Rabbi Janet Marder

April 25 2008

Bitter Herbs and Sweet Wine: Scenes from a Journey to Poland and Israel

People give you a quizzical look when you tell them you are going to Poland . “Why Poland ? What’s there?” some of them ask. Those who know more say, “Won’t it be awfully depressing? I’m not sure I’d want to go there.”

Our group – 37 of us – struggled to answer this question for ourselves when we met for our first pre-trip orientation. Why had we decided to join the Beth Am journey to Poland and Israel ? To remember, we said. To bear witness. To learn about the 800-year history of Jews in Poland , once the largest Jewish community in Europe – some three and a half million souls. To see for ourselves what happened to them. To reaffirm our connection to the Jewish past; to behold the towns and streets and houses where our family lived and died.

Some of us said we approached this journey with trepidation, that for years we had been afraid to go to Poland . Some said it felt good to be going with members of our synagogue, whose understanding would make intense emotions more bearable.

I didn’t take any photographs on this trip. But I kept a journal, so I could bring back snapshots in words that would summon up the experiences we shared. I want to share a few of them with you tonight.

Sunday morning, March 30: we meet at San Francisco airport, our suitcases crammed with warm clothes for the Polish winter and summer clothes for the Israeli heat. We gather in a circle in the boarding area of Lufthansa Airlines to pray that we will arrive at our destination safely and journey home in peace.

When we step off the plane in Frankfurt it is morning there and the middle of the night for us. We stagger around for a couple of hours or slump in a chair, dazed. Having nothing better to do, a few of us pore over a Finnish newspaper someone left on the seat near us. We are so spacey that before too long we have convinced ourselves that we really can read and understand Finnish.

On Monday in the early afternoon (around 4 in the morning for us) we arrive at Frederic Chopin airport in Warsaw .  We are reunited with Gabi, our wonderful Israeli guide; we pile into our bus and head south to Lublin , the biggest city in eastern Poland . On the way we stop in a small town on the banks of the Vistula River called Kazimierz Dolny, named for King Casimir the Great, who in the 14^th century granted the Jews protected status in his kingdom.

Gabi tells us about the famous Polish legend that King Casimir had a beautiful Jewish wife named Esther – a tale that may be a reworking of the Biblical book of Esther; in fact, in some old chronicles Casimir is called “The Polish Ahashuerus.” It is not what I expected to hear on our first day here: a Polish-Jewish love story

Next morning is gray and overcast, with piles of snow and slush on the ground. We ride the bus to meet Vitek, a friendly, youthful-looking Polish man who guides us around the old Jewish quarter. On the eve of World War II 130,000 people lived in Lublin, more than a third of them Jewish. About 2500 Jews escaped by fleeing east to Russia . The rest – some 40,000 people -- died in the camps of Belzec and Maidanek. Today there are perhaps 30 or 40 Jews in Lublin .

Vitek, an actor and storyteller, has worked with a few friends for years to restore the Jewish quarter, renovate the old buildings and establish a theater and museum of Jewish life here, aided by funds privately raised and from the municipality of Lublin .

He says, “I grew up in a small town that was once a shtetl. When I was growing up I was taught that the concentration camps were for all people, and the war was between Germans and the rest of the world. Only as an adult did I learn that it was a war against the Jews. When I came to Lublin , I knew nothing about what used to be here. Then one day I learned that this place I walked through every day was called ‘Jewish Gate’ – it was once the border between the Jewish and Christian parts of town.”

Vitek says that he leads tours every day for groups of Polish students. He says, “It’s easier to teach the young people. It’s hard to break through to the older folks.” He tells us that he meets regularly with the remaining Jews of Lublin, especially on the holidays. He says, “We will be together for Pesach. We have a kabbalat Shabbat every Friday afternoon, with Kiddush, challah and Shabbes songs.” He sings us a few bars of “Oseh Shalom,” and “Shabbes, Shabbes, zol zein brider Shabbes.”  Vitek says, “I am the guardian of their memory.” He adds, in Yiddish, “Ich bin a goy, ober ich hob a yidishe neshomeh. I am a Gentile, but I have a Jewish soul.”

Vitek points out a pre-war street lamp standing in the midst of an open area in the quarter, where Jewish homes and shops once stood. He says, “We built this lamp to be a Ner Tamid, an eternal light, as a monument to the Jews. It burns 24 hours a day.”  Once a year all lights in this section of town are turned off, leaving only this lamp burning, and the names of victims from Lublin are read aloud. Vitek says, “Imagine this place full of life, full of houses and people. Now there is nothing. It is a black hole in the midst of our souls.”

