. We kept passing long lines of tourists as we climbed upstairs in some of the buildings, others were coming down and again passing each other in and out of the rooms, eerily reminiscent of the people over 80 years ago who were herded into these camps off the trains. Our guide was Jacob, and when Haim gathered us together in a quiet place at the nearby Birkenau Concentration Camp, he invited Jacob to join us as we recited Kaddish.
In another moment of dislocation, we then went into Oswiecim for lunch where we met Sara Aloe, a Polish woman converting to Judaism. She is a researcher in Holocaust Studies and is also studying for her conversion on line with a Polish rabbi in California. Interestingly, there has been a rise in Polish universities of Departments of Jewish Studies and of Holocaust Studies. These programs and departments are no doubt one of the products of the obligatory study of the Holocaust for recent generations in Polish schools. We then went to the Oswiecim Synagogue and met Anna, a young Ukrainian woman continuing her studies at Kiev university, on line. She told us that she is studying U.S. History, and that she has always been interested in the U.S. and in its democracy. She was our guide, newly arrived and newly trained in this still active synagogue and accompanying museum; she told us that we were her first group. Then she took us to the Bergman Café that adjoins the synagogue where we met downstairs with our coffees and teas and discussed what we had seen and experienced that very full day. We were surrounded in that downstairs room by an exhibit “Crossing Borders” of beautiful photos of people – all African or Asian – dressed in elaborate traditional Polish costumes. Yes, hurray for border crossings!
Wednesday, November 1 17 Cheshvan
This morning we visited the Jewish quarter, the Kazimierz district, and walked around, discovering a beautiful huge synagogue being repaired as well as the still active 16th century Remah Synagogue and its adjoining Old Jewish Cemetery. This is the only one that remains in use of the original seven synagogues in Krakow. It is located at 40 Szeroka Street (a coincidence? An echo of Lublin? Or a common name?)
This Remah Synagogue was established by Rabbi Moses Isserles or Rema, as he is referred to, in the late 16th century. We learned that Rema or Rabbi Remah was one of world Jewry’s most influential scholars and is most renowned for a work of Jewish law entitled “ha-Mapah,” or the tablecloth. We thought in our next lifetimes, as Talmudic scholars, we might come to understand this idea or at least chew at its edges, but for the time being we had to satisfy ourselves with the very basic knowledge that this is a work in which Rema integrates Sephardic and Ashkenazi thought, which sounds like a great achievement even to us. On his tombstone next to the synagogue is inscribed “From Moses to Moses there was none like Moses,” and scattered in front of, on top of, around that tombstone are hundreds of little slips of paper on which travelers from all over the world have inscribed their prayers or simply their names, calling cards of sorts, at this important spot.
We then met with Jonathan Ornstein, Director of the Jewish Community Center in Krakow. Across its entrance stretched an enormous banner that read “WELCOME!” And it’s true, its doors are wide open. The Center was opened in 2008 by none other than the then HRH The Prince of Wales. (We hope that King Charles continues his interest and support.) Prince Charles’ generosity helped provide the wherewithal to make this an attractive and active venue for the multi-generational Jewish community here, made up of survivors and their children, and grandchildren, as well as people who have only recently discovered their Jewish origins.
We ended our wanderings sitting at a café where the klezmer musicians were playing in front of one of the many “Jewish” restaurants in the area with names like “Hevre,” “Cheder” and “Klezmer Hois” on Szeroka Street. (Again?) We ate and celebrated the hope this stirring Jewish life gives us. But at the same time we’re troubled by the thought that there might be more nostalgia and curiosity about an exotic long ago culture in this “Jewish revival” than genuine interest. That’s the question that hovers in the air and in our daily experiences here.
We then had some time to visit the Galicja Jewish Museum that describes itself as innovative and interactive “in exhibiting Jewish culture, the Holocaust, and present-day Jewish life.” We then bid farewell to Krakow, climbed back into the bus and headed to Wroclaw.
