“A Journey to the Past” (Messuah, 1980)
Mr. Strochlitz delivered this address at a special session of an International Conference on “The Aftermath: The Impact of the Holocaust on Jews and Non-Jews,” which was held at the University of Haifa in May 1979. It was published in Sigmund Strochlitz, A Journy into the Past: Poland Revisited (Haifa: Strochlitz Chair in Holocaust Studies, University of Haifa, 1979)
A Journey into the Past
July 1977, thirty-four years later, my family and I went on a journey to touch the before. We went to places where once our forefathers dwelled, prospered, built, and/perished.
I went as a father and grandfather. A witness and a survivor, a citizen of my new adopted country, and as a Jew. Carrying that responsibility and living by and with those symbols were a blessing and a burden, as was the reality that my family, like all Jewish families, belongs to a people whose suffering is the most ancient in this world; that my family belongs to a people whose memory keeps that suffering alive.
By telling the story, I try not to evoke any personal sympathy but to report what I found and reflect on past events that my generation lived through. Our people were victims of hate, evil, and the indifference of the world; and yet we, the remaining survivors of a national tragedy, have accepted a commandment that calls for a commitment to life.
I am very grateful to all of you for coming tonight to share with me in those events.
Wednesday, July 6, 1977. We are about to land at the new international airport, Warsaw. The voice of the captain of the Polish airliner coming over the loudspeaker was firm and dear. The language had a strange and threatening sound – a reminder of the past.
An unusual past stretching over a thousand years of Jewish history, marked on one side by peaceful times and tremendous contributions to Polish society and on the other side by tragic times of pogroms and persecution. The lives of a majority of the Jewish people alive today were touched directly or indirectly by that past. Most of them give due reverence to that past and remember. Only a few, however, dare to return to be confronted with what once was and is no more.
For years, I had tried to prepare myself for that journey but kept putting it off, constantly finding new reasons to postpone the encounter. I finally gave in, still wondering how I would be able to face a reality that will stare at me every minute of my stay in Poland, facts of life that I refused in all those past years to accept.
Jewish life in Poland is no more. Of over three million Jews living in Poland before the war, there are only fifteen thousand left. The youngest is sixty-seven years old. There is no rabbi in the city of Warsaw or in any other city in Poland. On a more personal level, my coming to the city of my birth, the city of Bendin, where thirty thousand Jews lived before the war, and accepting that I am really there but that I am the entire Jewish population of that town could be a shattering experience, a rude awakening, even though intellectually I have made peace with that grim reality.
The soft and concerned voice of my youngest son, Rafael, sitting behind me, interrupts my thinking. He points out that we have landed in Warsaw and are now behind the “Iron Curtain.” He also inquires into my present thoughts and urges me to share those feelings with him. I would like to. I would like to tell him that even now I have doubts why anyone should go back to a country whose population cooperated with its own enemy to wipe out citizens loyal to their country – citizens who gave their lives in the 18th and 19th centuries in the uprising against Russia and Germany and who lost thousands of their best sons in the Polish war of 1917, the war of liberation. I would like to tell him that there was really no reason why anyone should go back to places where children were condemned to see their parents and entire families go up in flames, where young parents were beaten to death holding onto their small ones in hopes of protecting them, why anyone should walk on ground where the dead and the living were not separated any more.
I would like to tell him how frightened I am to visit towns where our ancestors lived and to revive deeply buried, painful memories of a past when man’s cruelty was matched only by God’s indifference. Can he understand that?
I will have to confront people that I grew up with, went to school with, played games with – people I knew so well – and recall how they turned against us, became Nazi underlings, killers waiting impatiently to see us herded into trains whose destination was death. How eagerly they denounced our places of hiding with full knowledge that we would be killed. They were our neighbors, Christians invoking the teaching of the Church to justify murderous deeds. Or perhaps there were very few true Christians in that land of the Christians. Those are some of the thoughts and feelings that I am still hesitant to share with my youngest son or with the rest of my family.
We have arrived, and I wish to make peace with reality. But at the same time, I feel that leaving this world, as all of us must, without making sure that future generations understand what happened to our people is an unforgivable crime. My family should make an attempt to assume the past, and thus move closer to our people in order to help the present. As we tell our children of the past and then our children tell their children, maybe we will assure a future, a future as a free people among free peoples.
I am the last in line to exchange American money into Polish currency. I am tense, aggressive, and irritable. Even the politeness of the clerk angers me, until he mentions that I can exchange my unspent money into American currency on the day we leave Poland. I understand now. Our stay here is only temporary. I am now even able to relax though I continue to hold on tightly to my American passport while the Polish customs officer inspects our luggage only superficially. Suddenly he says loudly, as though to reassure us, “Relax, you are in Poland, not in Russia.”
Thursday, July 7: Warsaw. I had visited the capital city of Poland only once, when I was a young high school student. My recollection of the city is vague, and I have no interest in joining my family on a guided tour through the city. I am not here as a tourist. The monuments and historical landmarks mean very little to me. I know that the city was completely destroyed during the war yet rebuilt to retain its old character. Only the Jewish quarters vanished completely. Gone forever is the glory of the largest Jewish community in Europe, the center of Jewish religious learning and study. What is left is a void.
My wife Rose and her sister, our three children, their spouses, and two young cousins from Canada leave on a guided tour. I am now free to pursue my own interests. My first stop is the Jewish Historical Institute, located next to the Tlomacki Synagogue, destroyed and demolished by the Nazis. The Institute has a museum, a collection of rare manuscripts, and a library that is supposed to tell the history of the Jewish people in Poland before and during the war. The head of the Institute, a former colonel in the army, receives me warmly after reading my letter of introduction from a close friend of his. He strikes me as a sad human being, conscious of his Jewish background, but resigned to live a life denying his identity.
