The March of the Living: Poland, April 2012

(disclaimer:  this blog is about a trip I recently took outside of Asia)

My journey to Poland and participation in the March of the Living began in 2003 when Jeff and I visited Prague.  While walking through the beautifully restored Josefov, the thousand-year-old Jewish ghetto, it hit me like a ton of bricks that until the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, this was home to a thriving community of thousands of Jews, most of whom were murdered in the gas chambers of Poland.  Of course I knew all of that before my trip, but to actually experience the Josefov as a museum to the vanished community (just as Hitler intended) was life-changing.

The day after touring the Josefov, we visited Terezin (Theresienstadt), Hitler's "city for the Jews - to protect them from the vagaries and stresses of the war".  Our reaction to this was to seek a synagogue offering Friday night Shabbat services, so that we could be counted among the few living Jews in Prague in the 21st century.  The service was held in the beautiful Spanish Synagogue (so named because of its Moorish design), that can accommodate 300 people.  That evening there was only a handful of participants - perhaps 10 Jews (most of whom were tourists) and a Christian delegation from the United States.  There was no rabbi, and there were no printed prayer books.  Prayers were led by a visiting professor from the UK.

Ever since that trip to Czech Republic, we have included markers of Jewish life in all of our travels, including schools, synagogues, and cemeteries.  Our Asian adventure has taken us to the remnants of the Jewish community of Harbin, China, the unique Jewish cemetery in Penang, Malaysia, and the former Jewish ghetto of Shanghai.

This past winter, I registered for the UK delegation to the 2012 March of the Living.  Although there were 8 people from Hong Kong at the first meeting, only four of us ended up going - three Chinese ladies (Linda, Yvonne, and Shirley), and me.  We were to join the UK delegation in Warsaw on April 15th.

I made my own travel arrangements: a long journey via Singapore and Frankfurt.  As I was about to board my first flight from HK to Singapore, I almost turned back.  I felt a cold coming on, a fear of what I was about to experience, and the worry that since I was travelling with strangers, I would have no one to lean on to get me through the worst moments.

Day 1.  HK-Singapore-Frankfurt-Warsaw.
After three flights and twenty hours of travel, I finally arrived in Warsaw at 1 p.m. on Sunday, April 15. I was the last of my group to arrive.  Shlomo, the Israeli gentleman who was in charge of logistics, put his arm around me and guided me to my bus.  Unfortunately, Scott, the UK chef-de-mission didn't realize that I was already on board, and he ran around from one terminal to another looking for me, delaying our departure by half an hour.

We were handed a lunch bag (tuna and egg sandwiches, a bottle of water, fruit, and cookies), and off we went.  It was pouring and it was very cold (especially for the Hong Kongers: 8C).  As we drove through the drabness of Warsaw, our Holocaust educator, Elana Heideman, gave us some background to get us going on our journey.
We learned that in 1939 over 30% of Warsaw was Jewish.  There were 3 1/2 million Jews in Poland.  Jews had been living in Poland for a thousand years, mostly free from blatant anti-semitism.  The build-up of virulent anti-semitism that took place in Germany in the 1930s did not occur in Poland, therefore most Jews did not see the need to leave until it was too late.  After the end of Communism, some Poles began to discover their Jewish roots.  Today it is estimated that there are between 5,000-30,000 Jews in Poland, however, it will take several generations to make this a vibrant community once again.

That afternoon we celebrated Jewish life in Poland.  In order to understand the magnitude of what was lost, we had to learn what had been there in the first place.  Because it was bombed to smithereens by the end of the War, very little of pre-War Warsaw remains.  We stopped at a typical Jewish street (mostly under scaffolding, undergoing renovations).  Photos of people and street life were pasted to the buildings.  Nearby we visited the Nozyk Synagogue, the only surviving synagogue (there were 400 before the War).  During the War, the building was used as a stable by the Nazis.  Today, the Synagogue houses the Jewish Commune and other Jewish organizations, including the Association of the Children of the Holocaust in Poland.  Next to the Synagogue, we noticed a theatre that produces Yiddish plays in Polish.  I was starting to feel the emotions of what was gone.

