Poland Pilgrimage #3
Content Note: Descriptions of life and death inside a concentration camp.
Lublin, Poland.
Before World War 2 the Jewish population here was around 42,000 people, a third of the total population of the town.
After World War 2 less than 500 Jews remained.
It didn’t matter if you were religious, it didn’t matter if your family had lived here for hundreds of years. It didn’t matter if you were a young child or an aging rabbi. If you were Jewish, you were rounded up, marched 3 miles to the train station, and then shoved into a cattle car and sent to your death.
But before all that.
The Jews of this city THRIVED. Artists, Writers, Klezmer Musicians, Poets, Artisans, Bakers, Cobblers, Painters, Dressmakers, Rabbis, Yeshiva Students, Mamas and Papas, all lived full and meaningful lives in community with the land, the river, the trees and the wells of the town.
In fact the Lublin Yeshiva (Jewish learning academy) was considered “The Jewish Oxford”.
Now it has been converted into the hotel we are staying in.
Tal, a young Israeli woman now living in Lublin, was our incredible guide at the Grodzka Gate museum/theater. She described Lublin as the “Heart of Darkness” for the Nazi extermination plans, specifically “Operation Reinhard”.
The operation proceeded from March 1942 to November 1943; about 1.47 MILLION or more Jews were murdered in just 100 days from late July to early November 1942.
1.47 MILLION in 100 days.
Our visit to the Grodzka Gate floored us. Lots of tears were shed as we looked at the beautiful slide boxes showing photos of our ancestors living, full, and beautiful lives.
We asked Tal what it feels like to be a deep scholar of the history of this place and to hold what is happening now in her home country. She said that it is very hard and that sometimes she feels ashamed to see what is happening at the hands of Israel’s war machine in Gaza. ‘It looks like the photos of what the Nazis did here”, she said.
The parallels are real.
Piles of rubble, people starving, erasure of entire families, dehumanizing propaganda, suggesting the entire population are terrorists, animals, less than human, that all of this destruction is not even really happening. Suggesting that people are pretending to starve, that all the videos of injured and traumatized people are products of “pallywood”, and trying to erase the evidence of the horrors being committed, or claim they are a tragic but “necessary part of war”.
War is a crime.
At the end of our tour, we stumbled into the brighter light of day from the dark museum. We were disoriented, deep in grief and disbelief, Tal smiled and said,
“There is a tree I want to show you.”
She led us out into the open space behind the gate. She guided our line of sight the the area below the bridge we were standing on. We looked down at what is now a big grassy park, but once was full of houses belonging to the Jewish people of the town. It was all razed to the ground by the Nazis.
And there we saw the 300 year old willow tree that stands there. How or why it survived that destruction is unknown.
Our hearts, pulled like magnets, guided our feet down the steps. We surrounded her. We leaned into her and ran our hands over her rough bark. Tears were flowing and some deep wailing moved through us as we sensed all the LIFE she had seen.
Children playing, lovers courting, mamas holding sleeping babies, men in conversation over the week’s Torah portion, perhaps one of my own ancestors had even been cooled in her shade on a hot day…
I closed my eyes with my forehead pressed to her enormous body and I saw it in my inner eye.
We were there for a while with that memory keeper. Time is hard to track in this process, has it been 10 minutes, 10 hours, 10 generations?
It started to rain and we slowly peeled away and off to a warm bowl of soup at lunch together.
Then our journey got even deeper.
And this is where I’ll pause to remind you of the content warning for this post. I’m going to talk about the Holocaust.
The word “holocaust” originates from the ancient Greek word “holokauston,” which means “a completely burnt offering.”
I remember hearing that word in my family as a young child and not knowing what it meant. It isn’t used for anything else so it’s not a word you can understand by its use in various contexts. Finally I asked what it meant and the adults got squirmy or very intense and told me little snippets like;
“They stuffed them into train cars and took them to a camp behind electrified barbed wire”
“They told them they were going to take showers and then they filled the room with gas and they all died”
These images haunted me.
As I got older I did my own deep dives and exposure therapy. Schindler’s List, library books, deeper conversation with family members, Claude Lanzmann’s documentary, ‘Shoah’ (Hebrew for ‘catastrophe’)
I am grateful for all the bearing witness these sources afforded me, but nothing compares to yesterday’s trip to Majdanek, a forced labor camp turned death camp just outside of the city limits of Lublin.