We move through the building silently. The ground floor contains paintings. Sad faces stare out at me, faces of small-town merchants and artisans; children with their teachers involved in intensive study; faces of despair and helplessness of the masses of people driven from their homes by Nazi murderers. None of the painters survived. My guide draws my attention to a ninth century diary of a Jewish traveler to Poland, a letter from Spinoza’s teacher, records of the Sabbatai Zevi messianic movement in the seventeenth century. The diary, the letter, and the records of the messianic movement are probably the most valuable collection in the Institute, the guide points out proudly. I don’t doubt it – maybe they are. But isn’t he aware that hundreds of buildings in Warsaw could have been filled before the war with valuable Jewish paintings , beautiful ceremonial objects, manuscripts and books that are now lost and can never be replaced ?
We climb to the upper floors, known as the Martyrs Museum. Two rusty milk cans, in which Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum hid the daily records of the life and death of Warsaw Jewry, are prominently displayed. The cans and the records were found in 1946. Dr. Ringelblum, a well-known historian, started his records immediately after the outbreak of the war. At the beginning, he made an attempt to appeal to world opinion, to warn the world that Hitler was a maniac and that his threats to murder the Jewish people and eliminate every nation blocking his way in his drive to dominate the world should be taken very seriously. He was appealing to reason, in his innocence hoping to arouse the conscience of the free world. As the war dragged on and it became clear to him that the world did not care and that the Jews could be saved only by a miracle, the keeping of records became a purely historical act for posterity. Correctly suspecting that the enemy would try to distort events, he recorded every detail. Dr. Ringelblum was shot by the Nazis after the Ghetto was destroyed.
On the same floor as the two cans, in a glass case, there are two pistols and an old hunting rifle used by the Ghetto fighters during the 1943 uprising. Displayed next to the arms are Jewish Council files, Ghetto newspapers, execution and deportation orders, files of the American Joint Distribution Committee, and a large collection of photographs of Ghetto life. I move very slowly, trying to absorb everything. My guide is very patient. He watches me stand for a long while over a photograph of a young girl, an acquaintance of mine and a friend of my sister. Frumka Plotnick lived in our city during the war and became the leader of a small group of fighters in the city of Bendin. She made several trips to Warsaw disguised as a Pole and was finally able to secure two pistols to fight and defend the Jewish people in Bendin. In August 1943, on the day of the liquidation of the Bendin Ghetto, she and her friends were killed after exhausting all their ammunition.
We leave the Institute and head in the direction of the wartime Ghetto. Tall new buildings, playgrounds, and wide streets – but not one stone is left of Jewish Warsaw. The only building that remains is the old synagogue outside the Ghetto walls. During the war, the Germans converted the synagogue into a warehouse. A sign that the synagogue is closed for renovation is prominently displayed. We approach the Ghetto monument. It depicts a group of Ghetto fighters surrounded by men, women, and children armed with stones, sticks, and their naked fists. On April 19, 1943, the first day of Passover, Jews with a pitifully small arsenal of weapons stood up to fight against the German military might. History does not record any uprising like this one, with no hope for victory. The fighters planned to die, but to exact a price – to perish, but not to surrender. When the fighting stopped, only a few Jews were left alive, but the Nazis had paid a price and in desperation, burned every building.
Not far from the monument is a mound of earth where the young commander Mordechai Anilewicz, died fighting. I recite the kaddish, a prayer for the departed, hoping that someone will respond with the word “Amen.” Only an echo reverberates in the air, seeming to challenge the traditional meaning of the kaddish prayer.
Six hundred thousand Jews once lived in Warsaw, not less than the number of people living in Israel that were privileged in 1948 to greet the Declaration of Independence. We approach the sight of the old Jewish Community Center, where its president Adam Czerniakow committed suicide. An assimilated Jew who had little contact with the Jewish community before the war and strongly believed all his life that assimilation was the solution to our problems, he took it upon himself to lead, represent, and defend the largest Jewish community in Europe.
On July 23, 1942, the Nazis demanded more Jews for deportation. Suspecting that they were being murdered and not resettled, Czerniakow committed suicide. Many people consider Czerniakow’s act an escape. They feel he abandoned his people and believe that he should have issued a warning, told the truth, gone into hiding, and called for active resistance. Very few people remember Adam Czerniakow.
It is getting very late, but there is one more stop I must make today, the place where the poet and writer Yitzhak Katznelson lived and worked during the war. Two beautiful poems written by him, “The Song of the Slaughtered Jewish People” and “The Song of the Rabbi of Radzin,” are close to my heart. Yitzhak was very fond of the Rabbi of Radzin, who during the war called for active resistance and was shot by the Nazis. Some of the Rabbi’s followers are still alive and are growing in number. Only one week before leaving for Poland, my family and I were privileged to participate in the beautiful wedding ceremony of our granddaughter who lives in Israel. The bride, a direct descendent of the Rabbi of Radzin, and groom are proudly carrying on the tradition of the Radzin Hasidim.
We all decide to spend the evening in the old city of Warsaw. Soon we are lost. A young Polish student heading in the same direction volunteers to help us. Passing by churches filled to capacity, we are surprised by the Communist regime’s inability to eliminate religion from the life of the people. Our young guide, however, tries to explain the phenomenon as a protest against the Russian occupation and a rejection of the Communist way of life. “Nazi occupation has been replaced by Russian domination. We will fight – we are a proud people,” he tells us. I listen and understand his impotent anger, but I am still unable to develop any sympathy or compassion for the people who cooperated with their own enemy to destroy us.
