My Trip to Eastern Europe - Part 4

The fourth day of my trip would be another day delving into the events of the Holocaust but this time in Warsaw.  Warsaw of course was the place where the Nazis established the largest Jewish Ghetto in all of German Occupied Europe.  The ghetto had over 400,000 Jews imprisoned there in an area of just 1.3 square miles.  It is said that there was an average of 9.2 persons per room in every building within the ghetto.  The challenge would be to see the sites where the events of the Holocaust happened in a city that was effectively erased at the end of the war by the Nazis and then rebuilt by the Soviets.  Regardless, I was sure that I would still be able to understand what they went through by simply walking in the places that they lived and suffered.  I knew it would be another tough emotional day.

Thursday October 11, 2018 – Warsaw, Poland

We were able to sleep in a little which allowed me to get in a tempo run after a good night’s sleep.  My run took me through Pilsudski Square and the adjacent park.  I ended up running 4.1 miles in 35:34 (8:40 pace).  My goal pace was 9:00 per mile.  I crushed it.  Probably because the weather was so nice.  When I finished my run, I walked a little to just enjoy the morning and to have a chance to really see the Square.

Pilsudski Square is the largest square in Warsaw named after Josef Pilsudski who was instrumental in the restoration of Polish statehood after World War I.  It is also the location of the Polish Tomb of the Unknown Soldier erected on top of the underground foundations of the Saxon Palace, destroyed by the Nazis in World War II.  They change the guards every hour on the hour 24/7.  We got to see a changing of the guard last night.  There is a large cross commemorating Pope Paul II’s visit to the square in 1979.  The only other monument on the square is the Smolensk Monument that commemorates an air crash that killed Poland’s president, his wife and 94 other people and military personnel  on April 10, 2010.

After we gathered and got onto the bus, we headed over to see a fragment of the Jewish Ghetto Wall.  Since the ghetto was destroyed at the end of the uprisings (Jewish and Polish), there is nothing left of the ghetto.  There are still a few pre-war buildings in Warsaw.  But there is no way to imagine what it looked like during the war.  It is a very peaceful place but you can’t help wonder what it must have felt like seeing the wall being built between the buildings locking you in with 400,000 other Jews and the trepidation of what was coming next.  It was a sobering thought.

We then drove over to see a pre-war building that is still standing so that we could try and imaging what it was like living in these buildings behind the wall.  History says that families were forced to live with complete strangers in rooms with more than 9 people trying to survive the harsh conditions.  We stood in a courtyard in the middle of the building where the children who were too young to work would have to play.  It felt so cramped in the courtyard.  I could imagine the lack of privacy and the difficulty everyone must have felt since they, in many cases, had to live with people they didn’t know.  Most of these buildings have been leveled and built over thus erasing from view the conditions the Jews of Warsaw had to endure.

The next stop was the Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw.  The Warsaw Jewish Cemetery is one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe and the world.  The Jewish cemetery was established in 1806 and covers 83 acres of land.  The cemetery was closed down during World War II.   After the war it was reopened and a small portion of it remains active, serving Warsaw's existing Jewish population.  The cemetery contains over 250,000 marked graves, as well as mass graves of victims of the Warsaw Ghetto.  We visited the area where the mass grave was located.  The stones that surround the area had a black stripe to symbolize the tallit that these victims were not able to be buried with.  It was so sad to think about the families of these victims not knowing where their loved ones were buried.

We then visited the grave of Ludwik Zamenhof who was a doctor and the inventor of Esperanto.  As we stood there listening to the story of Zamenhof, I looked up to see that there was a headstone right next to the grave with the name Zygmund Frumkin.   I cannot express the shock and surprise in seeing my last name in a cemetery in Poland.   All I knew about my family was that the Frumkins were from Vilna.  But based on what I have learned about Poland, it is not surprising that the center of European Jewry being in Poland that Frumkins avoiding Russian persecution might end up living there.

As we walked over to see the grave of Ester Rachel Kamińska who was an actress and the mother of Ida Kaminska, I saw three more gravesites of Frumkin women.  It made me wonder how many other Frumkins are buried there.  Ida Kaminska was a well-known stage and film actress, who cofounded the Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater in the 1920s, and, in 1946, following the Second World War, played in the reestablished Yiddish theaters in Poland.

