Confronting Suffering and Resilience: A Journey Through Polish Jewish History and the Holocaust

A collection of reflections from President Robin Baker

Reflection 1: Experiencing the Holocaust

The subject of human suffering has been in front of me recently. Whether through my father’s illness, a friend’s father dying of cancer, or a colleague whose wife struggles with breast cancer, I have had to think more about human meaning and purpose. Perhaps it is just that I am getting older, and as we age, time gives us more opportunities to experience our own suffering and that of those close to us. When we are young it is easy to look past life’s challenges and believe those can be overcome.

Just a few months ago I received a call from one of my presidential friends, Phil Ryken, president of Wheaton College, who asked me to consider a unique opportunity. He invited me and several others to participate in an experience, led by Rabbi Yehiel Poupko and the Jewish United Fund of Chicago, to examine Polish Jewish culture and the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust on site in Poland. The Jewish United Fund graciously helps fund the program in an effort to deepen a Christian’s understanding of Jewish culture and, in particular, the Holocaust as a defining experience of Jews. As a historian and teacher, I have had the opportunity to present to college students the story of World War II and the Holocaust. I knew this period in history well intellectually and wondered if I could find the time to get away to Poland. Dr. Ryken believed that the actual experience would be essential and could help shape my understanding. He was right: The experience was life-giving and life-changing.

Rabbi Poupko is an important figure in the Orthodox Jewish community of Chicago. He certainly proved to be a person who knows the Torah well, and I think enjoyed quizzing Christians on our knowledge of and understanding of the books of Moses. We often failed to answer his questions and probably could have used a short course in the Torah prior to our engagement. Rabbi Poupko is also known for interfaith dialogue, and he has been involved in Jewish/Christian dialogues in Chicago for more than 15 years, primarily with the leadership of Wheaton College. I immediately found him to be a caring person and passionate teacher. In my own educational experience, there are instructors who draw you in with their intellect, passion and commitment to the subject, inviting engagement. Rabbi Poupko is that kind of teacher. He takes historical knowledge and makes it personal – he invites you into the experience of his people. At the end of each day, I felt that I was immersed in the experience of the Jewish people, making the trip not only worth it, but powerful.

Most history texts define the Holocaust as the “systematic state-sponsored killing” of approximately six million Jewish men, women, children, and numerous others by the Nazi German regime and their allies. While we know of far too many mass murder events in the 20th and 21st centuries, the Nazi German effort attempted to eradicate Jews from the human experience. When the war began in 1939 with the invasion of Poland, Hitler proclaimed that the war itself would result in the end of the European Jewish population. There is no other historical event that we know of where one group sought to eliminate another group from humanity.

Why begin the experience in Poland? Since the destruction of the second Jewish temple in Jerusalem, the Jewish community entered a long period of what one might call a forced diaspora. After leaving the area around Jerusalem, Jewish people migrated to Egypt, Spain and numerous other parts of the region. As they left, and in the aftermath of the temple destruction, the Jewish community retained its essence through the synagogue and the consistent study and application of the Torah. Wherever they went, Jewish people retained their sense of family and belonging by maintaining and nurturing a commitment to God’s purpose and design as communicated to Moses in the Torah. Rabbi Poupko consistently reminded us that the Jewish people are a family who found faith in God and remained a family over the millennia.

As they migrated, the Jewish people consistently faced persecution and eventual expulsion. Attempts to negotiate space as a minority group in a larger community were successful for short periods but rarely lasted. I have to admit as well that Christians were the persecutors as they sought to punish the “murderers” of Christ. Sometime around 966 a Jewish merchant from Spain, Ibrahim ibn Yakub, traveled to Poland and wrote the first descriptions of that area of Europe. His writing created a desire for a Jewish migration to that part of Europe. During the 10th and 11th centuries, Jewish merchants and artisans settled in Poland following trade routes to Eastern Europe. Persecuted and expelled from Western Europe, Jews found a refuge and a haven under the Polish and Jagiellonian dynasties at that time. The Jewish settlement in Płock is the first to be mentioned in written records in 1237. Shortly after that, in 1264, The Statute of Kalisz was issued by Duke Boleslaw the Pious. It granted a general charter of Jewish liberties in Poland and established a legal foundation for a Jewish presence in the country. Subsequently, the Jewish people were given special status subject directly to the king or the duke and were excluded from municipal jurisdiction. Jews assumed positions throughout Poland’s commercial and economic life. By the beginning of World War II, more than 3.5 million Jews lived in Poland and were an essential part of the life of that culture. Millions of others lived in other areas of Eastern Europe.