Friday, July 8: Warsaw – Cracow. I would not like to leave Warsaw without at least spending some time in the only remaining synagogue. Yesterday I saw the sign “closed for renovation,” but I couldn’t find anybody working. It occurs to me that the Jewish Home for the Aged is located near the synagogue and perhaps somebody there may have keys to the building. I am correct and several people join me. We walk into a dark, dirty building, shockingly neglected. The ark is bare and hardly visible. Torn prayer books, torn prayer shawls, broken menorah, broken mezzuzas cover the floor of this forsaken place. The people around me seem to be either indifferent or defiant. They don’t care and make no effort to hide their feelings. They lost everything and perhaps blame others, too, not only the killers. Nobody prays here to proclaim His greatness. No one is afraid to be judged for neglecting a sacred place.
Someone in the group suggests we visit the only remaining cemetery. I had not planned to do so, but I follow. We approach a huge tract of land, dotted by thousands of overturned tombstones, neglected and forgotten except by an occasional tourist. I pass the tombstones of the great S. Ansky, author of The Dybbuk, and the famous Yiddish and Hebrew author. Y. L. Peretz. A picture of Peretz standing with my father as a young man was once prominently displayed in our home. I leave the cemetery deeply saddened, thinking that the only large group of Jews left in Poland is congregated here. I am even more saddened than by my experience in the synagogue this morning.
Back in the hotel, everybody is getting ready for the trip to Cracow. My daughter, Romana, born after the war in a displaced persons camp, and my son-in-law, Chuck, born in the United States, have just come back from their visit to the Jewish Institute. They are silent and probably not ready to share their feelings with me. I refrain from asking questions. Over the years, I have been unwilling to talk about the past with all my children, and they have been patient and understanding of the reasons for my silence. Now, I, too, can accept that perhaps the time is still not right for detailed discussion of those dreadful events.
The plane ride to Cracow is a short one, but I have enough time to reflect on past history and my years as a student in that city. Cracow was the capital city of Poland in the beginning of the seventeenth century. King Casimir, who reigned in the fourteenth century, encouraged Jews to settle in Poland and founded south of Cracow a citycalled Casimir, where Jews lived until the Nazi invasion. Even though there were some blood libels and mob outbreaks incited by the Church and anti-Semitic riots supported by German storekeepers, the Jews of Casimir in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were much better off than their brothers in other parts of Europe. In the seventeenth century, large numbers of Jews fled from Germany, and at the same time many others sought refuge in Cracow from the Chmielnicki massacres. After the Congress of Vienna, some Jews were permitted to live outside Casimir, in the Christian sector. That privilege was granted only to those who had a certain secular education and were willing to give up traditional dress. In the nineteenth century, Jews occupied high positions in the administration and were very prominent in the cultural life of the city. One of them even rose to become the president of the chamber of commerce.
Before the war, I lived in Casimir when I was a student and my parents felt secure and I was comfortable staying in that part of town.
The Zionist movement had its beginning at the end of the nineteenth century but only became a real force under the leadership of Dr. Thon and Dr. Szwarcbart . During my years as a student at Cracow University, both these men were the idols of the young people. Their moral support and encouragement to continue our studies in spite of the constant harassment by the Polish students was the main reason for our perseverance. Anti-Semitic outbreaks on the university campus were, especially at the beginning of every school year, almost a daily occurrence. These outbreaks were intended to frighten our parents and to discourage and intimidate all of us. During my stay at the University of Cracow, several Jewish students lost their lives in defense of their right to attend classes. The official policy of many faculties was known as “numerus nullus”: under no circumstances could a Jew be admitted. Some faculties permitted only a small percentage of Jewish students. To the best of my recollection, there was not one instance when a Polish university professor raised his voice in indignation or in protest against these policies.
At the beginning of the war, there were 60,000 Jews in Cracow. The final liquidation came in the middle of 1943, when most of the Jews were either killed or dispatched to Auschwitz. Only a few were transferred to Plaszow, and then in the middle of 1944 to Auschwitz.
The airport, built after the war, is not too far from Plaszow and seems out of place. The passengers arriving and the people waiting for them seem to be party functionaries. The officials do not seem to be in any rush to go back to the city and resume their work. There are no taxis at the airport. We rent a small bus and proceed to the hotel. Rose and her sister watch every sign and building on our way, trying hard to recognize the city in which they grew up. They are a little frustrated and lost, but have forgotten that thirty-eight years have passed since they have seen the city. Perhaps they are not ready or willing even now to accept the changes that took place. It is not the same city or the same people.
It is Friday evening, and we are getting ready to attend services at the Rama synagogue. The synagogue was built in 1553 and named after Rabbi Moshe lsserles, who was known as the Rama, an acronym derived from the initials of his name. The Rama molded and guided the life of Polish Jewry for several centuries, and his additions to the Code of Jewish Law, or Shulkhan Arukh, are followed by Orthodox Ashkenazic Jews to this day. The Rama was born in Cracow in 1520 and died in 1572 and the cemetery where he was buried was totally destroyed by the Nazis. Only one tombstone remains intact – his. I approach the synagogue with a heavy heart.
