The final day of our journey began by visiting the Umschlagplatz. This was the square at which all the selections and deportations of the Warsaw ghetto took place, all there is today of it is a wall with the symbolic first names of all those who would have been sent to their death from there.
From the Umschlagplatz we followed the route that they took to Treblinka, a death camp which was completely destroyed by the Nazis when it was no longer needed. In contrast to Majdanek, Treblinka is located deep inside a forest, hidden away from view. This camp had one purpose: To murder as many people as possible in as little time as can be. The plan of the camp made it plain that it was built for maximum efficiency. We walked from the busses through the forest to where there are large stones depicting the route of the train as it came in. Trains were 60 carriages long and they would take 20 in at a time, once all those inside were gasses, they would take the next set of 20, then the last set.
Today there is nothing there of the camp. Instead, there are about 17,000 stones of various shapes and sizes scattered around the fields, each one with the name of the hometown or village that the victims came from. Zoe told us there about her family’s story, next to one of the stones. We then had a final discussion on what we all felt and learnt throughout our time in Poland.
We then returned to Warsaw to walk along the Path of Remembrance, a walk through the former ghetto marked by 16 granite blocks commemorating those who lived and died in the ghetto and the extermination camps. Each one of the blocks has inscriptions in three languages (Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish) and remembers the more than 450,000 Jewish people that were killed in the Ghetto during 1940-43. The monuments are simple, not only by reminding us of the suffering that occurred during that time but also of the spirit which allowed people to demonstrate their freedom even in the face of death.
We stopped off at two points along the route. The first was Mila 18, the monument which marks the spot from where the Uprising was co-ordinated. This was the address where Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of the Uprising, had his headquarters. On the day that the bunker was attacked, there were about 300 people inside, about 100 of whom died from the attack, the rest fleeing or giving themselves up.
The second site we stopped off at was the memorial to Szmul Zygielbojmwas, a Jewish-Polish socialist politician, leader of the Bund, and a member of the National Council of the Polish government in exile. During the war, he travelled to the US and England to try and convince their governments of what was happening in Europe to the Jews. After much talk and no action on the side of the Allies, he finally heard the news of the Ghetto Uprising, and also that his wife Manya and 16-year-old son Tuvia had been killed there. He committed suicide to protest the indifference of the Allied governments in the face of the Holocaust. In his suicide letter, he stated that while the Nazis were responsible for the murder of the Polish Jews, the Allies also were culpable. The monument is made up of three elements: an image of faceless people, a broken stone in front of the memorial, and an inscription in Polish and Yiddish. The engraved words are an unfinished sentence excerpted from Zygielbojm's suicide letter: "I cannot stay silent and I cannot live while the remnants of the Polish Jewry are dying...”
Finally, we moved to our final stop of our Poland journey. We walked to the Rappaport memorial, the famous Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, erected in 1948 as a tribute to those who fought and died in the ghetto. We sat and summed up our experiences before the last tekes took place in front of the monument. After the tekes, we sang Hatikva before boarding the busses to the airport.
The ride from Warsaw to Prague was interesting, as we were given our own tiny plane which even had propellers! We could feel every bump and jolt and were quite relieved to get back on land… The second leg from Prague to Tel Aviv was thankfully a bigger plane and really uneventful. Finally, we landed in Israel, thankful to be back and exhausted from an emotionally and physically draining journey.
The group had an amazing time and all expressed how fortunate they felt at the opportunity to go and visit these important sites. We talked about how we all have a duty to bear witness to the events of the past and it is up to each and every one of us to do our bit to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Part of this is strengthening our Jewish identity. Whereas Hitler envisaged a world free of Jews, our presence here today is testament to the strength of the Jewish people. At various sites, some of the group were wearing the Israeli flag, in a demonstration of triumph that Hitler did not succeed in wiping out the Jewish nation. 65 years ago, the Jews were forced to wear the Star of David. Today, we can do so out of choice, as a badge of honour, a symbol of pride.
Am Yisrael Chai!
Dion
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