When the war began and the German army achieved great success, they immediately began to restrict the Jewish population in Poland and Eastern Europe. They had already assaulted the Jewish population remaining in Germany for more than six years. In Poland, the German SS began to concentrate the Jewish people from the various places in which they lived into a few restricted and controlled ghettos. The Germans built walls around areas of a city and concentrated the Jewish population in smaller sections. The Warsaw Ghetto was one of the largest Nazi-formed ghettos in Eastern Europe. Although almost completely “razed” by the Nazis in 1943, we visited its remnants. At its peak, the Warsaw Ghetto housed more than 450,000 Jewish people in cramped living arrangements with little food and hope.

Rabbi Poupko took us to the Jewish cemetery of Warsaw to begin our conversation. Cemeteries would become a constant centerpiece of our visits and conversations. Why? In death, the living dignified life. In their monuments and memories, they gave testimony to the contribution their community made to the culture and the value they had to God.

One of the monuments I could not get out of my mind was that of Janusz Korczak, formerly Henry Goldschmidt. Like many Jews, Janusz changed his name to accommodate the culture. During the war, he established what we would now call a foster care center for children who had been left behind by parents who were either killed or shipped off to death camps. When the Warsaw Ghetto was being liquidated, Korczak, who was well known around the world for having written the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, was given the chance to leave Poland by the Nazis, but instead he chose to remain with the children of his orphanage. Korczak and his children were among the 900,000 Jews murdered at the Treblinka death camp.

1942 — In the morning at about 7:30 a.m. at the Community center, a special German army unit entered the ghetto. Sturbannfuhrer Hofle and associates came at 10 o’clock. We disconnected the telephone and we moved the children from the playground opposite the community building. We were told that all the Jews irrespective of sex and age, with certain exceptions, will be deported East. By 4 p.m. today, a contingent of 6,000 people must be provided. And this (at the minimum) will be the daily quota.

He refused to either cooperate or leave the children, and the SS took him, along with the children, and killed them all. As I stood in front of his monument it was tough to imagine humans so callous that they would persecute and kill children. Korczak’s life gave testimony to the fact that the Nazis could take the bodies of the children and even his life, but not their dignity or soul. It was tough not to think of my children or even my new grandchild. How could I respond to such inhumanity?

We walked to the grave of Simon Dubnow, one of the great Jewish historians of the early 20th century. He had escaped Poland at the beginning of the war and found a place in Riga. In 1941, as the Nazis overran Riga and its Soviet occupation, the German army Einsatzgruppen rounded him up and murdered him and many other Jews of the city. The irony for Dubnow was that he was arrested by a young German soldier who was his doctoral student at a German university before the war. The student participated in his murder.

Evoking memories of prior stories of the Bible, one grave depicted the story of Exile and quoted from Psalm 137:

1 By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
2 On the willowsa there
we hung up our lyres.
3 For there our captors
required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
4 How shall we sing the LORD’s song
in a foreign land?
5 If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand forget its skill!
6 Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy!

The Jewish people had faced exile often, and under the Nazis the persecution demanded that they submit to torture and slaughter. Still, the grave gave testimony to the fact that they would not forget Jerusalem despite their persecutions.

As the persecution increased, the Jewish community in the ghetto revolted against their overlords. The Polish government in exile called for help from the Allied armies. Samuel Zygelboim, a member of the Polish government in London, wrote this as his last letter to the “civilized world” —

“With these my last words, I address myself to you, the Polish Government, the Polish people, the Allied Government and their peoples, and the conscience of the world.

