I know I know, you're all waiting for my Poland blog but I haven't quite gotten to it yet! In the mean time, here's the essay I wrote for Jewish history on it if you feel like reading it (WARNING: it's long :P' yes i know the Hebrew is backwards, it got messed up when i copied it):
Polanya-
Past, Present and Future
On September 1, 1939 Nazi Germany
invaded Poland, an act that would spark a Second World War. However, the fate
of the Jewish people was unveiled nearly 7 years earlier on January 1 1933 when
Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. With the popularity of his
Nazi party continuing to grow, Hitler began to rebuild Germany to be what he
called “the 3rd Reich.” This “3rd Reich” however, did not
include the Jews in any way. Upon our pilgrimage, we have seen the fine line
between life and death that now exists in Poland. We discussed the term םייחה שודיק
(sanctifying life) which emphasizes acts of heroism, survival, and defiance. We
saw sites which used to be rich with life, and sites that still crawl with the
feeling of death. Now, reflecting on the experience, we look at what is known
as the 614th mitzvot and ways in which one is told to observe it. To
understand the prospective future of the Jewish people, it is important to
comprehend our most recent oppression: The Holocaust. In order to do this we
must also understand life before this atrocity.
Many Jews from the time of the Middle
Ages until the rise of the Nazi’s lived in small towns throughout Eastern
Europe known as shtetlach. These communities were also called השודק הליהק, or a
Holy Community. The people who lived here spoke Yiddish, but this was not just
their language, it was their way of life. It included culture, traditions, and
showed that they had a strong Jewish identity. A small slice of this way of
life could still be seen when we visited the former shtetl of Tykocin. Although
no Jews live there today, one must imagine what life was like when it was
livelier. As you walk to the central square but the church you can smell all
the goods being traded between both Jews and non-Jews on market days. When you
walk behind the old homes, you can imagine the barns being filled with cows and
horses and chickens. If you pass by the stream, you can see the women washing
clothing and sheets as the sun beats down on their backs and if you happen to pass
by on a Friday night, you can see the light of the Shabbat candles reflecting
in the faces of men, women, and children who could not even imagine what their
life would soon be like. But most importantly is the synagogue, the place of
meeting and prayer for the entire community. As you walk into the synagogue
today, you can read the prayers off of the painted walls as the Jews once did
there, and hear the voices of generations bouncing off all sides. It is for
this reason that we too sang and danced and prayed in this very same synagogue.
By doing so, we breathed life back into community which has been lost. For
centuries our ancestors lived and even thrived in this region of the world. Although
very few remnants of a once prospering Jewish community remain, they have left
behind a legacy that shall never be forgotten.
The vibrant way of life within
the shtetl was lost through horrible acts of destruction and murder. Towns such
as Tykocin are now merely ghost towns, echoes of a time that once was. But the
intent of the Nazi’s could not be more evident than in Majdanek, a death camp
near the city of Lublin. This camp is still in its raw state as it was one of
the first liberated by the USSR at the end of the war. In a camp like this
there is no separation between living and dying; instead there are only two
ways to be murdered. After walking through the gate and entering the camp, the
first place we were taken to was the Gas chamber. The one at Majdanek is not as
big or even as sophisticated as the infamous gas chambers of Auschwitz however
nonetheless it was still used to commit these horrible crimes of mass murder. Upon
exiting the deadly building, you are surrounded by barbed wire fences as far as
you can see. There are also black guard towers ever few yards. In a barrack in
the middle of this death camp, there are four wired containers in which are
thousands of shoes. Each one of these shoes belonged to someone. A big leather
boot for a strong young man. A petit pink heeled shoe for a beautiful woman. A
small soled shoe with frills for a child, no older than perhaps a year. If you
walk through each row, you can reach your hand out and feel these shoes, feel
these lives, feel these people. Each shoe tells a story, a story that was
abruptly interrupted and erased except for perhaps a few small unnoticeable
details. But all of these details fade away when you step back outside and once
again see yourself surrounded by barbed wire fences on all sides. Suddenly a
rush of fear hits you. To be surrounded with no way out is not a feeling most
people today are used too. This is a feeling, fear, is one that the prisoners
within these camps had to live with every day. They did not know if their
family was still alive. They did not know if they themselves would still be
alive in a few short hours. They were replaceable, disposable. They were not
people, they did not have names. They were nothing more than a number to the
S.S. soldiers who decided who would live and who should be shot on the spot.
