Pilgrimage to Poland - Part 7

The next day our positive energy experienced on the March of the Living quickly dissipated as we arrived at the site where an estimated 800 Jewish children are buried in a mass grave in the Zbylitowska Góra Forest.

The gravesite is located deep in the forest on the outskirts of the Polish village of Tarnow, which also once included a sizable Jewish community. The site was only discovered after the war.

According to our guide and my own research, these Jewish children, many of whom were outed by their non-Jewish neighbors, were taken from the town in trucks to an isolated area in the forest. Some of the older children tried to escape by jumping off the truck and hiding in the forest. But they were hunted down by the Nazi soldiers and murdered where they stood.

The Jewish children, from infancy to age 14, were lined up at the edge of a previously prepared deep ditch, extending several hundred square feet in area, and methodically machine-gun murdered; their young lifeless bodies dumped into the ditch.

The mass grave is now surrounded by an Israeli blue fence with informally placed Israeli flags over-looking the site and marked by a modest stone monument engraved in Hebrew describing the horror that occurred here.

There was no shortage of tears in our group as we listened to our guide’s description of the massacre that took place here, and as we said the Kaddish prayer in memory of these young forgotten souls.

Our next significant stop was to visit the Lancut Synagogue with its beautiful Baroque architecture. Like all of the other synagogues we visited this synagogue is now a museum and is no longer used as a Jewish house of worship.

After an overnight stay in the city of Lublin, we began our day with a walking tour of the Old City of Lublin, the Jewish Ghetto and the Grodzka Gate. Lublin was the home and burial site of the great Jewish scholar, Rabbi Shalom Luria (1510-1573) who was the “Av Beit Din” (Chief Judge of the Lublin Jewish Court).

As was true throughout Europe, the Nazis and their collaborators destroyed a vibrant and cultured Jewish population which had existed in this city for more than a thousand years. After the war and until the 21st Century, the citizens of Lublin did not acknowledge the existence of a past Jewish presence in their city.

This was confirmed by a non-Jewish acquaintance of mine who was born and raised in Lublin. He only learned of the existence of a Jewish community in his hometown when he emigrated as a young man to the U.S in the late 1980’s. He had never heard any discussion at home, in school or among his young friends of the existence of a Jewish community while he was growing up in Lublin.

As Poland awakened to its past and the Jewish impact on its cultural and national character, the citizens of Lublin acknowledged the existence of the long-time Jewish presence (but not their guilt in its disappearance) in their city.

One of the results of this awakening is the beautiful black and white murals of Jewish shops and other scenes painted by local artists on the Wall marking the boundary of the Jewish Ghetto, depicting Jewish life in the city prior to the Holocaust.

From Lublin we made our way to another concentration/death camp site. This was Majdanek, where we actually saw a series of furnaces in a preserved crematorium, one of which still contained human ashes. After all we had seen in the days before, it was still difficult to realize the reality of what we were witnessing.

It is estimated more than 300,000 slave laborers, a majority of them Jews, but including Poles, Russian POWs and other marginal groups, were worked to death, shot or gassed at Majdanek.

After a stop at the Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva, a famed center of Jewish learning which was the site of a massive Nazi book burning, now reduced to a museum, we finally arrived in Warsaw, the final destination of our Polish pilgrimage.

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.