Warsaw Ghetto wandering

by Darin Leviloff (United States of America)

I didn't expect to find Poland

Feeling a slight cold breeze, I stepped off the train in Warsaw. It was the summer of 1993. I glanced at my watch and noticed that it already toward the end of the afternoon. While I certainly had some hours of daylight left, I was unlikely to find any museums of note that were still open. But that suited me fine. This wasn’t a typical visit to see national treasures. This was a moment for dark reflection. 50 years prior, Poland was a center of World Jewry and Warsaw was it capital. That all that came to a shocking and horrible end as the Nazis who occupied most of the country (and eventually all of the country) enacted terrible policies of liquidation. In the end, approximately three million Polish Jews perished in the Holocaust. Many of them, on their way to the gas chambers, were housed temporarily in the notorious Warsaw ghetto. I would wander at dusk and reflect. Travel is not only about going to different places, but also about going to different times. My family had escaped Europe long before the terrible events of World War 2. My grandmother, in fact, was born, not far from Warsaw, in a city she called “Lomza”. As a small child, she was taken by her parents to America. She probably had no inkling that such an event would save her life. Now I was facing the fate of those that stayed behind. Through my Jewish education, I knew all about life in the Warsaw ghetto: how concerts, holiday observances, and schools remained active in the crowded tenements, which were sealed off from the rest of Warsaw. I also learned how, one by one, the Jewish residents were shipped out by train and taken to death camps like Auschwitz. I had visited there and the memory still chilled me to the bone. I also learned about a few remarkable Jewish resistors, who stockpiled weapons and, for almost 30 days, kept the Germans on their toes and rose up in revolt. Forward a couple hours later and I found myself standing in front of a statute of Mordechai Anielewicz. Not a name that rolls off the tongue, but the identity of the young man who lead the Warsaw Ghetto revolt and paid the ultimate price. The sun was falling, but I could still see glints of light reflecting off the graphite black statuary and the cold grey stone surrounding it. It depicted Mordechai in the center, gazing out with a stern visage and prematurely aged physiology. Other figures look out furtively around him, with the cold realism of so many Soviet era monuments. I walked further, my mind focusing on this place being both a place of life and a place of death- that same contradiction I had experienced when I walked the haunted ghetto of Cracow as a younger man. Deep in contemplation, I saw out of the corner of my eye, a dark clad Orthodox Jewish man, walking toward the synagogue building. I approached him, asking him if there was a religious service this evening. He responded affirmatively, but then in broken English said I should see the “concert” by the “American rabbi” at the “Jewish Center”. The juxtaposition was startling to me. How was there a concert in the ghetto? An American rabbi here? A Jewish Center in a place where there can’t be many Jews? Moments later, I joined a concert in progress. Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach was singing beautiful niggunim (Yiddish melodies with wordless lyrics), and then speaking to the crowd about love, humanity, and reconciliation. The crowd was enthralled, and my deduction was that these weren’t Jews, but were normal Polish citizens. Before I knew it, I am dancing on a stage with the Rabbi, the Rabbi’s East Coast entourage, and members of the audience. I am amazed that my mournful night of contemplation had turned into a whirling flash of people, smiles, melodies and joy. A night meant to be devoted to dark contemplation of death and persecution turned into a festival of musings about the meaning of life, redemption, and reconciliation. Maybe, just maybe, this was the message that my journey was meant to convey.