For me, cemeteries are history books, and the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery was a very detailed one.  Thankfully, the Cemetery was not destroyed by the Nazis (more on Jewish cemeteries in Poland later in the blog).  As we wandered through the overgrown, unkempt graves, we celebrated the lives of the most revered rabbis who lived in Warsaw during the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as the Kaminski family who were popular personages in the Yiddish theatre in the early 19th century.

And then we came to the hard part.  Memorials to the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (spring of 1943), as well as the graves of some of the fighters (e.g. Marek Edelman and his wife, Alina, who remained in Poland after the War).  We started contemplating the word "hero".  Surely most of the world regards the Ghetto Uprising combatants as heroes, but should we also call Janusz Korczak a hero? He was the director of the children's orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto, and, although he was offered sanctuary on the Aryan side of the city, he chose to stay with the children, eventually accompanying them to their deaths in Treblinka.

The most disturbing sight in the Cemetery was an empty field encircled by small stones.  This field is the burial ground of the 100,000 Jews who died in the Warsaw Ghetto from famine or disease.  We stood on the edge of the field and recited Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, for the first time on our journey.

From the cemetery, we proceeded to the Umschlagplatz, where 300,000 Jews of the Ghetto were gathered for deportation to the Treblinka extermination camp.  The memorial wall contains an alphabetical list of Jewish first names, including mine - Dina.  We stood in the freezing rain and tried to place ourselves with the 300,000 who were crammed into cattle cars right there.  Although we had only been in Poland for a few hours, we already felt immersed in our journey.

From the Umschlagplatz we went along the Heroes Walk, following the footsteps of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  There are many interesting monuments along the road, including the one at the left.  The Walk culminates at Mila 18, site of the bunker that was the headquarters of the resistance fighters.

Our last stop of the day was at the only remaining section of the Ghetto wall.  Elana explained how those imprisoned within would dig holes in the bottom of the wall so that very small children could escape to the other side to scrounge for food on the black market.  We also learned that the city tram passed right through the Ghetto!
The tram windows were blacked out so that the passengers could not see what was transpiring in the Ghetto.

We were all exhausted by the time we checked into our hotel and had dinner, but our day was not quite over.  We sat on the floor and listened to Renee Salt describe her life in the Lodz Ghetto.  Each bus on the March of the Living has its own survivor.  Renee, a quiet, elegant lady, was ours.  Renee was a young girl of 12 in 1941 when the Nazis brutally removed her and her family from their home near Lodz, and along with the other Jews of her town they were moved to the Lodz Ghetto.  Hearing her first-hand descriptions were heartbreaking.  We discussed the Judenrat (Jewish Council) that ran each ghetto (there were 1100 ghettos built by the Nazis to imprison Jews).  Renee told us about the living conditions, the lack of food, and disease that was rampant.  Some ghettos had schools and theatre groups, some had none.  Most families just wanted to survive.



Day 2 was the most difficult of the trip.  We awoke to the same cold rain as the day before.  At 7:30 a.m. we were on our bus learning about the dehumanization of the Jews by the Nazis.  This fact differentiates the Jewish Holocaust from other genocides.  Jews were deemed humanly inferior by the Nazis.  This is the uniqueness of the Holocaust.

In January 1942, the Nazi leadership decided on the "final solution to the Jewish question" at the Wannsee Conference.  Although more than three million Jews had already been killed by the murder squads in Latvia, Lithuania, etc., the Nazis wanted an efficient, cheap method of killing the remaining Jews, hence the extermination camps and the gas chambers.

We arrived at Treblinka.  There is a small museum at the entrance geared towards Polish visitors.  Most of the information deals with the Poles who were imprisoned in Treblinka I, the forced labour camp.  10,000 Polish prisoners (more than half) died.  The second room finally gives some information about the 800,000+ Jews who were exterminated systematically in the gas chambers of Treblinka II.

