My brother-in-law worked for Smithfield Foods and spent his entire career there traveling back and forth to Poland — working with the livestock farmers to increase production of pigs.
It was his dream to take my husband and I, his wife (my sister) and two close couple friends back to Poland after his retirement. His focus for our foray was less on art museums, shopping and exotic night life and more on the history of the Polish Jews prior to, during, and after World War 2.
His dream materialized just a few weeks ago when we all stepped into a LOT airline plane at Kennedy Airport bound for Warsaw.
According to the book “Polin. 1000-Year History of Polish Jews”:
-During the pre-World War 2 years, Poland’s Jewish population hovered around 3.3 million. It was one of the most diverse and tolerant countries in early modern Europe.
-Approximately 90% of Poland’s Jews were murdered as a result of the Holocaust.
-Three hundred thousand survived.
Chief Rabbi of Poland, Michael Shudrich, says the latest census reflects there are about 20,000 Jews in Poland at present, but he believes the number is 2-3 times greater than what’s reported.
We saw so much.
We saw remnants of the Warsaw Ghetto’s brick walls set against a beautiful blue sky.
We toured the Polin Museum, which stands on the site of the destroyed Warsaw ghetto — directly facing the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes — and documents the extensive thousand-year history of the Jews of Poland. Its interior and exterior architecture is both elegant and simple — a sight to behold indeed.
We toured the site of Auschwitz — the deadliest concentration camp. We walked under the Auschwitz Gate — reading Arbeit macht frei (Work Sets You Free). It didn’t.
Approximately 1.1 million prisoners were murdered in the five years that the camp complex was operable. Not all were Jewish. Jehovah’s Witnesses, members of the Romani community, homosexuals and people who were disabled were also targeted. It’s not known how many children were killed there, but on a single day — October 10, 1944 — 800 children were gassed to death.
We attended a Sunday afternoon Chopin concert in the Royal Baths area in the Lazienka Park and marveled at the tranquility of the setting and the beauty of the music — in sharp contrast to the horrors that ravaged Warsaw during World War 2.
On Shabbat, we prayed at the Nozyk Synagogue — the only Jewish house of worship in Warsaw that survived the Holocaust. Just two weeks before, on May 9, the synagogue was hit with three firebombs. No injuries. Slight damage. Chief Rabbi of Poland, Michael Shudrich, said to the Associated Press that the synagogue was spared “by tremendous luck or a miracle.”
We visited the excavation site of the basements of two buildings near Mila 18 in the Warsaw Ghetto where more than 5000 items related to the lives of the Jewish residents were discovered — shoes, books, kitchen utensils, corroded tools — shedding dramatic light on the hundreds of thousands of Jews confined to an area of 1.3 square miles — with an average of 9.2 persons per room.
Every night, I dug deeper into the book entitled The Girl In The Green Sweater. It’s a tale of an upper-class Jewish family miraculously surviving the Holocaust by hiding in the sewers below Warsaw for a year — among the stench, the swarming rats and the burrowing lice.
I drank it all in, but I never cried — until I did. And then I could hardly stop.
Next month, I’ll tell you what happened to turn on the tears.
The headline yields a hint:
Cries Before Annihilation