Two miles outside Lublin, a few minutes away by car, is the death camp of Maidanek. It’s on a main road. Busses, taxis and streetcars are whizzing by. The buildings of the city loom just beyond the camp, which is surrounded by two rows of barbed wires, once charged with high-voltage electricity.  A sign near the entrance says that children under the age of 14 aren’t admitted for tours.

Maidanek was established in 1941, originally as a concentration camp for Soviet prisoners of war. It was soon transformed into an extermination center for Poles and especially for Jews. Transports came from all over Europe, but the majority came from Poland and the local area. In this place the Germans once machine-gunned 18,000 Jews in a single day, in a massacre euphemistically dubbed “Operation Harvest Festival.”

We see what I have been dreading: the gas chambers. Small dark boxes, six of them, side by side -- each about five yards square, low-ceilinged, the walls of reinforced concrete. About 200-250 people were driven naked into each of these boxes. It would have been dark inside – there was just a small light in the ceiling. An SS man observed through a window from a nearby booth and regulated the supply of Zyklon B pellets. It took about 10 minutes to kill everyone inside. The walls and ceilings of these chambers are tinted blue from the residue of the gas, and the dying breaths of those who perished here.

We see the tables where bodies were dissected before burning so the Germans could extract gold and silver teeth and other valuables. Gabi says, “Alive or dead, the prisoners were the property of the Reich.”

800,000 shoes were found at Maidanek. We look at massive piles of them in glass cases that fill an enormous shed – woven sandals, flat slippers, a few with high heels, one pair of wooden shoes from Holland – all of them squashed together and covered with gray dust. There is a powerful stench. Gabi tells us he once visited here with a group of Israeli soldiers. One said: “All over the world there are thousands of kids without shoes. This is the only place in the world where there are shoes without kids.”

We stop in the small village of Markova, where there is a monument to the 9 members of the Ulma family – a husband, his pregnant wife and their seven children, aged 1-8. This Polish Christian family hid five Jews in their home and were murdered by the Nazis for their crime, as all those caught harboring Jews were killed. The monument says: “They gave their lives for others. Let this monument be a reminder to love and respect every person.”

Gabi points out that of the 23,000 righteous Gentiles honored at Yad VaShem, 6000 – the largest group – are Polish. Silently, we ask ourselves an excruciating question: could I have done what these heroic Poles did? Could I have endangered not only my own life but the lives of my children, in order to save Jews from the Nazis? For me, at least, it becomes much more difficult to judge the Poles who could not take that risk.

Just outside the city of Tarnow is Buczyna forest, bordered by well-kept houses and apartments. 2000 Poles, members of the intelligentsia, were murdered here by the Nazis. A year later, when the Jews of Tarnow were deported to Belzec, 8000 of them who were too weak to make the journey were put on trucks and taken to this forest, shot and dumped into ditches. Gabi says, “After the Holocaust, we need a new dictionary. The word ‘forest’ will never be the same. “ Then he concludes: “I have no more words to say.”

We spend a little while wandering in silence through the forest, which is very still, listening to the birdsong, looking at the tall trees, the flowers in the grass, and the small monuments set here and there. One area, dedicated to the 800 children murdered here, is decorated with small Israeli flags, some stuffed animals, notes and photographs of those who died.

In Krakow’s Jewish quarter, where “Schindler’s List” took place, we visit a few of the 8 synagogues that once were here -- one from the 14th century, now a Jewish museum, and one called the Temple, a large progressive synagogue built in 1862 and beautifully restored after the war. On Friday night our group will have our own Shabbat service in this place, lifting our voices in the vast space meant for a congregation that is gone forever.

We walk across the river to the ghetto established by the Nazis, taking the same route the doomed Jews of Krakow did in 1941, carrying their belongings on their back. The square where they assembled to be deported to Auschwitz is now filled with oversize bronze chairs that stand as silent reminders of the 40,000 Jews who once lived in this city.

We eat lunch at Klezmer Hoiz, one of several Jewish restaurants in the Krakow Jewish quarter, and meet with a Polish Catholic sociology professor, born in Chicago, who now teaches Jewish studies here at the university. She is friendly and gracious, knowledgeable in Hebrew; she has studied at Yad Vashem.

She introduces us to seven of her students, young men and women from Poland, Germany, Hungary and America. None of them are Jewish; all of them are fascinated by Jewish history, tradition and culture. They tell us about the festival of Jewish culture that takes place each year in Krakow – it draws 10,000 people, almost none of them Jews, and its klezmer concerts are broadcast on national television.

We ask the young students why they are interested in the Jews. “Jews are part of our history,” they tell us. “They were 10% of the Polish population. We want to know who they were.” They do not feel responsible for the Holocaust. They see Poles, too, as victims of the Nazis – after all, three million non-Jewish Poles were killed along with the Jews. We ask the Professor about Radio Maria, a Catholic station that broadcasts anti-Semitic propaganda; she does not discount its viciousness, but says only about 2% of the population listens to it.