We visited the grave of Solomon Zangwill Rappaport, author of "The Dybbuk" who is buried with two other Yiddish authors.   We wrapped up the visit with the monument to Janusz Korczak who was a Polish-Jewish educator, children's author, and pedagogue known as Old Doctor.  He spent many years working as director of an orphanage in Warsaw.   When the Nazis established the Jewish Ghetto, he repeatedly refused sanctuary and stayed with his orphans.  When the entire population of the ghetto was sent to the Treblinka extermination camp in 1942, he stayed with his orphans walking with them over to the Umschlagplatz.  Once there he boarded the train to Treblinka with the children and is presumed to have been gassed with them upon arrival.   There are no words to express the dedication he showed those children.  I imagine that he comforted them trying to shield them from the atrocities all around them.

Before leaving, we stopped at the memorial to the child victims of the Holocaust.  There is no way to explain the deep sense of sadness I felt as I looked at the monument.  At that point, I was done with this part of the tour.  I was having intense feelings of sadness, depression, anger and existential questions as to how this could have happened.  I knew that my visit to Auschwitz and these sites in Warsaw would haunt me for a considerable amount of time after I finally returned home.  But we had one more stop before lunch.

We went to the Umschlagplatz mentioned above.  An Umschlagplatz (German: collection point or reloading point) was a holding area set up by Nazi Germany adjacent to a railway station in occupied Poland, where the ghettoized Jews were assembled for deportation to death camps during the ghetto liquidations.  We were standing where largest such collection point existed.  It consisted of a city square in occupied Warsaw next to the Warsaw Ghetto, used for several months during daily deportations of 254,000 – 265,000 Warsaw Jews to the Treblinka extermination camp.  The monument was erected in 1988 on Stawki Street, where the Umschlagplatz was located, to commemorate the deportation victims.  Like the stones in the cemetery where the mass grave is, this monument has a black stripe too for the same reason.  What was really moving is that they list the 400 most popular Jewish-Polish first names, in alphabetical order from Aba to Żanna.  Each one commemorating 1,000 victims of the Warsaw Ghetto.  I found my name, my father’s and son’s name on the wall.  All I could think of was there but for the grace of God, go I.

We needed to get out of this depressed feeling.  So we went over to Old Warsaw to have lunch and tour the “old” city.  After another fantastic lunch of pierogis and sour rye soup, we met up with Marta to explore the area and learn about it.  The Warsaw Old Town is the oldest part of Warsaw.  It was totally destroyed at the end of WWII.  When Eisenhower visited the ruins, he said that funds from the Marshall Plan could be used to rebuild it.  Stalin refused saying he didn’t need any American money and set out to rebuild it back to what it looked like before the war.

The Old Town was meticulously rebuilt.  As many of the original bricks as possible were reused. However, the reconstruction was not always accurate to prewar Warsaw, sometimes deference being given to an earlier period.  This was in an attempt to improve on the original or an authentic-looking facade was built to cover a more modern building.  The rubble was sifted through looking for reusable decorative elements, which were then reinserted into their original places.  Bernardo Bellotto's 18th-century painting, as well as pre-World War II architecture students' drawings, were used as essential sources in the reconstruction effort.  However, Bellotto's drawings had not been entirely immune to artistic license and embellishment, and in some cases this was transferred to the reconstructed buildings.  Despite these “flaws” it is really a beautiful area.

In the center of the market square is a mermaid.  The statue dates back to the 1800’s.  Marta told us legend says that the Warsaw mermaid originally hailed from outside Poland.  Accompanied by her twin sister the pair swam across the Baltic Sea, arriving in Gdańsk.  Here the sisters split, one swimming to Copenhagen and the other down the Vistula River arriving at the old town.  Local fishermen soon noticed someone tampering with their nets, freeing the fish in the process, and teamed up to catch this pesky vandal once and for all.  They soon changed their minds once they saw her beauty and siren like singing voice.  A greedy merchant decided to trap her and take her on tour through the sideshows of Poland.  A son of a fisherman heard her voice crying in a shed.  He hatched a daring plan to free her, and in thanks to the townspeople who rescued her she swore to make it her life's mission to protect Warsaw.  It’s this defensive stance of hers which explains why she is armed to the teeth with a sword and shield.

