Warsaw: Ghetto and Cemetery

This morning at 9:30AM we met with Andrezej Jankowski in the lobby of our hotel. He was our guide to the former Jewish ghetto area and our teacher about the life of the Jewish people in Warsaw before, during, and somewhat, after the war. He is a fine young fellow, just 28, a “third generation” Jew. His grandfather, only 19 when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, followed his older brother into Russia. In 1941 when Russia in turn was invaded, he was evacuated to the Urals where he spent the rest of the war assisting in the movement into and setting up of industrial plants in the interior of Russia to avoid their falling into German hands. He became a committed communist and returned to Poland after the war, never giving up his idealism regarding Stalin and the Party -- despite the difficulties the Polish people experienced under the Soviet regime from 1945-1989. The great, all-equal world did not materialize for anyone. Jews were allowed greater latitude in some ways but a clearly delineated glass ceiling remained. Andrezej’s mother, who was sceptical about her father’s adherence to the communist ideology, married a Gentile Pole. Andrezej, himself, is firmly identified as a Jew, a Reform Jew with clear left politics. He spends part of his time involved with the Taube Institute that works within Warsaw’s Jewish community, strengthening connections among the various strands of the community but also teaching people like Andrezej, as well as people from around the world, how to explain the Holocaust and the history of the Jews in Poland. They are a major genealogical source for Jews wanting to trace their ancestors in Poland.

We were with Andrezej for four hours, walking the entire time in a healthy downpour. During the visit we had stimulating conversations with him on many topics of mutual interest. He told us about himself and questioned us about our interest in the Holocaust. We talked about responsibility, guilt, the roles of the Judenrat, about life in the ghetto during the war, about the Zionist movement, the founding of Israel, the current Palestinian situation, and the continual founding of settlements on the West Bank. He told us a lot about the leaders of the ghetto uprising – this as we visited some of their graves. These were the ones who had survived and had died natural deaths. The others had  been buried in mass graves along a corridor within the old Jewish cemetery. We stood quietly by this place aware that thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands had been summarily piled upon one another for disposal here and in other locations periodically discovered during construction projects around Warsaw.

The cemetery is such a powerful place. It is a vast area, closely packed with elaborate gravestones, all set within a forest of tall, lush trees. The Germans did not destroy the cemetery during their time in Warsaw because they needed it. It was right at the edge of the ghetto. In the first year after the ghetto was established over 100,000 inhabitants died of starvation and disease. The Germans were very afraid of typhus and other communicable diseases and needed a close-by burial place for all of these corpses. They allowed the carts with corpses to travel fairly unmolested from the confines of the ghetto to the cemetery. Funerals or other rituals were not allowed but burial was essential and needed to be facilitated quickly. Because the Gentile part of the city lay on the other side of the cemetery, these funerary excursions became conduits for individuals needing to leave, and occasionally, to come into the ghetto. It was also an avenue for smuggling food.

The cemetery had the greatest impact of all of the places that Andrezej took us to because it is intact. It carries the weight of the actual living Jews of Warsaw from the early nineteenth century – their rituals, their respect for the living and the dead, the desire for continuity between generations. It is powerful and beautiful in its austerity. (Unfortunately I was unable to get clear photos of the cemetery because of the darkness of the day and its situation within the trees. The few that I have do not convey its impact.) Little else of Jewish history here remains embodied in actual structures within which one can sense the lives of the people who once inhabited them. The ghetto itself was deliberately destroyed during and after the uprising. A few buildings remain, most notably a relatively small synagogue which continues to be used by the orthodox (and attended by others during high holidays.) It survived because the SS were using it as a stable during their time in Warsaw. We saw other bits and pieces: the pylons upon which had been built a bridge over a main traffic artery to let people in the ghetto travel from one smaller area  to the larger; some golden plaques about 4-5” square placed in sidewalks commemorating individual lost during the Holocaust; a piece of the wall which was originally the front of a building along the edge of the ghetto. Nothing had the impact of the cemetery, however. It is a silent, profound marker of a thriving, prosperous community that was deliberately destroyed out of sheer hatred.

The  ghetto itself encompassed a vast area. At the beginning of the war Warsaw had a population of about 1,000,000, one-third of whom were Jews. When the ghetto was established the process took about a month for Gentiles living in the designated area to move outside and Jews living outside, to move in. Soon 360,000 Warsaw Jews and about 90,000 Jews from other, smaller areas to the west were crammed into an increasingly dense and over-populated area. Within its walls were businesses, synagogues, houses of prayer, and churches. There were people of all classes, degrees of orthodoxy, well-meaning and opportunist, the good and the bad: in short, like most other communities. Within a year the transportations began. Each day 5-7,000 people would be gathered at one side of the ghetto to board  cattle cars provided to take them “to the eastern settlements,” in fact, to the gas chambers at Treblinka.

Before the war the population of Polish Jews had been between 3,300,000. At the end of the war no more than 300,000 remained. As survivors began to return from camps or from hiding another wave of persecution, this time from Poles, took place. Some were murdered by people who were frightened that the homes or businesses they had acquired when the Jews were placed in the ghetto or transported, would be taken from them. Already profoundly traumatized by their war experiences and feeling unsafe within their former country, most decided to leave Poland. The emigrations were to Palestine or to the west, to England and to North or South America. Andrezej said that in Warsaw now there are about 600 Jews registered in the synagogues, and perhaps another 1400 in the community not registered but who show up at festivals throughout the year. How many others there may be who have severed bonds over the post-war generations, is difficult to assess.

I told Andrezej about the comments made by a Toronto acquaintance whose extended family had been murdered during the war. He would never come to Poland himself because he is convinced that all Poles are anti-Semites and that for Jews Poland is nothing now but a cemetery. Andrezej’s own sense is that there is a degree of anti-Semitism but that the majority of Poles, like most people everywhere, simply live their own lives, address their own concerns and don’t worry themselves about other groups within the society. At either end of this spectrum, however, is both the group that hate Jews and demonstrated this in the ways that they assisted the Germans in their atrocities and afterward in various ways, and the group that relates to the Jews as fellow human beings, those who helped to hide and thus save thousands during the war.

Today we will visit the partially opened Museum of the History of Polish Jews.