News recently received from Poland informs us that the Germans are exterminating with unheard-of savagery the remaining Jewish in that country. Behind the walls of the ghetto is taking place today the last act of a tragedy which has no parallel in the history of the human race. The responsibility for this crime – the assassination of the Jewish population in Poland – rests above all with the murderers themselves, but falls indirectly upon the whole human race, on the Allies and their governments, who so far have taken no firm steps to put a stop to these crimes. By their indifference to the killing millions of hapless men, to the massacre of women and children, these countries have become accomplices of the assassins.

I cannot remain silent. I cannot live while the rest of the Jewish people in Poland, whom I represent, continue to be liquidated.

My companions of the Warsaw Ghetto fell in a last heroic battle with their weapons in their hands. I did not have the honor to die with them but I belong to them in their common grave.”

Zygelboim self-immolated in London, an act he hoped would inspire the Allied Powers to act. They did not.

On May 16, 1943, the message of SS General Stroop to Heinrich Himmler told the story:

“180 Jews, bandits, and subhumans were destroyed. The Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no more! The grand operation terminated at 2015 hours when the Warsaw synagogue was blown up.

The total numbers of Jews apprehended and destroyed, according to record, is 560,965.

We had no losses.”

With that memo and army effort, the Jews of Warsaw ceased to exist. We walked the ghetto and the cemetery, read poems, and examined monuments. It is what remains of a vibrant population of Jews who lived for more than 1,000 years in Poland and Warsaw. I felt the heaviness of the loss, as much as outsiders can both feel and share the experience. Such death and destruction is hard to imagine. What does it mean to be “subhuman” or to feel the weight of another who believes that you are less than human and worthy of extermination? Evil was present here.

Rabbi Poupko did not allow us to simply rest in an understanding of “evil” or the suffering of his people. He always left us with a feeling of the value of both the Jewish community and its heroism in the face of an evil that is beyond description.

Reflection 2: The Soul of a City

About 110 miles northeast of Warsaw on the road to Lithuania lay the small village of Tykocin (known in the Jewish community as Tiktin). Of its 4,300 residents just before World War II roughly 1,400 were Jews. Located on the River Narew, Tikocin became an important commercial center on the trade routes between Poland and Lithuania. Jewish community members arrived in 1522 and quickly became involved in commerce, with a few families engaged in farming. They were not recent arrivals in the region, and by the time of the Second World War they were enmeshed in the life of this small trading town – at least as much as a Jewish community could.

In 1639, the Jewish community acquired a field and built one of the finest synagogues in the region, characterized by its beauty and simplicity, along with a cemetery. They became known for the study of the Torah and for a strong commitment to their faith in God. Jews successfully passed on their understanding of Scripture and their culture from generation to generation.

Why visit Tykocin for a Holocaust experience? The village is small and hardly noticeable today. It certainly was not a location for a major death camp. Rabbi Poupko noted that Tykocin represented much of Eastern European Jewry. While it was certainly true that many Jews lived in major cities, others had made lives in small towns throughout Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine. In Tykocin, they lived next to Gentile neighbors for almost 400 years. To put it another way, when the first English settlers landed in America, Jews had been in Tykocin for 50 years. It was also a place where the synagogue still stood.

Rabbi Poupko chose to make two important points in Tykocin. First, only a “museum” Jewish culture still existed here, much like the rest of Poland. Vibrant for centuries, the Germans successfully eliminated Jewish citizens from most of Eastern Europe, and all that remains are museums – synagogues, cemeteries and the memories related to them. For Rabbi Poupko, each visit, important for historical reasons, was also significant because it brought dignity to the people who built a life there. In some sense, by remembering them, we give them new life. Tykocin had some of the most important rabbis of all of Eastern Europe: Rabbi Samuel Eideles, Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabbi Yitzakh. This small community made a major contribution to the study of Jewish Scripture. God chooses small communities and individuals to do great things.