The experience this morning in the Warsaw synagogue has left me depressed and heartbroken, but here I am pleasantly surprised. The people seem to be different. Even though they are old and frail, they seem to be alive. The place is alive, the atmosphere intimate. We walk in and sense the excitement. These people have not seen so many young Jews in a long while. We count ten people, a minyan, and sit down to pray. Strange sounds greet my children’s ears, but for me they are old, familiar tunes, causing my mind to wander and raise questions. Can I really say that my relationship to God has remained unchanged after everything I lived through? Can I accept His judgment as just and correct? What is the true meaning of our special relationship to God? Is it to be prepared to live in misery and tear, suffering and pain, to be slaughtered, and yet keep up a burning fire of unconditional obedience and never lose faith? Is there any sin in the world deserving of such punishment as the punishment we received? Those questions in one form or another have been raised by many in our long history, and the answers range from one extreme to another, resulting only in additional questions. But one thing I do know: to feel the presence of other Jews, to comfort them in their loneliness, and to maintain a link to our ancestors is a special obligation for those who survived. We suffered as Jews and survived as Jews to remain Jews. We depend on each other’s help to ease despair and dispel doubts, to reinforce faith and inspire confidence.
Services are almost over, and I notice at the rear of the synagogue a small group of young Poles, who are probably visiting Cracow, sitting silently following our prayers. For me their presence is incredible. The separation of the two communities in my time was unbridgeable, encouraged and promoted by the teaching of the Church and supported actively by the Polish government. We lived inside the cities as outsiders. Have attitudes changed or did we just become a tourist attraction? Is their interest directed toward our unique way of life, which guards us from going mad and keeps us hoping for and believing in a brighter future? Some claim that the younger Polish generation, after being humiliated by the Nazi occupation and looked upon with disdain by the Russians, have learned a lesson and are different from their forefathers. Perhaps.
Saturday, July 9: Cracow. Early in the morning, my son-in-law Chuck joins me to attend services. The rest of the family will follow. The crowd is a little larger than last night; there is a minyan without us, and the president of the remainder of Polish Jewry is conducting the first part of the services. I hear my name called to the Torah, honored with an aliyah. I recite the usual blessing following the reading, but I search my mind for an additional blessing, a blessing for a Jew who has been away on a long journey, has returned home, and knows that it is no longer his home and can never be his home again. I search in vain. There is no such blessing. There could not have been such a blessing. Instead, I ask the reader to make a mishehberach for an uncle who was one of the leaders of the Jewish community in Cracow. Our uncle, not a Zionist before the war, believed firmly that only the Messiah could bring us to the Promised Land. After surviving the war, he emigrated to Israel, unwilling to build a new life in a place where some day someone might again shout: “Kill the Jews.” He knew that life in Israel would be hard and dangerous, but be preferred to die there than to live in Poland. The reader concludes the mishehberach, a blessing pronounced upon others as a token of friendship or sympathy. Today, in addition, the blessing is a reminder to those present that there are in Israel survivors who once lived, worked, and prayed here and have no intention of forgetting those who are left.
Chuck, my son-in-law, is now called up to the Torah. He recites the blessing with a firm voice and a passion he has never known before. The sound of his voice just touches the congregants and slowly fades away, yet it will remain with me forever. I was very pleased that Chuck decided to publish, as his first scholarly book, Rabbi Akiba’s interpretation of Mishna-Tosefta.
After teaching all of his life “Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself,” Rabbi Akiba was tortured to death by the Romans, as were other Jewish leaders and scholars after him. Their fate, though, did not deter later generations from upholding the moral standards of their teachers. After Auschwitz and Majdanek, the commitment to love one’s neighbor as oneself seems to be meaningless to many survivors; nevertheless, it must be emphasized more strongly than ever.
I am invited to lead the congregation in the musaf service. Although pleased, I am unsure and filled with doubts. For over four hundred years, rabbis of great stature and deep beliefs, acting always in accordance with the will of God, which they believed could never be wrong, had led the congregation. These rabbis set an example for the congregation, and congregants set an example for the rabbis. Will they forgive me for daring to stand here? Will I be able to affirm my beliefs, not only with my lips but also with my mind and heart? I don’t know, but I decide to lead the congregation.
After services, my family and I walk through the streets of Cracow, where our ancestors lived. Our first stop is the house where Rose and her family lived before the war. Five families are now cramped into that apartment. Rose, outwardly calm, walks in, but holds my hand tightly. She is pale but her voice does not betray emotion. Her mind must be racing with the speed of light, remembering many details of her life here. Times of joy and worry, happiness and uncertainty. Before the war, I must have passed that house a thousand times on my way to the Jewish students dormitory. How I would have loved to know them all. The piety of Rose’s father was legendary and an example for the entire family. Charity for him was a sacred obligation. He might have survived the war but during Passover of 1945 he refused to eat bread and died of exhaustion. Spiritual courage meant to him much more than physical heroism. Rose’s mother was a very gentle human being, loved and admired by everyone.
We walk from one street to the next. Here the Uberbaums lived and over there the Kleiners, a little further the Heitners and on the next block the Graumanns. Here the Wurzels got married, not far from the house where the Goldsteins lived. Some of my children want to know about all their nephews and cousins. There were so many of them. Rose and her sister are trying to give our children a sense of the magnitude of loss suffered by their family. The children seem to understand, and yet there is no way to convey not only that our tragedy was the most terrible chapter in Jewish history, but that mankind failed. What happened in Germany was not just the work of one maniac, nor was it limited to one country. The Holocaust was a result of teaching hate for many centuries.
We move to the building known before the war as the Jewish Students Dormitory of Cracow. I am overwhelmed with memories. Here Nachman Bialik read his poetry and Gottlieb displayed his paintings, Professor Chaim Weizmann mixed a lecture in chemistry with the need to support Zionism, Ben Gurion urged us to build a socialist state in Israel, and Zev Jabotinsky warned about the dangers of Nazis and advised us to leave Poland as soon as we could by legal or illegal means.
