Day Two

Our first morning in Poland began with a wonderful, full breakfast at the hotel, complete with our first lunch making experience. We davened shacharit in the Nozyk synagogue, the only remaining synagogue in Warsaw out of the more than 300 that stood throughout Poland’s bustling capital before the Holocaust.

Our day today focused on the experiences of the Jews of Warsaw, as well as on the historical geography of the Jewish community in Poland. First, we went to the Warsaw cemetery to begin our formal trip. We spoke about the importance of our experience, of our responsibility and privilege of being among the last to know survivors and to have heard their stories firsthand. Surrounded by gravestones of our Jewish ancestors, we spoke about the life and excitement that was the Polish Jewish community prior to WWII and the Holocaust. It was a community rich in culture, Hebrew and Yiddish, Jewish learning, scientific and linguistic contributions, and a varied religious tradition that valued the Torah scholar as the hero of the day.

Our first reflection point in this over-200 year old cemetery was one of three mass graves dug during the period of the ghetto. Here, in the middle of the cemetery, was a large pit holding thousands of bodies of those who died in the ghetto of starvation and disease. We do not know their names or even how many Jews are buried in this pit, but we told their stories. We learned of the life they lived in the ghetto, of the records they kept in the Oneg Shabbat archives, of the culture they built despite all orders to cease living. We said kaddish, not knowing "whose mother, whose brother, whose father" we were speaking for, only that we were remembering those who have no one left to remember them.

We visited graves of Jewish leaders such as Adam Czerniakow, whom we learned made heroic and valiant attempts to aid the Jewish community in Warsaw during his tenure as the Head of the Judenrat, that is, until he was told to give 4,000 names for deportation to the east. Knowing what this meant, Czerniakow chose to take his own life rather than to play God and determine who should live and who should die. Moral decisions like this, those ending in matters of life and death, abounded during the Shoah and we explored their implications, both big and small. We spoke, too, of the smugglers who faced similar decisions. “Boys and girls, our age and younger,” we heard from our peer, “risked their lives daily to save their families and those around them by their heroic efforts as smugglers.” Crawling through sewers, these children would carry stolen odds and ends, sometimes just a potato or a loaf of bread, home to their families inside the ghetto where this food was used to supplement the 184 calorie diet allotted by the Nazis to each “healthy” individual Jew in the ghetto. It was the children who risked their lives and saved families, these same children who often opted not to jump out of the trains en route to Treblinka in order to not abandon their parents at such a hard and uncertain time.

We visited the graves of Y.L. Peretz, the great Yiddishist, and of Ester Kaminska, the actress, and viewed the tombstones of many whose stories are told through the words and images embossed on their matzevot (tombstones). We even saw one of these sewers through which the Jews of Warsaw were able to capitalize on their landscape and make connections with the outside world, even while they were entirely cut off in the ghetto. City Jews, those in areas with sewers or woods, were luckier than those in rural areas where no such escape routes existed.


 We visited the Jewish Historical Institute which currently houses the Jewish Museum of Warsaw and is the center of the archives of Warsaw's (and much of Poland’s) Jewish history. We studied the map of Poland, focusing on the geographic relationships between Germany, Poland and the Soviet Union, as well as the locations and distances between key cities in Jewish history. We learned about how the topography shaped the Holocaust experience. Why was it that in some ghettos, like in the modern urban center of Warsaw, the population revolted while in others, such as Lodz, the population tried to make themselves useful, believing that through filling a need of the Nazis, they would be spared. 

We also viewed a 37 minute film about the Warsaw ghetto, strung together from videos taken by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Many of these films were created as tools of indoctrination for members of the SS and Wehrmacht (German Army) about how the Jews live as vermin and are an ill within society (they showed the Jews starving, living in filth and squander, allowing the dead to pile up on street corners). The documentary helped students envision Jewish life in the ghetto: the starvation and deprivation, the vivid Jewish culture, geography and structure, etc…To tell the Jewish story, the film used diary entries written by ghetto inhabitants. Most of the first person accounts were part of the Oneg Shabbat project – a collection of first person accounts of ghetto life chronicled by various historians, cultural leaders, journalists, etc…in the ghetto. They spoke of spiritual resistance, of the daily hardship and of the underground life the Jews were trying to foster against all odds. The film raised many questions for the group, ranging from the technical and logistical to the deeply emotional and existential.

Our focus in processing both the historical geography of Poland and the video was the spiritual resistance: what does it mean to try to preserve life under inhuman conditions? What materials were available to the ghetto inhabitants and how did this shape their experience? Being together, having spiritual outlets, offered individuals the strength and motivation to continue to live. It was only when the families were torn apart that we began to see the most active physical resistance. It was only when the last transport had been taken from Umschlagplatz to Treblinka and only 700 Jews were left in the ghetto that the ghetto fighters began their uprising in earnest here in Warsaw. We spoke of the secret minyanim, hidden schools, newspapers, theaters, choirs and intellectual groups that met, soup kitchens and health societies organized to aid the poorest of the poor. How is it that even under the most adverse conditions, living in squalor and overcrowded situations, so much cultural and spiritual life continued?

Our next stop took us to Umschlagplatz (literally, “transfer station”), the site of mass deportation from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka. Over 300,000 Jews were shipped from this location at the northern point in the ghetto on trains 60 cars long (58 held Jews, about 6,000-6,200 per train, with the last 2 reserved for the SS officers). Almost all of the trains left for Treblinka. This was the last place, for many, where whole families were together. We held the first of our memorial ceremonies there, speaking the words: “We have come to remember those who cannot be forgotten. We have come to speak of that which cannot be spoken, but which must not be left unsaid…Since there is no adequate way, we shall do that which has always been done, and pray that we be forgiven for not doing more.” We recited kaddish for those who left their lives behind from here to meet their deaths.

Mila 18, the head quarters of the central Jewish fighter organization,  and the last remaining segment of the Warsaw Getto wall were our final stops of the day. on to Lublin!