For our purposes, it was also important to recognize that the Jews did not choose to leave; they were murdered systematically even in small towns like Tykocin, in addition to large cities like Warsaw. Certainly, this illustrates how important the destruction of the Jewish people was to the Nazi German nation. In June of 1941, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Germans took over Tykocin, forced Jews to wear the yellow star, and pushed them into forced labor for the regime. On Aug. 24, 1941, the Jews of Tykocin were told by the Gestapo that they were going to have to move to the Ghetto of Bialystok and would be permitted only to take packages of 25 kilos with them. What would you do if you were forced to leave a place your family had occupied for 400 years with only 25 kilograms of goods – a suitcase? As we sat in the synagogue we tried to imagine the fear that overcame the Jews of Tykocin.

The reality was worse than they could have imagined. While the Gestapo imprisoned the working population of men, the German SS took approximately 700 women and children and they walked into the forest. We took that same walk now among tall trees. Winding down the path we approached an area marked by a black fence. We approached in silence, and in front of the fence there was a marker. It was here that the German SS machine-gunned to death their helpless victims – not warriors, but women and children. When they were finished, they buried them in a mass grave and covered them over with dirt. Following a brief ceremony, we each walked silently in the forest and imagined the horror that happened more than 80 years ago. You quickly think of your own family and the pain of knowing you were powerless to stop the slaughter of the weakest in your family and your community. (The Germans later returned to the city of Tykocin and destroyed the Jewish cemetery, eradicating its history and the names of the people who had built the community).

At each location, we stopped and read poetry from individuals who tried to express their feelings of loss and helplessness. I found Jacob Glatsrein’s poem poignant:

Souls of Jewish cities

Hidden in the parchments of eternity
Will they rise from the valley of death?
Only you, my God, know how strong they were
For your discerning power built them.
Only you, my God, know
How weak they were
Before they vanished with the smoke.

Blundering butcher, be it known,
You have brought upon this world of yours,
For all eternity,
The curse of a dead heart,
Sad murderer,
You have uprooted trees, stems
Plucked out family names,
Erased memory
Diminished the song of the world.

Yes, every bullet and every death served to diminish the song of the world. Certainly, the experience of Tykocin made many in the Jewish community ask, “Where was God when the bullets began flying? Where was his justice?” Rabbi Poupko reminded us that it is not those in the Bible who don’t believe that challenge God at these moments but those with the greatest faith. The laments of David come from a heart that seeks God, but also wants to ask why!

Kadia Molodowsky in her poem, put it this way --

Lamentations for the Souls of Jewish Cities

God of Mercy
O God of Mercy
For the time being
Choose another people.
We are tired of death, of corpses,
We have no more prayers.
For the time being
Choose another people
We have run out of blood
For victims,
Our houses have been turned into deserts,
The earth lacks space for the tombstones,
There are no more lamentations
Nor songs of woe
In the ancient texts.

O God of Mercy, please choose another people! Yes, as the little children tumbled into the mass pits strewn with the bullets of war, one could only wonder.

“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is one. Into your hands, O Lord, I consign my soul.”

Reflection 3: Systematic Annihilation

“God of Israel, I have fled to this place in order to worship You without molestation, to obey Your commandments and sanctify Your name. You, however, have done everything to make me stop believing in You. Now, lest it seem to You that You will succeed by these tribulations in driving me from the right path, I notify You, my God and the God of my father, that it will not avail you in the least. You may insult me, You may castigate me, You may take from me all that I cherish and hold dear in the world, You may torture me to death – I believe in You, I will always love You!”  

“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is one. ‘Into your hands, O Lord, I consign my soul.’”

Yossel Rakover, An Appeal to God.  

The Jewish people, as any group would, continued to struggle with their suffering and commitment to God. Where was God in the midst of such pain? The German army saw others struggle with pain of a different kind. Rudolph Hess described it in his testimony:  

“As the firing started, Himmler became more and more nervous. At each volley, he looked down at the ground . . . the other witness was Obergruppenfuhrer von dem Back-Zelewski . . .”  