I recall also an evening with Mr. Ehrlich and Mr. Alter, the two leaders of the Bund, a left-wing radical organization. They dreamt of a perfect world – a socialist world built by workers. They urged us to support the Soviet Union and its plans to resolve once and for all the Jewish problem by establishing a Jewish republic in Birobidzan. They demanded that we give up our tradition, forfeit distinctiveness, and dissolve in the sea of Marxism. The evening was spent in heated discussion, and most of us agreed that not only were those utopian plans just dreams but that Cossak hate had been replaced by Communist deception. I was not surprised after the war when I read how the Russian Communists had betrayed Jews and had handed over to the Nazis those of our people who tried to hide in the woods or escape from the ghettos. The Jews who are buried in mass graves in Kiev and Charkow were killed by German bullets and Communist cooperation. Mr. Ehrlich and Mr. Alter with their vision of a bright future in Birobidzan escaped to Russia immediately after the outbreak of the war. They were jailed, and no one ever heard from them again.
The Polish authorities converted the Jewish student dormitory into a sports center after the war. During the war the Nazis found a different use for the building: they made it into a whorehouse.
Our last stop is the Ghetto. Rose without comment points out places of work and hiding. She refuses, however, to lead our children to the spot where the Jews of Cracow were shipped to their death. Her sister assumes that burden. I remain with Rose, knowing very well that she has searched in vain today for something or someone and that she was comfortable nowhere and lost everywhere.
Sunday, July 10: Bendin. The dawn breaks my uneasy sleep. Today our destination is Bendin, the town of my birth, my childhood, and my shattered dreams. The town where I lost my innocence and hope, and was filled instead with anguish. Here my early ambitions faded away and my doubts about human nature were turned into ugly reality. I no longer expect very much and have no illusions. There is not a single human being left in this town that I would like to visit. Nor do I expect to be recognized by its new inhabitants. Yet I am aware that certain playgrounds, buildings, even the jailhouse and streetcars will stir my memory. If only for one day to be able to share; but I do not return to that town to reawaken my past, rather to forget it – while remembering all those that I loved. Even the happy days of my Iife there are as dead in me as dry leaves on a dead tree. And if there are some parts of me still roaming the streets of Bendin, the time has come to put an end to them.
I Iive for the present that restored my sanity and gave me a purpose in life. The future belongs to my children, and I accept their assumption that without knowing where they have come from, they cannot know where they are going. Their assumption guides me here today.
Two taxi drivers are waiting for us as we leave our Cracow hotel for Bendin, a town known to my children by name only. The geographical existence of this small town will soon represent for my children more than just a little spot someplace in Silesia or a state of mind projected into their existence. It will become a tangible reality. Today we will walk together the streets of our ancestors. I will walk the last time, to return no more. They the first time, to retain continuity. For me it is the final departure and perhaps a way to transmit my Jewish heritage; for them a missing beginning, a link to make their lives more complet .
It begins to rain as we drive southwest. The roads are slippery, and we are further slowed down by horse-drawn carts and people walking to church this Sunday morning. We pass villages and small towns silently. Sue, my daughter-in-law, is on my right. The closer we come to our destination, the more subdued she becomes. Jaime, my older son, is on my left. My usual easy contact with him is strained. Perhaps he is reaching out for answers. I have none. I have no deeper comprehension today of what happened to us than I had immediately after the war. I only hope that my inner strength, my eyes, and memory will carry me through the day and that I will be able to share with my children my memories of the past. As time passes by, I am aware that a feeling is growing in me to urge them to study that period of our history as much as possible.
Some historical data about the city of Bendin suddenly creep into my mind. Documents exist indicating that Jews lived in Bendin at the end of the twelfth century, encouraged by the liberal policies of King Casimir. People moved to this city in great numbers from neighboring Germany. Many became merchants, and during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they developed a substantial trade with the neighboring countries. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Jews constituted a majority in the town. In the nineteenth century, Rabbi Abraham Bornstein, the son-in-law of the famous Rabbi Mendel of Kotzk, was the leading personality in the region. Under the Russian occupation, the Jewish people in Bendin suffered economically and were subjected to many decrees limiting their activities. During the 1905 revolution, many Jews were deported to Siberia. One of the greatest leaders at that time was Rabbi Berish Graubart. Well-known and respected all over Poland, he served as rabbi in Bendin for many years and was one of the four delegates invited to Moscow to meet the prime minister of Russia and discuss problems facing the Jewish people. Rabbi Graubart was extremely popular, though ahead of his time in his defense that secular education could be gained without diminishing religious upbringing. This stand was attacked by many though with no damage to his own reputation. In Bendin, the Zionist movement attracted only a small number of people, but it became much stronger in the twentieth century. Several events helped change people’s attitudes. In 1913 the famous writer Y.L. Peretz came to town to be the guest speaker of the newly organized “Hazamir.” Lectures on Zionism and concerts of Jewish music were among the activities that were well attended.
We approach the city. The task before me today will be difficult. I will be challenged to fit the details of my life before and during the war into some pattern although most of the pieces are missing. I must be careful not to cross the boundary between fact and fantasy, dream and reality; at the same time, I must unburden repressed feelings.
We are in Bendin. The physical aspects of the city have been unaffected by the war, and yet there is not a human being in sight. Midtown is sleepy, lethargic, almost strangled in boredom.
Here, every stone speaks to me of indignities and loss. The house my father built in 1932 and we lived in until 1940 has been converted into a city clinic. It is locked and there is not a sign of life inside. The house is shabby, completely run down, hardly recognizable, and seems to be much smaller than on the day we were expelled. Time has played a trick on me. I try to point out to my children the location of the different rooms in the house, but I become aware of a painful silence around me. That house and all adjoining houses had always been bursting with life and noise. Children running and mothers shouting in Yiddish, merchants arguing and artisans displaying their work.