Thursday, November 2 18 Cheshvan
As we learned this morning, this beautiful University town was chosen as the European City of Culture for 2016. For centuries the world knew this ancient city on the Oder river as Breslau when under Prussian/German rule, and now in a newly independent Poland as the difficult-to-pronounce Wroclaw. Nevertheless, the EU designation is merited. Like so much in Poland it was heavily damaged in WWII, but thanks largely to EU money it has been reconstructed, faithfully following the photographs and paintings of its market squares of pre-war years. The Rynek (market square) here is large and beautiful, lined with the pastel facades of houses, shops, cafes and restaurants. Whimsical bronze gnomes inhabit the place as well, and a bronze crocodile hangs by its snout from the awning of an art nouveau building, now a shop. Although it is an ancient city, don’t look for old city walls. Napoleon knocked them all down upon his entry. Now where they were, are tree-lined grassy moats. Alongside these moats in especially the southern part of the city are great mounds, now grass-covered, burial grounds of the rubble of war.
We started the day at the White Stork Synagogue, in the old Jewish neighborhood, a site now mainly for concerts but beautifully restored along with its small museum of the history of Jewish life in Wroclaw. German Breslau was such an important center of Jewish life and learning during much of the 19th century, that it attracted the German Rabbi and scholar Abraham Geiger, a central founder of Reform or Progressive Judaism, to its synagogue’s pulpit. We then went on to the Jewish cemetery, the Stary Cmentarz Zydowski which struck us as somehow different from all the other cemeteries we had visited; it was carefully laid out and looked tended even though many of the matzevot were riddled with bullet holes, evidence of the final fighting between the retreating Germans and the advancing Soviet Red Army. Buried here is Heinrich Graetz who wrote the first actual history of the Jews from a Jewish point of view.
While at the cemetery, we met two women who teach at the university here, Professor Dominika Ferens and Professor Aneta Dybaska. We had been told that they had invited us to lunch at their flat, so after completing our visit at the cemetery, we followed Jadna to their nearby apartment building. While enjoying a bountiful lunch of tomato soup (think Polish, not Campbells) and spinach stuffed pierogies, then sweet crepes and pastries for dessert, we talked, exchanging questions and answers, concerns and impressions. The talk was as nourishing as the food. It was a memorable afternoon and a welcome change to be in someone’s home.
Later we walked about Wroclaw Old Town. We admired the brass gnomes in unexpected places and the striking market square surrounded by the pastel facades of houses and shops and cafes. Before dinner we got in one more very important visit, this time at the university itself, to meet Marcin Wodzinski, a professor of Jewish Studies and Department Chair. He spoke to us about his work there, about the establishment and growth of the Jewish Studies department, which, he told us, is still growing. He was especially enthusiastic about the gift of new office spaces he had received for his expanding program. A local artist had complied with his invitation to provide some art he could hang on the walls of his new offices; the central corridor now features paintings of the Hebrew months, paintings that include both colorful images and texts. They are very beautiful , appropriate, and meaningful. When asked how he continues to attract students to the Humanities, Professor Wodzinski’s own words were memorable; he said that he tells undergrads and grads in the Humanities that their studies aren’t so much about job training as an opportunity to build themselves, follow their interests and inclinations to creatively become and evolve. Good words!
Friday, November 3 19 Cheshvan
This morning we drove to the airport and boarded a Ryan Air flight to Gdansk. If we had arrived by train, one of the first things we would have seen as we emerged from the red brick Gdansk railway station was a large monument to the Kindertransport and the children who were put onto the trains leaving from this station and others in Europe bound for the U.K. The British government had invited an unlimited number of Jewish children threatened by the Nazi aggression that had begun in the late 30’s, the only stipulation being that they come without their parents. So here on this bronze monument are five representative children of various ages standing on a train platform with suitcases and teddy bears, frightened and bewildered but ready to travel. The sculpture was created by a Gdansk Kinder, Frank Meisler, and unveiled in 2009 by seven other surviving Kinder who were invited back to Gdansk by the mayor, to be honored. We thought of those children, 10,000 of them as it turned out, of their spared but transformed lives, and were reminded of the multiple ways in which the lives of individuals and nations can be fractured, disrupted, and destroyed by war.
Another sort of fracture was that of the sinister-sounding “relocation” practiced by the Nazi regime as well as by the Soviets following the war, in this case, of German speaking citizens of Gdansk who were “relocated” by the Red Army. This place has only recently belonged to Poland, having been alternatively Hanseatic/independent/German Danzig since the 14th century. As recently as 1945, most citizens here were German speaking and in fact looked with unsuspecting friendliness on the Schleswig-Holstein, an old German battleship, as it made its way into the harbor in late August of 1939 under the pretense of “a courtesy visit,” complete with a jolly military band on board. A real Trojan Horse as it turned out, for after a few days, on September 1, 1939, it opened fire on the Polish military depot on Westerplatte, a forested peninsula that guards the harbor entrance, separated from the city by a narrow channel – and thus WWII began. We saw many troops of school children on field trips to this important site where the Polish army held out for a week, to the great surprise and consternation of the invading Germans.
