Pilgrimage to Poland - Part 2

After several hours of rest and regaining my composure from my encounter with the beautiful Vistula River and its ugly past as the depository for Jewish ashes, I met the group I would be traveling with at our organizational meeting.

Several of us had already communicated via e-mail, introducing ourselves to each other and sharing personal thoughts, anxiety and anticipation of what we were about to experience. The group was a cross-section of American Jews from coast to coast, non-Jewish partners and a Jewish couple from Winnipeg, Canada. An Israeli couple joined us a few days later on the day of the March of the Living.

Diverse in age, religious observance, and life experiences, we all had a connection to the Holocaust as genetic, multi-generational survivors, marriage partners and as one historical people whose ancestors had emerged from Egyptian slavery to stand at Sinai and receive the Torah as the everlasting Constitution of the Jewish People.

This trip that we were about to begin could not be experienced alone. We needed each other to both lean on and to support; thankfully, the people that fate brought together were warm, sensitive and ready to embrace each other. I walked into that room full of anxiety and left with 30 new friends.

Our guide for the week was an Israeli who, we would learn as the week progressed, had an extensive knowledge of the Holocaust, and the Polish Jewish community that had existed prior to the Nazi occupation in 1939. During the entire week, his gifted narratives and presentations gave us a deeper understanding of what we were witnessing, and through his poetic readings and discovered notes of victims, an emotional connection with those who did not survive.

One short-coming, which he alluded to at the orientation meeting, was that guides (and anyone else for that matter) in Poland were restrained from discussing the collaboration of Polish citizens in the Holocaust due to a law passed that made it a crime to discuss Polish citizen participation and cooperation with the Nazis.

This was and still is a point of diplomatic contention with the Israeli government which opposed that law, leading to strained relations between the two governments. Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, also vigorously opposed Poland’s refusal to recognize its role in collaboration with the Nazis.

One could understand and expect that the antisemitic puppet government installed by the Soviet Union, which liberated Poland, would refuse to recognize or restore Jewish property rights of Poland’s Jewish citizens who survived the war. Unfortunately, this refusal to recognize Polish guilt continues today more than 30 years after being liberated from Soviet Union domination, and despite Poland’s embracing western oriented democracy along with European Union and NATO membership.

After going through the logistics with our tour guide and group leader, we began our journey by walking across the bridge over the Vistula River that led us into the Jewish Quarter of Krakow known as Kazmierz. As we walked through the Jewish Quarter we saw the signs of past Jewish life. Shops and residences that once were the businesses and homes of Jews were now occupied by a new generation of Poles, not Jews.

The several synagogues we visited with their beautiful architecture and interior design were now museums and monuments to a local Jewish

community that no longer existed. In place of the Aron Kodesh (the housing for the synagogue Torahs) in one synagogue, were paintings of Torah murals and in another synagogue, behind the Aron’s curtain were nothing but bare walls.

Krakow was the birthplace and home where many rabbinic scholars over the centuries added to the collective wisdom of the Jewish people. Now all we could do is visit their graves in the restored Jewish cemetery surrounded by a wall constructed of pieces of broken monuments the result of Nazi desecration and destruction.

While the tone of our trip was now set, we awaited our confrontation with the concentration and death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau the next day.

To be continued.

If you wish to comment or respond you can reach me at melpearlman322@gmail.com. Please do so in a rational, thoughtful, respectful and civil manner.

Mel Pearlman holds B.S. & M.S. degrees in physics as well as a J.D. degree and initially came to Florida in 1966 to work on the Gemini and Apollo space programs. He has practiced law in Central Florida since 1972. He has served as president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Orlando; was a charter board member, first vice president and pro-bono legal counsel of the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Central Florida, as well as holding many other community leadership positions.