I feel like an intruder, afraid to break that silence. But I must. Almost whispering, I relate certain facts about my parents and grandparents, a little about my sisters and aunts, and finally emphasize that our house was a place of traditional Jewish culture and Zionist yearnings. We were taught by example to respond to every need in the community and every cause embracing Jewish identity or survival. Philanthropy was practiced daily but never as a substitute or criterion for Jewish commitment; but there were many misunderstandings and disagreements during the war years.
On the next block, three families live in the apartment in which I was born. The present tenants seem to be friendly, yet they doubt the purpose of our journey. Here where it all began, I suddenly feel like sharing with my family my childhood and its emotional riches – the times that existed at the beginning. I am caught in the excitement of remembering and lost in a euphoric cloud of retelling: It was from this window that I jumped to prove to my young friends that I was not afraid, and here I played and fought my adversaries. From this house I first left for school and dated with high expectations. Up the hill I explored the mysteries of a fourteenth century castle, played hide-and-seek with my two younger sisters, conspired with my friends to make unbearable the life of the butcher living on the ground floor – his looks were repugnant to us.
I went almost daily with my mother to the home of my grandparents just across the street. My grandfather, tall and thin, resembled a biblical prophet, surrounded by holy books that he pored over with a monotonous melody that rings even today in my ears. I used to see him sometimes in the morning putting on his tallit and tefillin and reciting the prayers by heart. I wondered if I would ever be able to memorize so much. I waited anxiously after every meal to join my grandfather in the prayers of grace. In my childish world, it was extremely reassuring to hear him pronouncing loudly and as a matter of fact, na’ar haiti, gam zakanti – “I have been young and am now old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, nor their seed begging bread.” The living reality could not shake my faith in the truthfulness of that statement. My grandfather died in 1936. I was only nine years old at the time. Even though I was extremely attached to him, his image completely faded from my mind in the following years of my life. It was only after the war, when I had to enter the world again after witnessing that man can still teach a lesson to hell, that he reappeared in my mind. His towering figure became a constant companion of mine; and in the struggle with myself, he never left me alone, pleading that I not despair, urging a commitment to life.
Today in Bendin, I feel vulnerable again, attacked from all sides by familiar but nagging questions. Why did it all have to happen and why was the world silent? Where was the great American Jewish community or the Protector of Israel? These are the questions that still haunt me today. I fear that life may be without meaning, that life is not an answer and death not a homecoming. I simply cannot bear these thoughts and long for just a touch of my grandfather’s boundless faith.
Most of my family lived in my grandparents’ neighborhood. Like Rose in Cracow, I am trying here in Bendzin to bring to life what is no more; and to project images that are only in my mind. I walk with my children through the town where my friends and relatives lived and perished. Uncles – merchants and dreamers; aunts, more pious than their husbands; cousins – Zionists and Communists; nephews, friendly and hostile; school mates – scholars and bookworms. How well I remember them all. I can see them, but only I alone can see them. Only I alone can hear, even today, Bendin roughnecks cursing in Yiddish and preachers sermonizing in the same language; mothers singing Yiddish lullabies, and young men courting their girls in a language that to my sorrow even my own children hardly understand. I pass places that we used to frequent after school, and then the school itself, which looks different to me, having somehow lost its dignity. And the house Alf Szwarcbaum lived in. How I remember the flickers of hope embracing the entire Jewish community after every letter of his that reached us from abroad describing his efforts to rescue at least a few. The houses of worship, converted by the Poles into apartment houses and stores, distort my perception of the city. The buildings that I remember humming with activity seem to me lifeless: real estate without meaning and purpose. The Nazis slaughtered people, but they saw no reason why buildings and real estate should suffer: they were too costly to be replaced. I hope my children do not sense my present feelings, but I have no doubt that what they have seen will remain forever in their consciousness, even though I am unable to unlock the daily life of my family as it had been during the war. To be turned into a subhuman, to live constantly on the brink of destruction could only be understood by one who survived that ordeal.
Perhaps I should try to convey some of the dilemmas of our elders and some of the acts of courage and heroism performed by the Jews of Bendin during the war. They could provide lessons for the future.
In his book, Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation, Isaiah Trunk related a sharp disagreement that took place prior to the first settlement action in Bendin in 1941. Merin, the chairman of the Jewish Council, called a meeting of the elders. In his opening speech, he stated that it would be necessary to follow the standard policy that anything the authorities demanded should be done by the Jews themselves – including the delivering of Jews for resettlement. Michael Laskier declared himself against Merin’s proposal, saying that in all Jewish history the Jewish community never helped to deliver to the enemy thousands of victims for extermination. Laskier stressed that the sick and elderly chosen for resettlement would surely be killed. He referred to the famous ruling by Maimonides in which pagans tell the Jews, “Give us one of yours and we shall kill him; otherwise, we shall kill all of you.” Maimonides’ response: All shall be killed and not a single soul should be delivered. Other council members warned against the dangers of slipping into a moral abyss if Merin’s advice were followed. My father never mentioned the meeting to our family, but if he participated in the deliberation, I have to assume that he was among those opposing the Merin view. The cooperation and activities of the Merins all over Poland did not, in my opinion, save one life. On the contrary, they may have deluded most of the people into false hopes. The Merins, and their families, perished together with others.
There were also extreme acts of courage and heroism in the city of Bendin. Rabbi Shimon Huberbrand reported the following:
“In September 1939 the wicked ones came to Bendin, surrounded the Jewish quarters and set fire to the synagogue and the houses adjacent to it. Every Jew who tried to escape from one of those houses was shot on the spot. Yet even as the flames engulfed the synagogue, several Jews rushed into it, led by a certain Schlessinger, his son, and son-in-law. They fought their way through to the Holy Ark and each succeeded in rescuing two Torah scrolls, one in each arm. When they emerged from the burning synagogue, they were all shot by the Nazis.”
