May 3 - Arielle Hendel
We started our day with a delicious breakfast in the hotel – and they said we wouldn’t eat well. Don’t listen to them. We will come back heavier with memories and bellies! To see the rich history of the Warsaw Jewish community we went to the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery. The cemetery has memorial monuments and headstones telling the story of the writers, doctors, young children, families and allegiances. It also includes a large area for a mass grave from the Holocaust. An eerie reminder of the many lives lost. The contrast of the spring buds and the dark tombstones made me mindful that I wouldn’t have wanted to be there at night. But during the day, the stories of the community came to life. Among the memorials were tributes to the Perez and other writers, actors, doctors, a children’s memorial and one to a man who instead of saving himself joined his orphans on their final voyage to Treblinka. There is still an orphanage we saw in Warsaw in his name. We then traveled onto Majdanek – It’s hard to describe the depth of depravity. While planned as a work camp, in the end all prisoners were either worked to death – the inmates did not usually last in this camp more than 2 months and they worked under the most disgusting conditions. The camp was set up as an agricultural experimental camp experimenting with alternative fuel sources. In 1945 the prisoners were lined up during the course of one week and shot. I cannot really describe the sickening feeling of seeing the dissection table and gas chamber and ovens. While the camp was not as large as Auschwitz, it is not as well preserved and it is easier to imagine the hardships that prisoners endured here. The weather was cloudy and raining. The camp covers a large expanse of fields. At the top of the camp, there is a memorial which houses the ashes of the inmates. A silent sickening scream from the past. Two things happened however that broken the sadness. A Holocaust survivor traveling with the Boca Raton group approached our group and we started to talk. He got very excited when he found out we were from California and asked if the Metzes were traveling with us. Right there, beside the lower gas chamber, a reunion of old friends took place. And, then near the memorial, we ran into our Youth Trip participants including Abby Gavens, Devorah Fine, Janine Adelberg, Rabbi Eitan Julius and others. These two coincidences proved that the Nazis hadn’t won – they hadn’t annihilated us and in fact, we had a future.
After this difficult journey, we traveled onto Lublin – the the Old Yeshiva which was recently purchased and refurbished by the Warsaw community. We sang as we waited for a briefing. This yeshiva educated many orthodox rabbis including some 500 which kept orthodoxy alive, proving once again that Judaism is surviving and even thriving in Poland.
On Shabbat we split into two groups: one went to the Novizc synagogue in Warsaw. There was a bar mitzvah and over 500 people in attendance at the shul. The second group walked through the ghetto seeing one of the only intake streets in Warsaw. We proceeded to the only two portions of the remaining ghetto wall. We met at the Umshlatplatz which was the ‘sorting’ area for the Warsaw ghetto.
I cannot describe the conflicting feelings of Poland. It houses one of the darkest times in our history and is also the keeper of an amazing cultural history. It had been a center for Jewish life in Eastern Europe for centuries which developed language, music, literature, arts and culture.
We proceeded to the Old town of Warsaw – a bucolic recreation of the old town destroyed during the second world wall. The square was full of cafes, a fountain, shops on the banks of the Vestula across from the (now famous) Warsaw Zoo. After a dinner at the hotel we left for Israel. Dinner was punctuated by a moving poem by mission participant, Diane Rauchwerger. But did I mention we LEFT for ISRAEL!~ So exciting!