Our last stop was at the Jewish Geneological center and the Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute.   The Jewish Genealogy & Family Heritage Center was built to start to build a bridge between the two worlds of pre and post Holocaust.  For over twenty years, they have been assisting families from all over the world to discover their roots in Poland and offer a new point of view about their family story.  We had a chance to visit the Ringelblum Institute as well.

The institute is a repository of documentary materials relating to the Jewish historical presence in Poland.  The most valuable part of the collection is the Warsaw Ghetto Archive, known as the Ringelblum Archive Oneg Shabbat. It contains about 6,000 documents (about 30,000 individual pieces of paper) many of which are on display including the milk container that were buried before the end of the war and subsequently found when the war had ended.   Oneg Shabbat had historians, writers, rabbis and social workers as members.  They were all dedicated to chronicling life in the Ghetto during the German occupation.  They worked as a team, collecting documents and soliciting testimonies and reports from dozens of volunteers of all ages.  The materials submitted included essays, diaries, drawings, wall posters and other materials describing life in the Ghetto.  The collection work started in September 1939 and ended in January 1943.

The original plan was to write a book after the war about the horrors they had witnessed.  As the pace of deportations increased, and it became clear that the destination was the Treblinka death camp with few likely to survive, Emanuel Ringelblum had the archives stored in three milk cans and ten metal boxes.  These were then buried in three different places in the Ghetto.  Two of the canisters, containing thousands of documents, were unearthed in September 1946 and a further ten boxes in December 1950.  The third cache is rumored to be buried beneath what is now the Chinese Embassy in Warsaw but a search in 2005 failed to locate the missing archival material.  All but three members of the Oneg Shabbat were murdered in the Holocaust.  Emanuel Ringelblum escaped the ghetto, but continued to return to work on the archives.  In 1944 Ringelblum and his family were discovered and were executed along with those who hid them.  After the war, Rokhl Auerbakh, one of the three surviving members of Oneg Shabbat, initiated the search for and excavation of the buried documents.  These documents and Rokhl Auerbakh’s testimony were used in the trial of Adolf Eichman.

This was the end of a very busy day.  We headed back to the hotel to change and head to dinner at Momu.  We had dinner with members of Beit Polska.  They were also member of Beit Warszawa Synagogue, a liberal Jewish synagogue that opened in 1999.  Beit Polska is the umbrella organization for the Progressive/Reform Judaism in Poland.  It is good to know that the Jews are starting to re-emerge in Poland after the events of the Holocaust all but wiped out Polish Jewry.

As I sit back and think about what I saw in Warsaw that day, I am most grateful for the risks taken by the Oneg Shabbat.  Here we are some 70 years after the events of the Holocaust and there are still those who would deny that it ever happened.  One of the Oneg Shabbat members, 19 year old David Graber placed a note inside the top of one box that read, “I would love to see the moment in which the great treasure will be dug up and scream the truth at the world.  May the treasure fall into good hands, may it last into better times, may it alarm and alert the world to what happened…in the 20th century….May history be our witness.”  Sadly just hours after penning these words, 6,458 more Jews were deported, including Graber, who perished in Treblinka.

What makes me hopeful is that these records tell the story of the Jewish people of Warsaw at that time as individuals with names.  This means that we don’t have to depend just on the German sources.  The Germans saw them as faceless anonymous victims not worthy of being individually remembered.  Remembering our history is not just about scholarship.  An archive such as the Ringelblum shows us that you don’t have to fight with guns and violence.  You can also can fight with the pen.  This archive is and will continue to be a powerful weapon for the truth.  So in the end, David Graber’s wish was fulfilled.

Nov 13 – 5.10 miles (43:09, 8:28 pace) – Tempo Run
Nov 14 – 8.10 miles (1:17:04, 9:31 pace)
Nov 15 – 8.50 miles (1:13:58, 8:42 pace) – Mile Repeats
Nov 17 – 11.10 miles (1:48:17, 9:45 pace)
Nov 20 – 9.60 miles (1:23:48, 8:44 pace) – Mile Repeats
Nov 21 – 8.10 miles (1:16:36, 9:27 pace)
Nov 23 – 5.20 miles (44:50, 8:37 pace) – Tempo Run
Nov 24 – 8.20 miles (1:17:12, 9:25 pace)
Nov 25 – 18.10 miles (3:03:02, 10:07 pace)

Total Miles:  82.0 miles
2018 Total Miles:  1,703.1 miles