Warsaw's JewsA piece of the ghetto wall that remains in Warsaw today. It was a long day but I'm not complaining. We spent today in Warsaw exploring Jewish life during the war both inside the city and at an extermination camp about 50 miles outside of the city called Treblinka. The walk through what was the Warsaw ghetto is difficult to describe. What was once the ghetto sits in the middle of the downtown of vibrant city and is in the heart of businesses and homes. There are a few remnants of the wall that kept over half a million people inside the roughly 2 1/2 square miles that the Nazis carved out as the ghetto. These are in the midst of homes and we had to speak quietly so as not to disturb residents. We traced the outline of parts of the ghetto, walked significant portions of the ghetto, and talked about life in the ghetto from smuggling to starvation to the Jewish resistance movement. Much of what we know about life in the Warsaw Ghetto comes from the meticulously archived and organized files of Dr. Emmanuel Ringelblum, a historian by trade who documented and asked others to document ghetto life by gathering any artifacts and information that they could. When it became clear to Ringleblum and those working with him that the ghetto was going to soon be liquidated, they hid the carefully arvhided documents in iron boxes and milk canister buried underground. Dr. Ringelblum and his wife went into hiding with non- Jewish Poles outside the ghetto but were betrayed to the Nazis. Although Dr. Ringelblum and his wife did not survive - they were interrogated and executed but Nazis - the records did. After the war, two people who worked with Ringleblum cam back to what had been the ghetto and found all but two of the records they had left behind, giving us over 17,000 documents that outline the life of Warsaw ghetto, the largest in Europe during the Holocaust, and sharing the stories that most of the ghetto inhabitants are no longer around to share. This was a kind of resistance to the Nazis within the ghetto. But there was other more active resistance as well. A marker on top of a mound at what was once the house at 18 Mila St. in Warsaw. Mila 18 was the address of a home on Mila street in the Warsaw Ghetto. It served as the base of operations for Mordechai Anielewicz and other Jewish resistance fighters who worked to smuggle arms and munitions into the ghetto to stage an uprising against the Nazis. Anielewicz was young, only 26 years old, and he had no military experience but began to organize the uprising after large scale deportation in the spring and summer of 1942 took nearly 75% of the population of the Warsaw Ghetto. Anielewicz and other resistance fighters were left behind in the Warsaw Ghetto with approximately 55,000 Jews. When the Nazis move into the liquidated the ghetto and finish the transports to an extermination camp called Treblinka as a "birthday gift" to Hitler in April of 1943, Anielewicz and his fighters use a guerrilla style warfare to drive back the Nazis. They are able to hold out for nearly a week before the movement inevitably runs out of weapons and ammunition. Some ghetto fighters flee and join the Polish resistance fighters in the forests who were staging their own rebellions against the Nazis. Anielewicz and others stay. When the Nazis came to collect them for transport at their headquarters at Mila 18, Anielewicz detonated explosives from inside to take out as many Nazis as he could, even though that meant his own death as well. The marker is on the mound that was once the house at Mila 18 and commemorates the Jewish resistance fighters of the famous Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Stones marking the train tracks that led to Treblinka. The most significant stop of the day was a trip about an hour and half outside the city to what was once the extermination camp Treblinka. Opened in 1942 as part of Operation Reinhard, the camp excited solely as a killing center for European Jews, many of them from Warsaw but thousands of Jews from all over Poland and the rest of Europe. It is estimated that more than 900,000 Jews were killed at Treblinka, the second highest casualty rate of any camp in the Nazi system besides Auschwitz. Yet we often don't mention Treblinka when we think of Holocaust sites. That was by Nazi design. After murdering nearly one million Jews by 1944 the Nazis not only closed Treblinka but they also dismantled and plowed the camp under. The buildings were all destroyed, any bodies that had been buried in mass graves (in the early stages of camp operations before they were cremated) were dug up and burned, and the Nazis planted trees over the site of what had been one of the most devastating and horrific camps in the Reich. It is significant to note that this work was done mostly by remaining Jewish prisoners before their own execution and the process of dismantling the camp was extensively documented by the Nazis. After they were finished, it was like nothing had ever existed there. Today, stone memorials that mimic the train tracks that ran into Treblinka mark the spot where thousands of Jews were brought to their deaths and 17,000 stones mark the towns and villages throughout Poland and other parts of Europe where Jews came from to be killed by the Nazis. These are the only places that survivors and relatives have to mourn their dead. Some of the 17,000 stones that mark the villages throughout Europe who's Jews died at Treblinka. Our group located one particular stone for one particular village while we were at Treblinka. There is a survivor traveling with us and later this week we will go to his village to retrace his footsteps from his home in Poland to Auschwitz. But today we mourned his mother, brother, and sister who were all deported to Treblinka and killed. He told us about the day that he and his father were separated from his family and how that, when he is at Treblinka, he thinks about his mother and what she must have done to try and comfort his siblings. He spoke about his walk through the site of Treblinka and thinking of his family as much harder than speaking about his time at Auschwitz because of the violent and tragic way in which he lost them and the unknowns about their death. He showed tremendous courage in sharing his story and his loss with us. Toward the end of our time together at Treblinka today, he said something that echoed a poem we had read. We were going to leave Treblinka. We had come, we had remembered, and we had mourned but we would be able to leave and that we had a great responsibility to share what we had learned there because thousands of Jews were never able to leave Treblinka.
So today was long and today was hard, but I am not complaining. Instead I am grateful for the many blessings in my life and the opportunity to learn about and share these places, to honor the memory of those who died and to carry out the promise of "Never Again". Comments are closed.
|
About the Trip
|