He commented to Himmler as the soldiers used their weapons to slaughter women and children:

“Those were only a hundred . . . look at the eyes of the men in this commando, how deeply shaken they are. These men are finished for the rest of their lives. What kind of followers are we training here? Either neurotics or savages?” 

Even among the German SS, men who had been trained in the ideological commitment of the Third Reich, killing innocent women and children were damaging their mental health and ruining their “usefulness” as soldiers. The response of Himmler was to slowly end the practice of “personal” killing and to experiment with a variety of ways to conduct mass killings. Never did he consider that the killing of Jews should stop.  

Following the German high command conference at Wannsee (it was at this conference that the final solution to the Jewish question was decided), Himmler and the SS developed Treblinka, which became one of three killing centers in Eastern Poland created as part of Operation Reinhard. Originally a forced labor camp, Treblinka migrated in 1942 to be a mass killing center taking Jewish people deported from the Warsaw Ghetto before its dissolution. The Germans built Treblinka near an important railway junction and it was here, similar to Belzec and Sobibor, that the Germans developed efficient methods of murdering mass numbers of people. The Treblinka killing center was divided into three parts: the reception area, the living area, and the killing area. The living area contained housing for German staff and the guard unit. Small numbers of Jewish males were forced to work the camp while others were taken to the gas chambers. The instructions to the Jews on arrival at the “reception center” went something like this:  

“You are in a transit camp, from which you will be sent to a labor camp. In order to avoid epidemics, you must present your clothing and belongings for immediate disinfection. Gold, money, foreign currency, and jewelry should all be deposited with the cashiers in return for a receipt. They will be returned to you later when you present the receipt. Bodily cleanliness requires that everyone bathe before continuing the journey.”

They were not in transit and the “instructions” were intended only to ensure their compliance before their death. By late 1943, almost a million Jews were exterminated at Treblinka.  

We arrived by bus and gathered by a small dirt road that led into the forest. Treblinka was built to be hidden from public view. We walked about half a mile into the woods and came upon what appeared to be an old railway system with a landing. Nothing of the former camp remained. The Germans destroyed the camp in the late fall of 1943 as the Soviet army began to turn the tide on the eastern front. We walked in silence and stopped to read the signs marking parts of the former camp. One, in particular, caught my eye: “The presented pictures were taken by Kurt Franz, the deputy commandant of the Death Camp Treblinka. They come from the album marked ‘Beautiful Times.’” What could be “beautiful” about a death camp, and how could a human being describe such a place as beautiful? There are no gravestones – only mass graves marked by rocks and stones. The trees and the grass have reclaimed the ground once the scene of unknown suffering a death. Treblinka felt like a place where the earth itself cries out in mourning.  

We stopped to pray and reflect, and finished our visit by reading portions of Shmerke Kaczerginski, from the Literature of Destruction:  

Still, Still, let us be still

Graves grow here.  

Planted by the enemy, 

They blossom to the sky. 

All the roads lead to Ponar,

And none returns.  

Somewhere father disappeared,

Disappeared with all our joy.

Be still, my child, don’t cry my treasure;

Tears are of no avail.

No matter the fury of your tears, 

The enemy will not notice.

Rivers open into oceans, 

Prison cells are not a world,

But to our sorrow, 

There is no end, 

There is no light.

Reflection 4: Museum Culture

Elegy for the Little Jewish Towns

Gone now are, gone are in Poland those little Jewish towns

Hbrubieszow, Karczew, Broady, Falenica

You look for candlelight in the windows

And for song in the wooden synagogue in vain

Vanished the last leftovers, Jewish tatters

Blood was buried by sand, traces were cleared

And walls were lucidly whiten by glaucous lime

. . . 

Gone now are those little towns where the shoemaker was a poet,

The watchmaker a philosopher, the barber a troubadour

Gone are those little towns where the wind joined

Biblical songs with Polish tunes and Slavic rue

Where old Jews in orchards in the shade of cherry trees

Lamented for the holy walls of Jerusalem . . . 