The next day we are in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest concentration camp, where one and a half million people died, 90% of them Jews. Our tour guide, a middle-aged Gentile woman, tells us that two of her uncles, members of the Polish resistance, were murdered here.

For several hours we walk through the camp, which is unimaginably huge, larger than we could ever imagine, viewing the barracks, standing in the gas chambers that held up to 2000 people at a time. We see the crematoria, the punishment cells where prisoners were whipped, the “wall of death” where prisoners were shot, the square where prisoners who tried to escape were publicly hanged, and everyone was forced to watch – those who closed their eyes were killed on the spot.

We walk past enormous piles of spectacles and artificial limbs and battered suitcases carefully labeled with people’s names and hometowns (the Nazis told them to do this so they could pick up their belongings after their shower). We see whole rooms full of human hair, as well as the cloth that a German firm made from the hair of dead prisoners. We see the house where Rudolf Hess, the camp commandant, lived with his family and entertained his guests, just a few yards from the crematoria.

We create our own ceremony of remembrance; we read aloud the names of family members who perished here; we say Kaddish; we chant the prayer called El Malei Rachamim, God full of mercy. We are weeping. We are holding on to each other. It’s impossible to talk.

Throughout the day, there’s a chilly wind blowing. Our legs are aching and we are all freezing cold on this April morning, bundled up in layers of sweaters, heavy coats, hats and gloves. We can only imagine what it was like for them.

Our last days in Poland are spent in Warsaw, where almost 400,000 Jews lived when the Germans invaded,  a third of the city’s population. On Saturday night we meet with the members of Beit Warszawa, a vibrant progressive synagogue of 200 members, mostly young – the average age is 31. They have two rabbis, one American-born, the other from the FSU.

One member tells us that she learned when she was 12 that her father was Jewish, and felt strongly drawn to reclaim the tradition of her ancestors – she spent three years studying Judaism at HUC in Los Angeles. We meet a young man, a convert, who says, “I fell in love with a Jewish woman – then I fell in love with Torah.”

They tell us that, while there are only 5000 Jews officially registered in Poland today, there are thousands more with Jewish roots – and many of them, especially the young, are searching out their heritage, attracted by the sense of spirituality and community they find in Judaism. They are full of hope about the future of Jewish life in this new democracy.

That night I had to leave our group to return home because my mother-in-law had a health crisis. I was not with them when they went to the Warsaw ghetto the next day, and heard the story of the uprising, which began 65 years ago this week; and when they toured Treblinka, a camp where everything has been destroyed and all that remains are stones set up on the bare ground, bearing the names of towns where the inmates once lived.

I was not with them when they flew to Israel, traveling from a land that is cold and gray and full of graves to a place of light and color that is chock full of living, vibrant Jews – all colors, all shades of opinion, all articulated vigorously at the top of their lungs.

To celebrate their arrival, our group said Shehecheyanu at Robinson’s Arch, near the Southern Wall of the ancient temple. They met members of the Druze community and the Bedouins, joined in a Yemenite dance workshop, visited the community of the Belzer Chasidim, traveled to the desert where Ben Gurion lived, wandered the streets of Jerusalem discussing the tales of Shai Agnon, Israeli’s Nobel prize winning author.  They felt with special intensity the miracle of Jewish life restored, renewed, reborn; and what it means to have a state for the Jews; and what it could have meant 70 years ago, to those who were despised and had nowhere to go.

B’chol dor va-dor …in every generation, we should see ourself as if we, personally, had come out of Egypt. We drink the four sweet cups; we lift them up in gratitude and joy; we celebrate Jewish freedom and survival. But no Seder is complete without the maror. We put the bitter herbs in our mouth and chew on them and swallow them. We take into ourselves a story of darkness and pain – not because we are gluttons for punishment, but because it is our story, and it is true.

To be a Jew in the 21st century is to take ownership of two powerful stories – twin towering events of our recent history -- the Shoah and the birth of Israel. To chew on both of those stories, to swallow them and try to digest them, opens us up to wrenching grief, anger, terror; unspeakable cruelty; incredible courage and resilience and love.

It’s hard to endure all these emotions – no question about it. But the stories are ours, and we have to come to terms with them – one way or another. So please: make the journey to Poland and see the sights with your own eyes, even those you are afraid to imagine. Or learn from reading or hearing the stories of others. Come to Beth Am this Wednesday night, as our Peninsula Jewish community gathers for Holocaust Remembrance Day. Sign up for a family trip to Israel with Rabbi Yoshi, or next year’s adult trip with Orna and Shelly and me. 

Eat the bitter herbs; drink the sweet wine. Open yourself to all of it, let it touch the deepest parts of you, and you will never be the same.