Final Day in Warsaw

Our second day in Warsaw was predominantly a tour of Jewish interest sites. Our guide for the day, Marek Brukh, was born outside of Warsaw in 1948. On our way to the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising we passed the infamous Pawiak Prison. During the war it was used by the Nazis to incarcerate political prisoners. In from of the entrance is a dead tree with its trunk covered with placards with the names of past prisoners.
From there we drove to the site of the Ghetto Heroes Square. The area had all been leveled to rubble and is now surrounded by Soviet built apartment buildings. The setting is park- like, totally incongruous with both ghetto life and its destruction after the uprising. The city is in the midst of building a museum for the history of Polish Jewry. Facing the huge construction sites is a large monument dedicated to the fighters and the martyrs of Israel. This monument is the same as the one in the courtyard at Yad Vashem in Israel. On one side of the monument are the figures of powerful fighters in the midst of the uprising. On the other side the figures are walking with heads bowed marching off to the death camps. There are also other smaller monuments dedicated to individuals such as Mordecai Anielewicz, the young leader in the ghetto uprising and Szmul Zygielboim who committed suicide back in Warsaw because of allied indifference to the situation for Jews in Poland after going to the west and telling of the horrors that were already beginning.
At the other end of the square is a small mound with another monument. This one is located near Mila Street, the bunker headquarters for the organizers of the uprising. Marek showed us a picture that was taken after the entire ghetto area was destroyed. The only building standing was a church in the distant background. During the uprising the resistance people used the sewer system as a safer path between bunkers. A sewer lid is memorialized as a symbol.
Next we drove to the Umschlagplatz, the site from which those rounded up in the ghetto were brought and forced onto the transports to the concentration camps. The monument here contained hundreds of first names to represent all those who shared these names. From 1942 to 1943 over 300,000 Jews were sent to their death either on the way or in the killing camps from this spot. It’s uncanny to feel some identification with the victims when seeing one’s own name on the wall.
While driving around the city we passed a building that was an orphanage both during the war and today. Janusz Korczak, pen name for Henryk Goldszmit, who wrote popular children’s books, had worked at that orphanage. When offered freedom, and not to be sent on the transport, he defiantly chose to remain with the children and went with them to his death at Treblinka. Throughout the city there were monuments to this great man. There was a statue of Korczak in the old Jewish cemetery on Okopowa Street. This large area was enclosed within the ghetto and was one of the very few Jewish cemeteries to survive the war. Although the Nazis burned the records, used gravestones for paving and desecrated most of it, its survival provides its own historical record of more than a century of Warsaw Jewry. Today some of the broken stones have been used to create a memorial wall as we had seen also in Krakow.
We walked through a part of the cemetery’s vast expanse and saw many unusual and unique gravestones, mausoleums and monuments. One grave belonged to Lazaro Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, an attempt to establish an international language, ostensibly to produce a state of peace among humanity. Our guide said that only about 300 people speak Esperanto today and that English is the new Esperanto, “without the hope of peace.” There was a wall memorial to the more than one million children slaughtered by the Nazis. In the wall was a hole symbolizing how children entered and exited the ghetto, often smuggling in food from the outside. On the recent grave of Marek Edelman who died in October of 2009 were many bouquets of flowers, not the custom many of us know and practice with regards traditional Jewish graves. Edelman was an important figure in the ghetto uprising of 1943. We saw graves of famous writers (S. Anski, who wrote The Dybbuk and I.L. Peretz), thespians (the mother of Ida Kaminska of Yiddish theater fame), political and historical figures (Adam Czerniakowa, put in charge of the ghetto Jewish administration), and rabbis and pillars of the community. The cemetery has been renovated since the war and a copy of the original gate was made and erected in 1998.
Our next stop was the Nozyk Synagogue, the only surviving synagogue in the ghetto after the war. It was not destroyed, although severely damaged by bombings, because the Nazis used it as a stable. Renovated and reconstructed in the late 70’s and early 80’s, it has since become a central place of orthodox worship.
Not much remains of the original ghetto walls. However, not far from our hotel is a small area where we were able to see some traces. In a small section of the wall remaining, a few bricks had been removed in order to be able to place and light yahrzeit candles. Right next to a small section is now a small tourist information office. Although the office was closed, both the guide and Janusz commented that it had only been put there in recent months. Besides the wall sections there are marks in the walkways where the wall had once existed. This area is situated between ordinary buildings and would not be easily found unless one knew what to look for.
For the remainder of the afternoon we had free time for shopping in the nearby mall and/or at TK Maxx, modeled after T. J Maxx, for additional sightseeing ( a couple of people went to the Chopin Museum) or for rest before our final Shabbat in Warsaw.
For Kabbalat Shabbat and dinner, we headed out by bus from the center of town to the home of Beit Warszawa, the Progressive Jewish community in Warsaw. We were warmly greeted by Rabbi Burt Schuman, an American rabbi ordained at age 47. After serving for 7 years in Altoona PA, he was drawn to Warsaw and has served this congregation for the last 4 years. He led the service with a translator as he knows relatively little Polish. It turned out that the translator was also the cantorial soloist but that was hard to tell as Rabbi Schuman seemed to lead all of the singing. He graciously asked me to say a couple of words to the congregation. Also in attendance was a retired rabbi from California, and his wife who were spending a few months in Poland and surrounding countries as scholar in residence.
After services we were invited onto the lovely staircase of this large house/mansion turned synagogue center, where we chanted together kiddush and motzi. We were then welcomed into a large room (actually a tent) for a buffet Shabbat dairy dinner. We split up among the tables so we could talk with and meet the congregants, who mostly spoke English. We learned of a few who were only now discovering their Jewish roots. Jewish origins were often hidden by their parents in the communist era, and only now discovered in adulthood.
The walls were covered with lovely artwork, including a few pieces by the famous Israeli modern artist, Agam. We learned that that this congregation has an American patron but they continue to struggle like most Central and Eastern European progressive congregations . Even so, every week the congregation offers Shabbat dinner for all who show up. After the lovely evening we departed so we could pack and prepare for our departure from the hotel at 3:00 am.
This journey was both difficult and enjoyable at the same time. We visited and paid homage to some of the most tragic sites in all of Jewish history. We met members of small but emerging progressive Jewish communities in all three countries. We viewed beautiful historic Jewish buildings and artifacts but with few Jews to give them life in the present. We experienced both denial of the full tragedy of the Holocaust along with museums and memorials visited by thousands of students in order to educate them. We heard of the continued presence of anti-Semitism in places that bear the burden of a shameful history. We also gained new insights into the different populations around the Jewish community, learning that all is not what it appears to be or that sometimes we too don’t know the full picture of the events of the past. As a group we were also able to experience the general culture and cuisine. This was truly a powerful journey and we all learned much more about our heritage and hopefully about ourselves.