Antoni Slonimski – 1947

It was only a few days into the trip and the weight of this Polish experience was already difficult to manage intellectually, much less emotionally. How could a culture so committed to education and the pursuit of learning create a system that attempted to eliminate the Jewish people? The Reformation began in Germany, and it developed some of Christianity’s most significant theological scholars. It was here that Hegel engaged students in philosophical discussions and Bach wrote great music. Science and industry thrived here, yet everywhere we looked, ordinary Germans participated in the mass slaughter of Jews. How can one explain this?

As we visited Lublin, Kazimierz Dolny and Sandomierz Rabbi Poupko reminded us that we were viewing “museum” culture – the only thing that remained of the Jewish culture that had been an essential part of these communities were a few buildings and cemeteries. At the beginning of World War II, about one-third of the population was Jewish. Today, in that same city, the population is zero. Our visit served to pay tribute to the important role Jews played in these communities over several centuries. Lublin became known for its rabbinic culture, and it was here that Rabbi Meier Shapira opened his legendary Yeshiva – an educational center that provided for the systematic study of the Torah – along with its synagogue. As we walked through the building, the old black-and-white pictures on the wall invited you into the lives of those who were long gone. You could “see” in their eyes the hopes and dreams of generations that sought to build faith and family. It was inside these walls that students were mentored, prayers were offered, and people renewed their faith in God.  

Over the centuries, the Jewish community always had a tenuous relationship with their Gentile/Christian neighbors. Pogroms were common, and the Jews found themselves punished for the alleged crimes of the past. Often scapegoated for the broader community's frustrations, suffering was a common experience for them. We stopped in the small city of Sandomeirz to visit a church. As a Christian, I had heard of “blood libel” but had not paid a great deal of attention to this particular myth. In the Middle Ages, some in the Christian community created a story, which alleged that the Jewish community sought Christian children to sacrifice for Passover. I have to admit that it is hard to give credence to a story like this or to consider that large parts of the community believed it was true.  

In the 17th century, Sandomierz was the scene of at least four blood libel cases where Jewish people were tried and given death sentences for “sacrificing Christian children.” In a Sandomierz Catholic church, a large painting hangs in the nave depicting a Jewish Passover celebration with a dead child at the center of the feast. In the lower corner of the painting, an older Jewish man is depicted recruiting another child for sacrificial use. For more than a century the painting hangs in a prominent location and has been viewed by thousands of parishioners that march out the doors each Sunday. It makes a consistent statement – the Jewish people are “others” and they threaten our children and our community. Although the painting now has a plaque noting its history, after this visit it became easier to imagine how non-Jewish community members embraced the elimination of the Jews.  

Rabbi Poupko introduced us to individuals who made different choices at the risk of their livelihood and their lives. In Krakow, we visited the pharmacy of Tadeusz Pankiewicz, a Polish Roman Catholic who has been recognized by the Yad Vasheem as “Righteous Among the Nations.” Pankiewicz’s pharmacy, Under the Eagle, was within the borders of the newly established Jewish Krakow Ghetto in 1941. Offered the possibility of relocating the pharmacy away from the Jewish community, Tadeusz refused and continued, while the Ghetto existed, to provide essential medications and shelter to Jewish people suffering under Nazi occupation. His pharmacy was near the factory of Schindler, an industrialist who also worked to shelter members of the Krakow Jewish community during the war. Amid great suffering and oppression, some heroes worked to preserve Jewish lives in the Holocaust.

Reflection 5: Dark Places

“Almighty God, Creator of heaven and earth, God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, whose names we have been taught to invoke by your servant Moses in time of distress that you would then be reminded of the covenant with the Patriarchs and Matriarchs to make their children as plentiful and precious as the stars in the sky. We their children stand now in this place known only too well to You. To invoke its name is enough – Auschwitz. More need not be said lest we profane the image of God in which we are created, and lest we turn forever to blasphemy and despair, a turn ever too easy to be taken in this place. Once, long ago, our Father Abraham, first among the sons of men and women to know, You stood at Moriah, now called Jerusalem, and in obedient silence made ready to offer Isaac. Your Angel stayed his hand. No angel in this place save the Angel of Death. Let silence earn silence for we who witness to 6,000,000 Moriahs whose ashes are forever heaped ‘neath Your throne of glory.”  