Unfortunately, Hitler was almost as hard on Gdańsk as he was on Warsaw, but as with so many war-torn Polish towns and cities, there has been much reconstruction. In the case of Gdansk, its Długi Targ or Long Market (Gdansk’s Rynek) is a particular success, its original Hanseatic-Dutch architecture having been faithfully and beautifully restored. We entered that square from the waterfront through the 16th century “Green Gate” and thought ourselves in Amsterdam, not Poland. But here, the ice cream and Baltic amber shops and stalls, the pastry shops and cafés predominate, no sign of tulips. The focus of the square is an impressive bronze sculpture of Neptune – the sea is never far away here – and across the square is the monument to Daniel Farenheit, the 17th century inventor of the farenheit scale, and it features a large antique thermometer in a glass case. A bit further down the beautiful cobbled Ug. Długi is the Town Hall. From its modest beginnings in the 14th century, it grew – as befitted an increasingly wealthy Hanseatic city – into something quite grand, embellished and made more and more beautiful by artists – particularly Flemish – in the 16th and 17th centuries. And then the partitions, and then the World Wars.
We arrived at our hotel in Gdansk in time to prepare for Shabbat at Beit Trojmiasto, well north of the shipyards we would visit the next day, in a quiet residential part of town. It was good to be back there in the synagogue that had just begun when we arrived in 2015. On that occasion we witnessed the affixing of the mezuzah, the carrying in of their first Torah and placing it in the aron kodesh, the words of gratitude to Haim and Beit Polska spoken by the congregation’s President and by several others; we felt part of the general excitement and joy. On this occasion as well in 2023, the singing was restorative and energetic, and afterwards the food was plentiful!
Saturday, November 4 20 Cheshvan
Today we saw a bit of Gdansk Old Town, its cobbled streets lined with shops most of which sell Baltic amber in all its forms. Then on to the World War II Museum which like the Polin museum needed at least three days to do it justice, so comprehensive and appealingly instructive is it. From the Enigma cipher machine to Joseph Stalin’s pipe to a Soviet T-34 tank, it’s all here. Not only artifacts fill these rooms but also explanations and examples of the making of war, especially of the propaganda and its crude effectiveness.
After lunch – yes, somehow we were always able to eat the delicious food even after such sights as we witnessed in the museums – we set out for the Gdansk Shipyard and the Solidarity Museum. En route, we passed the medieval crane, a famous Gdansk landmark. Built in the 15th century, this brick and wooden structure (reconstructed after WWII) facilitated trade and helped build ships in this busy Baltic port. It now houses part of the Polish Maritime Museum and serves as a reminder of the city’s past, whether Prussian or German or Polish or “Free.” A bit north west of the crane, up the Motława canal, we came to the Shipyards made famous by the strikes in 1980, led by Lech Wałęsa. The trade union movement – Solidarity – finally succeeded and by 1989 the Soviet-run Polish government was out of power; in 1990 Wałęsa became the first President of a newly recovered Poland, finally its own country once again. How this all came about is engagingly told at the new Solidarity Museum, a fittingly industrial-looking brick structure, through multi-media exhibits that let you read old news clippings (with English translations), view assembled artifacts that illustrate what life was like under Communism, watch videos on old black and white television screens of events as they were reported at the time and see on computer screens taped interviews with individuals active in the movement. Room by room, those historic years are made vividly present and help explain how “the power of the people” can work. It was a perfect finale to our sojourn in Poland that had taken us from the southern Carpathians to the Baltic sea, from the medieval to the modern, from the Nazi death camps we visited and a recognition of the depths of human depravity to our meetings with individuals who envision a more positive way of being, those educators and academics, artists and entrepreneurs, helpers and activists, people whose outlooks and actions I admire and take some hopefulness from. It was a 12 day seminar in which we learned about people and places and events we had never heard of and experienced some increased clarity about events and issues we were familiar with but vaguely and with much unresolved confusion. Learning, I remind myself, is a process.
It was impossible at the Farewell Dinner that night to sum up all of our impressions and memories, but we shared what stood out for us and regretted that our pilgrimage to Jewish Poland was over – until the next trip.
Thanks to all who made it possible: Dominika, Haim, and Jadna especially!
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