A diary kept by a member of the Sonderkommando in AuschwitzBirkenau records the following incident:
In August 1943, transports from Bendin were arriving daily and the people driven into the gas chambers. The old rabbi of our town was in one of those transports. Knowing that those were the last moments of his life, he urged everyone to sing and dance and face death as the highest achievement in life. Dying tor Kiddush Hashem, sanctification of God.”
There were many attempts at sabotage and active resistance that failed for lack of cooperation, betrayal by the Poles, or the inability to secure weapons.
The only thing left for me today is to visit the cemetery where my grandparents are buried, find the tombstones, recite the kaddish, and reinforce in my children’s mind that they, like some of their friends, also had great grandparents. The cemetery is only one mile from town and my family used to pray there several times a year. We travel around for several minutes but I cannot find the cemetery. It has disappeared without a trace. Playgrounds and buildings have replaced the old cemetery. Even though I should have expected this, I simply cannot face it. Child-like tears stream down my face, yet they do not relieve my pain. Thirty-two thousand Jews lived in Bendin before the war and were murdered by the Nazis. For the Poles, however, the job was not complete until every trace of Jewish history was removed from Bendin. After spending seven hours in the town of my birth, I leave the city feeling more alienated than I could have ever imagined.
We return to Cracow exhausted. The destruction of the cemetery by the Poles and the desecration of the tombs of my grandparents tortures my mind. But I also realize that in the total destruction, this is but a minor tragedy, a blow that I will have to cope with. One way would probably be to try to remember my grandparents together with all the others I loved who were murdered and have no graves. My children, however, were robbed of being able to embrace the tombstone with their family name on it, recite the kaddish together with me, and say a final goodbye to their ancestors.
Tomorrow will be the last day of our stay in Poland and the only day of our journey when neither myself nor Rose will be with our children. We will travel separately to Birkenau-Ausch witz. My children accept my wish silently. The decision to spend that day alone was prompted by several reasons, some of which can be defined and some being beyond my capacity to express.
I dread revealing the secret wish that is exactly the opposite of what I tried to transmit to them all these years, to love and cherish life and never give in to despair. But many times I did, and even though I made a promise in Auschwitz not to run into the electrically charged wire, but to survive to bear witness to tell the tale, the thought of suicide was constantly present. It was part of the hopelessness of our life and the ever present smell of burning human flesh. I don’t want to watch my children attempting to close my wounds. Time did not heal them, and rightfully so. They are painfully open and should remain that way. To repress the indifference one felt at being surrounded by corpses during the day or waking up and touching the cold and dead bodies of young people who had been alive yesterday and being able to swallow a piece of bread is even today tearing me apart. I dread that encounter and I want to be alone.
We pass the gates of Birkenau, holding onto each other in an unconscious effort to ease tension. The place is now quiet, the screams can no longer be heard, the smell of burnt human flesh is gone, and the sense of horror is missing. Nobody is around. The crowds visit Auschwitz one mile from here. Very few come to Birkenau. There is nothing left here except one row of barracks and a partially demolished crematorium. Two million Jews died in the gas chambers of Birkenau.
A sudden noise startles me. It sounds like a train coming to an abrupt stop, whistling and spitting out human cargo to be disposed of. The sign on the gates, “Arbeit Macht Frei” – working will keep you free – all of a sudden is visible to me. By now I am frightened and hear the gates closing behind me and see the angels of death in Nazi uniforms. My tattooed number, 132407, is flashing in front of me. Long rows of barbed wire fences, towers with flashing lights and machine guns. Columns of ragged human figures driven by blood-thirsty S.S. men with the help of mad dogs are passing in front of me. Skeletons shrouded in striped uniforms all over the place. Total confusion, people crying, moaning, some even praying. Children losing parents and parents looking for children. And what is incredible in all that confusion, I hear music, an orchestra playing. Could that be the entrance to hell and, if so, did God choose the Nazis as His messengers? Frozen in fear, I turn around and am relieved to notice that we are still the only visitors here. The gates are open. Rose is next to me. No dogs, no skeletons, no machine guns, no S.S. men, no train, no music. There is nothing to fear. No people around.
Irrational, but people built the gas chambers, people built the most inhuman tortures. People killed people. I am pleased that my children are not with me. The fear in my eyes would have probably frightened and remained with them for a long time and crippled them. What strikes me now, even more, is that the one thing that all of us were trying to accomplish immediately after the war was to re-create life. It was not only a national affirmation of life. It was to prove to ourselves that we were not defeated, that we strongly believed in the destiny and mission of the Jewish people, that the defeat was also a defeat for mankind, even though this time we paid a very high price.
We walk through the one open barrack. Six hundred people marked for death were driven in every night in frantic search for a place to lie down. There was scarcely room for half of us.
Was I really here? Had I really survived the most inhuman conditions imaginable? Where did I get the strength to live and remain human while watching every day thousands of people dying and others arriving to be led or misled to the gas ovens?
Was it strength deriving from faith or was it just luck? One thing I do know: the best of us did not make it. Generally, only those prisoners held out who were prepared to use brutal force, theft, and betrayal to save themselves. But also not for a long time. Those inmates who resorted to brutal force in the hope of surviving finally became its own victims. Turning away from the golden rule, “don’t do unto others what you don’t want others to do unto you,” they adopted the iron rule: “do unto others before they do unto you.” But this very iron rule, which they clamped down in their attempt to save themselves at the cost of their fellow man, resulted in eliminating each other.