Our group of 26 linked arms as we exited the museum.  We began our walk towards the memorials of Treblinka.  No one walked alone.  In front of us was a path surrounded by a forest of tall trees.  Silently, we observed the sculpted stones beside us representing the railroad tracks that brought the Jews to their deaths.  Ahead of us lay an imposing memorial monument surrounded by thousands of stones.  Each  stone bears the name of a  Jewish town or city whose population was exterminated at Treblinka.  There is an enormous field where the Nazis dumped the ashes of the victims.  I felt numb, overwhelmingly at a loss, and angry all at the same time, in spite of the fact that there are no buildings remaining and no "evidence" of the horrors.  Our group stood at the base of the large monument and recited Kaddish once again, this time in memory of Renee's younger sister, aunt, and uncle who perished at Treblinka.

We ate our sandwiches on the bus and got to know each other better as we drove to our next destination, Kazimierz Dolny, a shtetl town that was home to Jews for a thousand years.  My maternal grandmother was a large woman.  She always told me that it was a sign of good health and prosperity to be fat, but when she was a young girl, she was very thin, so her family sent her to "the country" in the summers to fatten her up!  The countryside surrounding Kazimierz Dolny reminded me of the Laurentian mountains north of Montreal - lakes, forests, clean air.  Renee told us that the women and children from the big cities would spend the summers in towns like this - the kids would play while the women played cards in the shade of the trees.  The fathers would arrive on Friday nights spend the weekends with their families before heading back to the cities and their work.  I could relate to this so easily, remembering my father and uncles arriving in Trout Lake on Friday nights.  My dad never came empty handed - there were bolo bats, bubbles, colouring books and lots of other fun stuff.

On the outskirts of the town there is a Jewish cemetery in the cool forest, on a hill just above the main road.  The Nazis not only attempted to murder every living Jew, but also tried to destroy the memories of those who were already dead and buried.  They removed the gravestones and used them to pave roads.  In 1985, a memorial was constructed from these same gravestones.  The memorial is in the form of a Wailing Wall.  Through the jagged crevice in the monument, I walked into the actual graveyard, which has a few dozen original stones dating back to the mid 19th century.

The 15th century synagogue in Kazimierz Dolny is now a museum.  In the gift shop at the entrance, there was a display of Matzos (I wonder who would buy them?)!  The main sanctuary had been used as a cinema after the war, but it now houses excellent photos of prewar shtetl and synagogue life.  Needing a bit of a break, a few of us decided to walk around the town, and then stopped for a coffee or slivovitz (thank you Philip!).  Friendships began to cement, and we'd only known each other for 36 hours.

We drove on to Lublin, had dinner, and then another discussion before collapsing into bed until 6 a.m. the next morning.

Day 3.  Lublin.  The rain had stopped, but it was still very cold.  Four layers of clothing and two pair of socks.

My mother was born in Lublin in 1927.  When she was 6 months old, my grandfather left for America.  For the next 5 1/2 years, my mother and grandmother lived on the third floor of 6 Lubertowska Street with my grandfather's brother and his family.  In 1933 my grandfather finally secured passage for my mother and grandmother to Montreal, leaving behind the rest of the family who all perished in the Holocaust except for my mother's cousin, Fayge.

Elana had kindly asked the bus driver if he would mind stopping in front of 6 Lubartowska so that I could take some photos.  The apartment building is no longer there, nor is the shul next door at number 4, but I was still very happy to be standing where my mother spent her early childhood.  In my mind I could hear my grandmother chatting with her friends and neighbours, and picture my grandfather in his wholesale chicken business.  Lubertowska was known as the street of trades.  This was definitely the most "up" moment of the week.

Lublin was also a centre for Torah study.  We toured the newly restored Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva, farther down Lubartowska Street.  The Yeshiva originally opened in 1930.  When the Nazis came, they stripped the building and burned the entire library.  During the War, they used the building as the headquarters of the German Military Police.  In 2003, the building was returned to the Jewish community.  Its synagogue, the first to be entirely renovated by the Jewish community of Poland since World War II, was reopened in 2007.  As we sat in the sanctuary, Rabbi Michael, one of our group, explained the Gemara (commentaries on Jewish law) to us.