With all of the terrible acts
committed by the Nazi’s, the Jews did not sit around doing nothing. There were
many acts of resistance, some more well-known than others. One of the most
famous examples was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. In this case, the remaining
Jews in the Ghetto staged an armed revolt. Another example of the resistance
within the Jews was on October 7, 1944 in Auschwitz 2 (also known as Birkenau).
Here the members of the Sanderkommando, with the help of young girls from a
nearby ammunition factory, blew up gas chamber 4. There were also more subtle
acts of defiance. In Yiddish, these are known as ןביילרביע (Iberleben), or
small acts of resistance. Emanuel Ringelblum was a Jew who had been resettled
to the Warsaw Ghetto. Just an average man, realizing the future ahead of him
and the rest of the people now living in the Ghetto, he decided to get together
with other people, just ordinary people like him, to write diaries and to
collect documents and photographs and any other papers they could find. They
then buried them in metal boxes and milk canisters. This collection of
documents is how we now know so much about life inside of the Warsaw Ghetto.
There were also other even less
well known and smaller acts of defiance by the Jewish people of the Ghettos and
concentration camps. There are many stories of people doing simple things such
as just passing a comb around (an object of high value in a place such as that)
to protect against the spread of lice which was not uncommon and spread quickly
in the tight and dirty conditions of the barracks. Other stories include people
who took on a parental role of a young child who was thrown into shock after
being separated from their parents. Although
these more “simple” acts of survival and resistance may seem incomparable to those
which took part on a larger scale, these smaller acts of survival were just as
important if not more, for these were the acts that went against everything the
Nazi’s wanted. They tried to strip us of our humanity so we held on to every
part we could grasp hold of. They tried to kill us so we continued to live and
work another day.
Rabbi Emil Fackenheim wrote, “Jews
are forbidden to hand Hitler posthumous victories, they are commanded to
survive as Jews, lest the Jewish People perish.” What this “614th
mitzvah” commands is that Jews are forbidden to forget the events of the Shoah.
By forgetting we are giving Hitler victory. Instead we must continue to survive
and thrive as Jews, as people, because this is what Hitler aimed to destroy. We
must educate ourselves and future generations because to be able to teach and
to learn about our past is a victory. This shows that just as Jewish life and history
did not end at the destruction of the second temple, it will not end at the
Holocaust, instead it is continuing to grow even today. By going to the sites
of the Ghettos and of the death camps as a group of Jews and to turn around and
walk back out the gates like millions did not have the chance to do; that is a
victory. Continuing the everyday aspects of Jewish life is also a victory. To
be able to study Torah and to be able to intermarry is a victory. These were simple
human rights that were stripped from us by the Nuremberg Laws (laws passed in
Germany in 1935 which stripped Jews of rights such as citizenship). Perhaps the
greatest victory today however is the existence of a Jewish state in the land
of Israel. Israel is our land and by having our own land shows that we are a
people, a nation. That is an idea that Hitler would have never accepted, and
for this reason it is one that we must continue to prove in order to keep the
614th mitzvoth.
Our עסמ to Poland was a life
changing experience for me. I learned many new facts and stories about the
Shoah that I had never known and may have never heard. I never thought about
writing a diary as resistance and had never hear of the term ןביילרביע. I
believe that it is every Jew’s responsibility to go to Poland and to understand
not only the number of 6 million, but to see what that number really meant. To
see it in the shoes at Majdanek and in the homes of Tykocin. It is important to
observe Rabbi Emil Fackenheim’s 614th mitzvot and continue Jewish
life and Jewish traditions and to support the state of Israel. To have a states
means that we are a people. To be a people means that we are all connected,
even with different views. Just as we were all present at the giving of the Ten
Commandments at Sinai, we were all part of the Holocaust, and it will stay with
us forever. Never again and never to be forgotten.
