What would a trip to Poland be without a walk down the worst memory lane, EVER! Rather than add more words to an already indescribable experience, I will offer my brief impressions associated with the following pictures.
Let me start off with the mother of all images. I am standing with a group of tourist on the railroad track that dead ends into Birkenau. For those of you who are not familiar with Holocaust logistics, Auchwitz was actually a "camp" with minimal "killing" facilities. Next door was Birkenau with 4 crematoriums and one of the Nazi's official extermination centers. Our guide has just made the following statement. "This train track was formally completed on May 30, 1944 and for the first time brought the victims right to the door of the crematoriums. Within one hour of their arrival, they were dead!" I stood there stunned, that was the day I was born. Enough said! As the group moved on, I stood on the platform contemplating how different the day must have been in Aurora, Illinois from what it had been here at Birkenau
Vardit and I walked into one of the many antique stores in the old Jewish section of Krakow. The store is packed with family heirlooms, kiddish cups, old books and piles and piles of dishes and silverware. I think, who owned all this stuff? We read the cute inscriptions in the books from parent to child, from lover to lover. And suddenly it hit me, the owners died in the Holocaust. These are all looted treasures, the thousands of empty apartments, doors left open, valuables sitting in the cabinets and the owners all gone. What an incredible transfer of riches from Jews to whoever came along and claimed the booty. I see the above picture which is made out of silk and recognize it as the poster that my daughter always kept in her room in Berkeley. This tapestry was last displayed in the apartment of a comfortable Jewish family circa Poland, 1940 and now sits on sale for $30 in a Jewish memorabilia store in a tourist strip in Old Krakow.
The Kashimer section of Krakow housed the Jewish population and with the Polish economy in shambles, there is a successful tourist business in both Holocaust and Jewish cultural tours. The area has been completely renovated with museums and great Jewish restaurants surrounding the old town square. As I sat eating pirogi, matzoh ball soup and potato pancakes, I looked up and saw one of the few buildings that had not been refurbished. As with every other experience in Poland, one part of me imagined the vibrancy of this neighborhood, the food, smells, intellectual discourse and then I stared up at the empty window and imagined the families being suddenly dragged out onto the street and marched off to their deaths. This contrast between a rich cultural life that I feel part of (at least through my grandparents) and the unimaginable horror of the Holocaust dominated my feelings throughout the entire trip.
This image caught my attention at Birkenau, and reminded me of the escape scene in the movie The Great Escape. There is the boundary fence, the guard tower and the limitless surrounding forest. If you recall, in the movie the tunnel does not come out in the forest, it comes out in the clearing just beyond the fence. We see the dirt move, a shovel and then a head pokes out and the prisoner looks up to see they are completely exposed to the guards in the tower.
The one thing that struck me coming from Israel to Poland is that this is a Catholic country with almost no Jews. (There are about 4,000 in a population of 38 million) I was walking in the woods looking for the site of the Plaszow Concentration Camp and stumbled across this weird memorial cross; Jesus with a crown of barbed wire thorns, what's with that. Here is the actual memorial for Plaszow, a camp to which most of the Krakow Jews where march and killed.
The gates of Schindler's Factory. This actually wasn't much of a tourist trap, I walked down a fairly obscure and quiet neighborhood and there was the gate from the movie and a small plaque; the movie was actually filmed on location here.
There isn't much to see of the old Jewish Ghettos of Warsaw and Krakow except in the exhibits of the many fine museums. I specifically made it a point to take the train up to Warsaw and walk through the ghetto. As a 10 year old boy in Aurora, I read The Wall by John Hersey which was the story of the Warsaw Ghetto and also a book called, (I think) the Theory and Practice of Hell which was about Dr. Mengela's experiments. Why my parents let me read that stuff, I'll never know. But I have been obsessed with Holocaust minutia ever since.
I was walking through a fairly sterile neighborhood of Socialist apartment architecture which my map said was the heart of the Warsaw Ghetto. Suddenly I saw a mound of dirt and this sculpture in the middle. This was all that marked the heart of the Ghetto. I kept walking with my head down trying to feel the vibrations of the neighborhood and suddenly stepped on the granite strip that wound its way around the streets. I'm guessing this marked the barrier of the Ghetto. What distinguished the Warsaw Ghetto of course is that there was a rebellion of about 7000 remaining fighters and after the uprising the Nazi's completely leveled and burned the place down to the ground. There is no "there" to refurbish, it is history.
Finally, all that remains of the Krakow Ghetto wall is a small section that was preserved for us tourist. The Krakow Ghetto was noteworthy because it was self-regulated for several years, had a health system, soup kitchens, industrial activity and despite the fact that it was the repository of tens of thousands of inhabitants of destroyed stetels around Poland, it held itself together amazingly well. That all came to an end when the remaining populations was march down the road to Plaszow for extermination.
I don't know if it was necessary for me to make this trip. I was not overwhelmed by "tsuris" (Yiddish for grief), but neither was I underwhelmed. I just couldn't stop thinking (as all Jews do) of that knock on the door and the sudden transformation of a pleasant, middle class life into a total, incomprehensible living hell. As we used to say, "I groked it." ( To grok (pronounced GRAHK) something is to understand something so well that it is fully absorbed into oneself: from Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein)
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