We boarded our bus and drove to Majdanek concentration camp.  The ride took 10 minutes.  The extermination camp is only 5 kilometres from the Yeshiva.  The Nazis didn't even have to transport the 60,00 Jews by cattle car to their deaths.  Majdanek is not in a secluded forest.  It is right there, in the city of Lublin.  The camp today is intact, just the way the Russian army found it in July, 1944 (the Nazis had no time to destroy it before the Red Army arrived).  A mere turn of a switch and it could all begin again.  The camp is vast.  It is enclosed within a barbed wire fence.  Houses and apartment buildings have been built right outside the fence.  There are billboards advertising new residential complexes along the road to the camp.
I cannot bear to include photos of the barracks, the gas chambers, or the crematoria.  As we walked through the camp, we took turns reading a survivor's story.  It gave a human voice to our journey.  For me, the worst part of this trip was assuming from time to time that I had heard the worst, and that I could bear the rest of our mission.  I was shaken over and over.  At Majdanek we learned of the cruelty of the camp director, who used the ashes of the Jews to fertilize his rose gardens.  We talked about human choices, and why so many chose to follow the Nazis' dictates.  Renee, our survivor, told us to be tolerant.

There is a very moving monument in Majdanek.  It sits on a hill, the site of the massacre of 18,000 Jews in November, 1943.  Their ashes lie under a large dome.  We put our arms around each other and sang Ani Ma'amin (I believe).

Before arriving in Krakow, we stopped in Sandomierz, a city whose Old Town has a medieval charm.  The dark side of Sandomierz lies in its cathedral:  paintings depicting the blood libel myth still hang on its walls, although the day that we visited, cloths had been thrown over them (the Poles were well aware of the 11,000 March of the Living participants).

After dinner in Krakow, some of the younger members of our group taxied to the Old Town to unwind.  Several of us sat in the hotel lounge, sipping our wine, and becoming fast friends.  Sharing an experience like the March brings people close very quickly.

Day 4.  Krakow.  The sun is bright, and the weather is warmer.  Only three layers of clothes and one pair of socks.

Ghetto platz.  The Jews of the Krakow Ghetto were deported from here to Auschwitz.  Today, there is a flat stone platform.  Sculpted steel chairs are placed randomly on the square.  Ironically, the chairs face a travel agency across the street!
We stood on the corner in front of the pharmacy Polish-Catholic owner, Tadeusz Pankiewicz, refused to move when the ghetto was enclosed.  He continued to supply medications to Jews, often free of charge, and his pharmacy became a meeting centre for the ghetto's underground activity.  In 1983, he was awarded recognition as a "Righteous Among the Nations" at Yad Vashem.

We stopped briefly outside Oscar Schindler's factory, which is now a museum.  Pictures of the Jews that Schindler saved line the windows of the office.  This was another of the few "up" moments of the trip.  The small remaining piece of the Krakow Ghetto wall is nearby.

Auschwitz-Birkenau lies 70 kilometres east of Krakow.  We walked through Auschwitz I, the forced-labour section of the concentration camp.  The sturdy, red-brick, two-story structures were originally built as Polish army barracks.  The Nazis were proficient at adaptive reuse of existing buildings.  I thought back to the Terezin concentration camp in the Czech Repulic, which was built by Emperor Joseph II as a fortress in the 18th century.  (Ironically, Joseph II was the first emperor to grant basic religious freedom to the Jews.)  Auschwitz I is now a series of museums, detailing the horrors of the extermination camp, Birkenau, next door.  There were many groups going through the exhibits that morning, and at one point I began to feel overwhelmed and claustrophobic, so I sat outside in the fresh air and regrouped in order to face Birkenau.

Train tracks still run through the famous entrance to Birkenau.  The tracks extend about one kilometre to the spot where Mengele determined with a flick of his finger who would live and who would die.  There is one cattle car in the middle of the track.  A group of Israeli police had just placed a flowered Magen David on it.

