Pilgrimage to Poland - Part 9

Following our visit to the Jewish Historical Society Museum in Warsaw we took a walking tour of the Okopowa Jewish Cemetery (Cm. Zydorfski), the largest Jewish Cemetery in Europe with an estimated 250,000 graves dating back to 1806, when the Jewish community of Warsaw made up a substantial part of the Warsaw population and the need for more Jewish burial sites necessitated the new site.

According to the Jewish Community of Warsaw website, the cemetery is, “the resting place of many spiritual leaders, political activists, creators of Jewish culture; eminent Jewish contributors to Polish cultural, economic and social life, thousands of nameless victims of the ghetto; and many generations of Jewish Varsovians [residents of Warsaw].”

Despite the Holocaust and the desecration and destruction of the Nazi occupation of Poland, the cemetery survived the war years relatively intact compared to other Jewish institutions such as the Great Synagogue of Warsaw which was deliberately demolished.

However, we observed significant damage to many of the ornate gravestones some which were overturned and riddled with bullet holes; the result of the German army’s pursuit and murder of the valiant Jewish partisans who escaped to the cemetery after inflicting heavy casualties on the German army during the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion.

We then travelled north to the Treblinka Memorial where once stood the infamous Treblinka concentration and death camps known as Treblinka I and Treblinka II.

Treblinka, the Polish village closest to the death camps which bear its name, is located 50 miles Northeast of Warsaw; the camps were located about 4 miles out of town along a rail line which allowed easy access and transport of Jews from all over Poland to their ultimate deaths.

Treblinka was established in the early days of the Holocaust and was the initial pre-eminent death camp in Poland as part of the developing Final Solution prior to the opening of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Because of its earlier establishment, its killing procedures were not as efficient as the latter methods used in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Death in Treblinka was by carbon monoxide poisoning as compared to the more efficient Zyklon B gas later used in Auschwitz-Birkenau. As a result, the number of deaths at Treblinka numbered approximately 800,000, and was second only to Auschwitz-Birkenau which accounted for more than 2,000,000 Jewish deaths.

A long walking path from the parking lot to the Treblinka Memorial winds through a beautiful thick forest and opens up into a field of thousands of naturally irregular stones each marked with the name of a town, city or community from where the victims who were gassed and incinerated originated.

These acres of stone memorials are dominated by a massive memorial in its midst on the site of a gas chamber, made of large granite blocks resembling the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. The blocks are vertically split creating the appearance of two pillars which reminded me of the broken tablets of the Ten Commandments and the complete abandonment of humanity in this wretched place.

In August 1943 a group of Jewish prisoners attempted a revolt, killing some of the camp’s guards, but the attempted revolt failed. Several hundred prisoners managed to escape into the woods but were hunted down and summarily executed by German troops using dogs to ferret out their hiding places. Several months after the revolt, the Nazis closed and destroyed the Treblinka death camp infrastructure, leaving behind the incinerated remains of its victims.

As we walked along the now quiet peaceful path back to our bus, I looked through the trees and visualized these desperate Jews being hunted down like prey by the vicious Nazi animals masquerading as human beings. That visual continues to haunt me to this day.

As we made our way back to Warsaw, we were looking forward to Kabbalat Shabbat services (Welcoming the Sabbath) with several of our companion groups, Shabbat Dinner at the hotel, and to an open discussion of the past week’s experience that none of us will ever forget.

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.