And maybe it was not brutal force or luck or the decision to let fate take its course that kept some of us alive. There were other factors that made you determined to resist the tide that swept away thousands a day: Affirming a bond with a friend in mutual trust and aid, being more of a person in a world of beasts, helping each other and grasping an outstretched hand when knocked down at work, being next to each other in line for food to make sure that nobody would take that piece of bread away, sharing everything, comforting each other, supporting each other in the determination to survive . Staying alive just to save your own life was for many not enough. Staying alive because somebody counted on your help gave those who survived the necessary strength; and in the final months of the war, when we were just dragging our ghosts, survival meant the denial to Nazis of their final victory. These forces kept us going.
I sit silently for several hours on the grounds near the half-demolished crematorium and try to pray in my own way. My mind is a jumble of thoughts growing in intensity, suppressing fear, challenging God’s justice if not His power, reflecting on the fact that my generation has been cursed and blessed as perhaps no generation of Jews since our beginning – that the world has divided itself between those that tried to murder us and those who remained indifferent to our murder. What occurs to me now is that perhaps I am here not only to defy all those that denied our people the right to exist, but that with all the strength available to me, I am obliged and perhaps privileged to convey to those who perished that some of us survived to testify and that further, after two thousand years, we finally control our destiny. I wish to tell them that their dreams became a reality. We established our own State, we live in freedom, produce most of our necessities, and have the means to defend ourselves. We are defenseless no more. The Jewish people have returned to their homeland, re-established a sovereign State, and returned also to the stage of world history.
On a more personal level, I am overwhelmed by an urge to tell my parents that they were not the last ones, that Jewish life did not come to an end. That we are alive to remember them, that their grandchildren are here today and are proud of their Jewishness and are well aware of their grandfather’s fight during the sixth Zionist congress against the establishment of a Jewish state in Uganda rather than in Palestine.
My two younger sisters, so in love with the idea of Zionism, perished here, together with my parents, on the same day.
We were all born to live and to die, but to live first. This is the natural order. But my two sisters, like one and one half million Jewish children and youngsters, were brought to this world just to die.
It is the end of the day, the day that I dreaded most, being afraid of a sudden explosion of feelings of guilt for having survived while others perished, for having perhaps followed instincts that fractured humanness in me. Recounting it now, two weeks later, I can only remember that I was relieved, perhaps at peace, and felt a little hunger after twenty-two hours of fasting. I did not expect, nor did I understand, this sense of peace; particularly when I feel threatened by recent events that could again recall the kingdom of night and fire. Furthermore, I was conditioned in my younger years to visit the cemetery of our ancestors, share with them our daily problems and the dangers we face, and beg them to intercede on our behalf. But here the opposite has taken place. I tried to protect those that were killed, to shield and reassure them. What occurs to me now is that maybe I should return here, together with my children and grandchildren, because only here in this forsaken place can future generations understand their responsibilities toward their people, keep up the memory of those who perished, and remember. Four million people died here. They must be lonely, very lonely.
On the plane to London. The Jewish people lived in Europe for many centuries resisting attempts at conversion and retaining their loyalty to the faith of their forefathers. Expelled from one country and being able to adjust to new conditions, enduring pogroms, poverty, despair, and anguish, they found inner strength, joy, and hope in longing for redemption, relying more on imagination than on reason, and all the time keeping the concept of the unity of all people as the highest goal. But with the advent of emancipation, some of our people surrendered to assimilation, many became revolutionaries, and few attained high positions in European governments. Though there was a general improvement in the life of our people, our forefathers did not lose their sense of realism. They knew that governments can be overturned, that economic crises can cause upheavals and create conditions for scapegoating and mass murder. History can be cruel. God could again take leave of humanity, and we could become the convenient target. So while our main effort has to be directed toward building a strong and independent Israel, we should not neglect the needs of those that live in the Diaspora. We have to depend on each other and on nobody else. We have to support each other in the determination to resist forces that are again threatening our survival.
We are at the end of our journey into the past. I tried to describe what I saw, and made an attempt to convey feelings and reactions to the present and to the past. I tried to share what I still remember, realizing that time has blurred my perception of events and people. I would consider my task incomplete, however, without quoting what Yankiel Wiernik, a carpenter who escaped from Treblinka, wrote in his diary:
Between 450-500 persons were crowded into a chamber measuring 125 square feet in Treblinka. Parents carried their children in the vain hope of saving them from death. On the way to their doom, they were pushed and beaten with rifle butts and gas pipes. Dogs were set on them, barking, biting, and tearing them. It lasted a short while. Then the doors were shut tightly with a bang. Twenty-five minutes later everybody was dead and they stood lifeless. There being no free space, they just leaned against each other. They no longer shouted because the thread of their life had been broken. They no longer had any needs or desires. Mothers held their children tightly in their arms. There were no more friends, no more enemies. There was no jealousy. All were equal. And why all this? This is a question I keep asking myself. My life is hard, very hard. I must live to tell the world about all of this.
We are all home again. and my children have seen with their own eyes more than I could have described in words. They have touched the past and it hurts. Maybe one can go beyond oneself, beyond personal horror and beyond tragedy, and find meaning in a story written long ago by Shalom Asch:
A young man goes from town to town in search of his family following a terrible massacre of the Jews in Poland in 1648 and finds nobody. As he roams through the Fair of Lublin among the refugees, listening to the cries and moans of his people, he yielded to despair an asked himself, “can there be a future to our people?” Then he walked a narrow street where the merchants’ stores were located and saw an empty store in which an old man was calling for buyers. He marveled at this because the store was empty and there was nothing in it to sell. The refugee went over and asked the old man, “Your store is empty and yet you are asking buyers to come in. What can you sell?” “My son,” the old man said, “I sell faith. Emuna.”