I'm still at a loss for words to describe Birkenau, the physical size of it and the numbers of Jewish men, women, and children who perished.  The camp is enormous.  All that is left on the men's (larger) side is an endless field of chimneys in the middle of concrete outlines of barracks (the wooden barracks are long gone).  The chimneys were never lit.  Prisoners huddled uncovered on slabs of floor or planks of wood.  I'm not sure how anyone managed to survive the cruelty and tortures of the guards, the Polish winters, or the starvation and disease.

We followed Renee through the camp.  She continued her story.  When the Lodz Ghetto was liquidated, she was deported to Birkenau by cattle car, along with her mother and father.  She was sent to the left with her mother.  She never saw her father again.  Renee and her mother kept each other alive with words.  They talked about their family.  Somehow they survived.  Towards the end of the War they were shipped to Hamburg to clear the rubble of the city.  Then they were left to die at Bergen-Belsen.  They were liberated by the Allies in the spring of 1945.  Renee and her mother had typhus.  Her mother died two weeks after liberation.

I am not including pictures of the crumbling crematoria or the insides of the remaining barracks.  I was able to cope numbingly with the experience of Birkenau by listening to Renee's story.  It humanized the  horrors for me.
Our group stood next to the monuments in the photo and, led by Rabbi Michael, recited the special Kaddish for victims of the Holocaust.


On the bus back to Krakow, we listened to Chaim, another survivor accompanying the UK delegation. Chaim said that we are the engine.  We have to keep telling the stories and testaments.  Six million is not a number.  It is Jewish individuals - we have to make their lives come to life.

That evening, the entire UK group (180 adults and young adults) gathered in the beautiful Kupa Synagogue in the Kazimierz (Jewish quarter) in Krakow.  We listened to Freddy, a very spry, animated  91-year-old survivor tell us his story.  You could hear a pin drop!  Scott also addressed the group - we loudly cheered him.  We were ready for the March the next day.





Day 5.  The March of the Living.  Auschwitz to Birkenau.

We left our hotel early in order to enjoy a few hours in the Kazimierz.  We sat in a cafe, ordered our cappuccinos and relaxed.








There were 11,000 participant in this year's March.  We came from every part of the globe.  We were young (16) and old (90+).  We were Jews and non-Jews.  Some were survivors.  Some were witnesses.  Some were liberators.  We linked arms, waved the flags of many nations, and marched together.  Each one of us represented 545 individuals of the six million Jews who were killed by the Nazis.

Our mood was jubilant as we gathered in Auschwitz I.

As we marched through the gates of Birkenau,  we heard Chaim Topol (the MC of the ceremony) reading the names of the 1.5 million children who perished in the Holocaust.  We were given wooden paddles that we each inscribed with a personal message.  We placed the paddles on the train tracks.  Mine was in memory of my grandfather's family from Lublin.

The ceremony was the most moving event I have ever attended.  A children's choir sang.  A young violinist played the theme from Schindler's list.  Esteemed Rabbi Israel Meir Lau addressed us.  There was a tribute to the liberators.  The "Righteous among the Nations" were honoured.  Torches were lit in memory of the victims of the Holocaust and in honour of those who resisted Nazi tyranny during those dark times.  The last torch was lit in honour of Israel, the hope and future of the Jewish people.
We stood.  Dudu Fisher sang Ale Malei Rachamim, the prayer for our departed ancestors.  Six Holocaust survivors who accompanied the March of the Living led the Kaddish.  The absolute highlight of my week was standing next to Linda and Yvonne, my two Chinese friends from Hong Kong, listening to their beautiful voices proudly sing Hatikvah along with 11,000 people at the end of the ceremony.

As we passed through those horrid gates for the last time, we were accompanied by a small band of shofar blowers.  It was triumphant!

A huge thank-you to Scott and Elana for making this journey unforgettable.  Hugs and thanks to our group for getting me through the week.







We are moving from memory to history.  In a few short years there will be no more living witnesses to the Holocaust.

Am Yisrael Chai.