It was close to midnight when we disembarked from the 8.5-hour bus ride from Berlin to Warsaw’s West Station. We collected our luggage from the bottom of the bus and stumbled our way through the clouds of cigarette smoke towards where we thought we’d seen some taxi-looking cars. Since the drivers – some of whom seemed very content to continue sleeping in their warm cars – mostly didn’t speak English, we punched the address into their phones, which led to a lively symposium (in Polish), with hand gestures suggesting routes and fares were the topic of discussion. Somehow, we negotiated what seemed like a fair price and were on our way. Almost. One of their colleagues apparently hadn’t picked a card from the machine – the arm wouldn’t open for them – which led to a line of cars needing to embark on a coordinated reverse maneuver back up a narrow one-way road.
The following morning, after very little sleep and following a concerted effort, we reported to the Jewish cemetery at exactly 8:00am, as our guide was told that’s what the guard had demanded. The very same guard who showed up at 8:45. We were no longer in Germany.
Despite this somewhat stereotypical welcome, the rest of our time in Warsaw actually went remarkably smooth. While we remained focused on our subject matter, Warsaw turned out to be a surprisingly convenient, easy-going, and warm location (temperatures in Warsaw didn’t fall below 30, even at night).
The Israeli songwriter Meir Ariel has a famous line: “At the end of every sentence you speak in Hebrew, there’s an Arab smoking a waterpipe.” In the common interpretation, no matter how hard one tries or wishes, the patient existence of Arabs in the region is not something that can be ignored or changed. To paraphrase – at the end of every European Jewish story, there’s a cemetery. While the stories of bravery and resistance are awe-inspiring, in the big picture, they are a drop in the ocean of death and destruction. That is why we began the Warsaw chapter of our journey at the Okopowa Street Jewish Cemetery, the largest active Jewish cemetery in Europe (devoted readers of the blog might recall that the same title was given to the Weissensee Cemetery in Berlin, and both are equally true or false, depending on who you ask and how you measure).
At Okopowa, which borders the old ghetto wall (in one of its variations, as it moved throughout the years), we visited the gravesites of Warsaw’s most prominent Jews, who were not only prominent Jews but household names for all Warsawers and beyond. Among them were Leyzer Zamenhof, the inventor of the Esperanto language; the famous actress Esther Rachel Kaminska, whose tombstone is decorated with the Polish eagle alongside lions, deer, and snakes; and poets like Peretz, Anski, and Denizen, who were the Emerson, Thoreau, and Channing of late 19th-early 20th century Warsaw.
The turn of the century was a tumultuous time for the Jewish community of Eastern and Central Europe. As Jews witnessed their neighbors begin to unite around their ethnical and religious identities into what’s become Nationalities – along with violent outbursts towards “outsiders” like themselves, a question of great consequence emerged: Where so we belong, as Jews? Generally speaking, there were four possible answers: The first option was to fully assimilate, at times to the point of conversion, leaving behind Yiddish and Jewish heritage to become Polish. The second option was to jump onto the nationalism wagon and start their own Jewish nation. Palestine was one possible location at the time, but there were other alternatives. The third option, which wasn’t available to everyone, was to go to the New World. Jews are, after all, used to packing up and moving when things got bad. The fourth option was to resist and actively fight the very structure that made them outcasts – the nationalist movement.
While history tends to at least somewhat remember the assimilationists, immigrants, Territorialists and Zionists – who represent the first three answers respectively – the fourth group is most visibly, and tragically, remembered at the Okopowa Cemetery. Countless tombstones and monuments tell the story of the Bund and its members – the Jewish socialist-democratic movement, which at one point in history was a mainstream voice within the Jewish community, until its utter demise in WWII.
Another place where one could learn about the Bund is POLIN, Museum of the History of Polish Jews (Polin is the name of Poland in Yiddish and Hebrew). Among the many, many sites we have visited on this journey and previous ones, if there is one place we would urge anyone interested in Jewish history to visit, it is the POLIN Museum. No words can do justice to the design, interactivity, attention to detail, clarity, and accessibility of this state-of-the-art museum. At some point, we had to rush the teens through it – a first for this Jewish educator, who has visited many museums, including Yad Vashem and the U.S. Holocaust Museum, with multiple groups.
The reason for the rush (worry not, we still spent two full hours there) was a very important meeting we had not far away, at the Nozyk Synagogue. While the rich and complex history of the 122-year-old synagogue could easily fill the remainder of this page, the focus here will be the same as the one that led us there – learning about current Jewish life in Poland. To this end, there is literally no one better to speak with than Rabbi Schudrich, Nozyk’s rabbi and the Chief Rabbi of Poland. Rabbi Schudrich was born in the U.S. and moved to Poland in 1990, dedicating his life to making Jewish life in Poland viable. Among countless fascinating anecdotes, genuinely funny jokes, and inspiring messages, we learned about the unique Polish phenomenon of people discovering they’re Jewish.
While most of Poland’s Jewish community – nearly 3.5 million – vanished in the Holocaust, some survived. Many found refuge or immigrated to other countries, but not all, as an unknown number of Jews remained in Poland. Among this unique group are those who hid their Jewish identity before, during, or after the war, and children given to non-Jewish families for protection. Since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, individuals and families have rediscovered their Jewish roots – whether through memories of a grandmother who never cooked pork or elders finally feeling safe to reveal their heritage. Rabbi Schudrich welcomes them with open arms, embracing them into the community.
Our final stop on this eventful first day in Warsaw was the Krasinski Garden, located just outside the old ghetto walls. After the teens (who are still, teens) finished spinning on the park’s carousel, Rinat shared a chilling photograph of a Polish girl on a similar carousel, in the same location, taken during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as smoke rose above the ghetto walls.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and life in the Ghetto prior to it, were the main subject of our second, and final day in the city. Even though Warsaw was virtually erased during the war, a handful of structures from Ghetto times still stand, including two that we visited – a portion of the wall, and a nearly complete apartment building, one of many which housed about a thousand Jews in unimaginable conditions. We learned about the reality of living in the Ghetto, and the impossible dilemmas it presented for its inhabitants. From Judenrat members needing to choose who will live and who will die (which led to the suicide of its leader, Adam Cherniakov), to a 12 year old needing to risk her life to feed her parents. While it is more comfortable to imagine the Jews living in the ghetto as one supporting community, the reality was that for most, it was for each their own.
The second and concluding part of the day followed what is known as the Path of Heroism – a route of about four blocks, beginning at the Umschlagplatz (the site where Jews were gathered and put on trains to the labor and death camps) and ending at the POLIN Museum. The path is marked with monuments commemorating the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto. Along the way, we learned the stories of individuals like Janusz Korczak, the author and educator who ran an orphanage within the Ghetto walls. When the orphans were taken to Treblinka, Korczak chose to accompany them to their deaths. We also learned about Mordechai Anielewicz and Zivia Lubetkin, two leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Following the liquidation of the ghetto in the summer of 1942, they believed that although armed resistance would almost certainly be their final act, its true significance lay in the mark it would leave on history – a message of defiance and dignity for future Jewish generations, if any were to remain.
Speechless