Shabbat Evening to Warsaw!

My daughter is in Poland this week as part of the United Synagogue Youth Poland/Israel Pilgrimage. It is an interesting choice of title for the trip: in Poland, though they visit cities such as Cracow and Warsaw, it is the camps that is the focus of this part of the pilgrimage. The cities themslelves are known as the sites of ghettoes into which Jews were placed before being shipped to the death camps which dotted Poland.

Pilgrimages are journeys to holy places, but Sobibor, and Madjanek, and Auschwitz are not holy. Forever, these pieces of earth are damned by what occurred there more than sixty years ago. These sites of pollution can never be redeemed; no blade of grass grows there which is not fed by the blood of the innocent men, women and children who on that ground were put to death. I cannot imagine my daughter in Poland, not merely because she is my daughter far from home for the first time in our lives, but because she is in Poland, where Jews were slaughtered viciously, callously, premeditatedly, and hatefully. It is where Mr. Mastbaum escaped from the train which was taking him to Sobibor, and lived subsequently in the woods for two years scrounging for food, for shelter, for some remnant of human concern. It is where Mrs. Mastbaum, also, survived two years in the forests of Poland while Nazis and Nazi-sympathizers hunted for her and other Jews. Poland is where both of them--and many thousand others--lost their entire family to the Nazi massacre. And now my daughter is in Poland, celebrating Shabbat in a country that hoped it could annihilate all the Jews.

My Shabbat blessing for my daughter, Emma: May she grow to be like Sarah, and Rebecca and Rachel and Leah. May God bless and keep her; May God watch over and protect her; may God’s countenance shine on her and give her peace.

I have myself been reading a great deal about Poland, and specifically about the Partisans who managed to escape from those cities, and ghettoes, and smaller villages to live in the forests and fight against the Nazis in small bands of organized and armed resistance. There are times when I read their memoirs and I think to myself that they must be making up what it is they are narrate. I cannot imagine humans being that cruel. It is abominable. It is reprehensible. I can not forget, and, I am afraid, I can never forgive.

I am re-reading the diary of Anne Frank. She did not live to be as old as Emma is now; and for twenty five months she did not breathe the air in the world. She lived in the insufferably claustrophobic space of the Secret Annex, and, remarkably, did not go mad. I have never been that strong.