  

Over the next several days we walked the grounds of Majdanek, Auschwitz, and Birkenau. It is very hard to describe the experience of visiting these places where millions of people were sacrificed on the altar of Nazi ideology. It is one thing to read through the historical details but quite another to hear the cries and suffering of the women and children, in particular, who were slaughtered here. The days were sunny with blistering heat. Each step reminded us that millions suffered here in that same heat and cold. The buildings were poorly insulated, the food was below subsistence level, and the toilet facilities were almost nonexistent. After all, one was not expected to live here.  

  

I am once again reminded of the German soldiers who took pictures and found in them a reason to celebrate their work. How could anyone be so callous? One cannot help but see in the faces, the images of their children, the immense suffering that would have come from the lack of ability to protect them. The pictures continue to haunt me days after coming home.  

The camps were also built near residential communities and close to industrial plants, where “able” Jews worked until they could no longer. The cries of thousands had to be heard within the surrounding area and the captains of the German industrial network knew and participated, at least from a distance, in the slaughter that was taking place. 

As we walked through the camps we saw the material stripped from the Jews by their overlords such as hair, shoes, brushes, and glasses. The Germans saved everything and used much of it in their industrial system. Abraham Sutzkever memorialized the “collection” in his poem, A Cartload of Shoes. A portion of the poem reads:

Where are they, the feet?

The feet from those boots

With buttons like dew – 

And here, where is the body

And there, where is the bride?

Where is the child 

To fill those shoes

Why has the bride 

Gone barefoot? 

Through the slippers and the boots

I see those my mother used to wear

She kept them for the Sabbath

Her favorite pair.

And the heels go tapping:

With a clatter and a din, 

Everything in the camps reminds us of human suffering and the lives that were extinguished by the Nazis. The materials left are insufficient to describe the lives of the Jewish people. In the end, when death comes, our lives cannot be described by what we possess. The possessions perhaps remind us of what we deemed valuable, but it is the character of our being – our souls – that remain and call to memory.

In one of the newer exhibits in Auschwitz, there is a book that houses the names of many of the Jews who lost their lives in the Holocaust – perhaps 30 feet long with four and a half million names in it. The names are in alphabetical order, and I watched as Rabbi Poupko and his family turned to “P” and found more than 80 people who were murdered in the Nazi extermination camps. As they read the list and verbally called out the names, they gave life to their relatives who had suffered and died in this place. That moment, in some ways, felt similar to the time I was in Normandy looking at the thousands of crosses representing soldiers who gave their lives to destroy the Nazi regime. It is a moving experience. The soldiers, of course, gave their lives willingly, while the Jewish names represented those whose lives were taken by the Nazi system. It was a holy moment.  

I have found it difficult to enter the world of poetry. Perhaps it is because of the language and symbolism that sometimes create barriers to complete understanding. But on this trip, I gained a love for poetry. The poetry shared by the Rabbi entered my soul in ways that helped me share the experience of the suffering – it expressed my own pain. Nelly Sachs, a German Jew who escaped the Holocaust and later won the Pulitzer Prize for her work, captured the pain of the death camps in a variety of her poems. I resonated most with O The Night of the Weeping Children:

O the night of the weeping children! 

O the night of the children branded for death!

Sleep may not enter here

Terrible nursemaids 

Have usurped the place of mothers,

Have tautened their tendons with false death,

Sow it on to the walls and into the beams – 

Everywhere it is hatched in the nests of horror.

Instead of mother’s milk, panic suckles those little ones, 

Yesterday Mother still drew

Sleep toward them like a white moon,

There as the doll with cheeks derouged by kisses

In one arm,

The stuffed pet, already

Brought to life by love,

In the other – 

Now blows the wind of dying,

Blows the shift over the hair

That no one will comb again. 

Reflection 6: Final Thoughts

Hear O’ Israel, the Lord our God, The Lord is One.  