The tours started in the open space of the camp where new arrivals were “sorted”. Those who were stronger, younger, healthier were sent to hard labor, those who were old, frail, sick, or children were sent to die.
All people were stripped of their possessions.
EVERYTHING was taken.
Coats, clothes, blankets, watches, dolls, glasses, shoes, EVERYTHING. It was a major process to strip, sort and sell the raw materials of all these belongings, and huge piles formed in the yard. It was a major industry of the Nazis to sell or repurpose these possessions. The tour guide gave the grim appraisal that the Jews, in a way, were forced to fund the German army.
Those who were selected for work were marched into the showers, forced into concrete vats of carbolic acid and held under the acid by SS guards. Then they were pushed under showers of alternating freezing and boiling water. If they tried to move out of the way of the water they were beaten severely.
Others weren’t sent into the showers but into concrete gas chambers by the hundreds. Carbon monoxide was used for a while and pumped into the room through a tiny hole in the wall. Guards complained that the carbon monoxide took too long to kill people and soon they began using Zyklon B instead, which stained the walls a sickly blue color.
I learned that gas chambers were used because the commanders of the Nazi regime were set on killing in such large numbers. That imperative caused those who were forced to manually shoot/execute the prisoners to have incredibly high suicide rates. This reality resulted in the need to develop a method that was one step removed and able to kill even more people at one time.
Capos at the camps who were prisoners themselves were forced to come in and remove the dead bodies by the hundreds and carry them in trucks and trailers to the camp crematorium. Smoke billowed from the chimney without end and the ashes were spread over the gardens where the SS grew vegetables for the officers of the camp.
Ok, deep breath.
So what does it mean to “bear witness” to all of this?
And for what purpose do we endeavor to do so? Good Question.
As we followed our tour guide we were shadowed by a large group of 17 year old Israeli boys draped in the flag of Israel and led by a few older men. They occupied each space they entered and filled it with boisterous songs of nationalism.
I empathized with their emotion, and yet my heart wondered if using this unfathomable tragedy to strengthen allegiance to a nation state currently bombing and destroying the culture and the people of Gaza wasn’t just using one shoah/catastrophe to justify another.
Some people in the community where I used to work compare the Gazans to the Nazis.
But they are not Nazis.
The truth is, you can’t argue with history. It happened. As much as we might wish we could avenge the suffering here, it’s really not what is needed.
You can’t heal the the horrors committed upon the children of your people while you slaughter the children of others.
It all comes down to dehumanization. No matter what the setting of the field of war is.
Whether it is Eastern Europe, Sudan, Congo, Gaza, Ukraine,if you are able to strip humans of their precious Goddexx-given humanity, then all sorts of horrors are possible.
If you strip people of their homes, their possessions, their land, their dignity, if you wall people in, you are setting yourself up for failure. You are failing the central spiritual tenet of Judaism as I understand it; That Goddexx is ONE unified field of creation including EVERYTHING and EVERYONE, that what we do to others we ultimately do to ourselves, and that subsequently we are commanded(and wise) to walk in LOVE.
So we bear witness.
Not to stoke the fires of nationalism, not to seek revenge or to feed our fury, not to give ourselves the right to violence or desensitization. But to remember, to grieve, to understand how easy it is for humans to dehumanize and in the process to dehumanize themselves.
We bear witness to let ourselves feel without fueling the story, to observe the sensations in our bodies, honoring what is there without trying to escape it or fix it.
We bear witness to physically hold each other through it, as we sat on the living earth and cried in each other’s arms, and we bear witness to call upon the Holy Oneness to enter our hearts and strengthen our love, our tenderness, and our commitment to non violence. We ask for the strength to become the change we wish to see in the world, to truly turn wounds into wisdom.
When we returned to the hotel, we met in ritual and council. We remembered the Torah’s direction to choose blessing instead of curse. We lit soul candles from Tarnow, and then we held council and witnessed each other’s refractions of the day’s experiences.
Keep us in your prayers. We are humble alchemists doing the work together. Trying our best to see the long arc of healing and aim for it from here.
Thank you for bearing witness with me here. I hope it softens your heart and strengthens your loving kindness today.