I am sitting in Somnium, a Portland-like coffee venue along the Vistula River in Krakow, trying to filter through my experiences of the past week. It's quite warm outside and a thunderstorm lurks on the horizon. People are walking along the river, others pass by in cars – life appears normal. It is certainly true that one cannot live every day in the shadow of deep pain, but on some level, one must come to grips with it. Over the past five days, we have been exposed to the heights of Jewish culture and its darkest moment – the German attempt to rid the earth of the Jewish race. We have walked the grounds of death camps and considered the lives that were destroyed there. My mind cannot grasp it, and I do not understand it. Through Jewish poems, I feel their pain but can in no way share it.  

At the end of our day in Auschwitz, Rabbi Poupko’s son, Chaim, who is also a Rabbi, shared a story to emphasize the importance of the Torah even in the midst of the death camp.  

“Even in Auschwitz Jews tried to keep the Torah. When they were in Auschwitz there was a moment when the Germans did a roll call of the very young men in the camp. The roll calls were common and usually resulted in death for a group of people. In one such case, 1,600 teenage boys were collected for a roll call. The guards placed a cross beam in the center of the ground. If you were taller than the cross beam you were sent one way and if you were shorter you were sent the other. 1,400 shorter boys were placed in the barracks to be eliminated. The father of one of the boys selected knew he could save his son by bribing the Kapo. When he approached the Kapo, the guard told him he could certainly save his son, but the number to be executed had to be the same so someone else would need to be chosen. What should the father do?” 

“When he discovered the cost of what he wanted to do, the father approached the Rabbi in the camp. ‘My only son was in the barracks of the shorter boys, please tell me, can I bribe a Kapo because someone else will have to take his place? But If I save him, someone else will be condemned to death. Can I do this knowing it will cost the life of another? I knew that the law notes that you cannot actively give up your life or actively cause another’s death. But in this case? The question tears my heart to pieces. Rabbi, what can I do?’ The Rabbi deliberated and was troubled himself. Auschwitz is not a normal place! The Rabbi answers back simply with, ‘I do not know.’ I responded, ‘but Rabbi, you would tell me if I could redeem my son and since you have not said I must not. If you cannot answer my question then I must sacrifice my son.’ At that moment I knew how Abraham felt.”

That story haunts me to this day. The German death camps created an environment that no one could even imagine. We can read, and ponder, but the pain remains. Why does such suffering exist in this world that our God has created? I do not have a complete answer, but it does not lead me to reject God. Rabbi Poupko conveyed the story because he wanted us to realize that even in the darkest moments they continued to seek wisdom from God. Their faith was often strained to the breaking point, but the faith of this father who lost his son remained.  

I live with the reality that this world is broken – terribly broken. As we gathered and prepared to depart, one of my colleagues asked, “Rabbi Poupko, we are grateful for your work and that of the Jewish Federation for providing this experience, but what do you hope for us to take away?”  

He answered with a poem:

Our Town is Burning!
by Mordechai Gebirtig

It’s burning! Brothers, it’s burning! Oh, our poor town, alas, is burning! Angry winds with rage are tearing, smashing, blowing higher still the wild flames – all around now burns! And you stand there looking on with folded arms, and you stand there looking on – our town is burning!

It’s burning! Brothers, it’s burning! Oh, our poor town, alas, is burning! The tongues of flame have already swallowed the whole town and the angry winds are roaring – the whole town is burning! And you stand there looking on with folded arms, and you stand there looking on – our town is burning!

It’s burning! Brothers, it’s burning! God forbid, the moment may be coming when our city together with us will be gone in ash and flames, as after a battle – only empty, blank walls! And you stand there looking on with folded arms, and you stand there looking on – our town is burning!

It’s burning! Brothers, it’s burning! Help depends only on you: if the town is dear to you, take the buckets, put out the fire. Put it out with your own blood – show that you can do it! Don’t stand there, brothers, with folded arms! Don’t stand there, brothers, put out the fire – our town is burning…

Amid great suffering, do something, don’t stand there with folded arms!