Auschwitz and Treblinka cast a jarring shadow over any Jew’s trip to Poland. There’s no sidestepping it. Visit the memorial sites and the heart sinks, the stomach tightens.
Under blue skies, the infrastructure of death at Auschwitz II–Birkenau, preserved for posterity, evokes an incredulous numbness. The empty green fields of Treblinka, dotted with monuments, appear placid. But when our guide narrates, it chills the marrow.
I’ve visualised these two camps in morbid sepia for most of my life and the terminus of human morality they represent. Auschwitz was a destination so evil that it caused some religious Jews to question the existence of a Divine presence in the universe.
But am I better off for having trodden the wretched terrain of the death factories? I’ve asked myself that question over and over. Returning to Melbourne, I’ve mulled it over with communal figures and friends in our “shtetl”, one of the most emphatic Polish Jewish émigré communities in the world.
Our media study mission of Jewish Poland in September, organised by the Polish government – nuanced, forward-looking and candid – can’t help but sit beneath that Holocaust shadow. More than three million Polish Jews – over half of all Jews who perished – were murdered on Polish soil.
Polish officialdom is at pains to emphasise that the Holocaust was perpetrated on occupied Poland by Nazi Germany. That does not mean there isn’t a frankness about Poles who aided and abetted the mass-murder of the Jews. But there’s also an emphasis on Poles who hid and protected Jews, some paying with their own lives.
The narrative wars among Poles about their WWII history, as with many national debates, have become mired in politics. For the 2015-23 right-wing government of the Law & Justice Party, deflecting accusations of Polish complicity in the Shoah became a matter of patriotism. It’s no secret that outspoken dissenters were removed from communal posts in which the government has leverage.
A controversial statute criminalising public claims that Poles were complicit in the Holocaust was passed but never enacted, after fierce criticism from Israel. The moderate government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk has taken a far lower profile.
But beyond the gates of the death camps stands a millennium of Jewish life, as showcased at the impressive POLIN Museum in Warsaw, which opened in 2014. Its 10th anniversary is the milestone around which our media mission has been constructed.
We tour its core exhibition, designed by chief curator Professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. It’s a cavalcade stretching from the General Charter of Jewish Liberties in 1264, through the growth of Poland as a state under its benevolent 14th century monarch Kazimir, as a haven for Jews fleeing persecution in western Europe. By the mid-16th century, 80 per cent of the world’s Jews lived in Poland, some holding prominent roles in society.
In 1632, antisemitic books were prohibited.
But history soured. The Khmelnytsky Cossack rebellion slaughtered 65,000 Jews. Poland was partitioned by its neighbours. Yet by 1897, Poland had 1.3 million Jews – 14 per cent of its population. In the early 20th century, Warsaw’s cinemas, theatres, bookshops and cafes beat to a Yiddish pulse unparalleled in the world. The Bund was thriving. One in 10 Poles was Jewish. Life barrelled on energetically towards its unknown appointment with the apocalypse.
The exhibition’s portrayal of the post-WWII period is not yet complete, and a final phase is under development, detailing the Polish émigré experience in destinations including Australia.
We are fortunate to be visiting POLIN while a special exhibition is staged. Titled (Post) Jewish: Shtetl Opatow, the paintings of the late Mayer Kirshenblatt, created in the 1990s at the urging of his daughter Professor Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, portray life in his village early last century. It’s an exhibition of yearning for a vanished world.
In its 10th year, the museum is thriving. Under the banner of “Mir zenen do (We are here)”, inspired by the wartime Partisan Song, the celebration event rings with speeches from Polish dignitaries, messages from Yad Vashem chair Dani Dayan and World Jewish Congress president Ronald Lauder.
Historian Marian Turski, 98-year-old survivor and vice-president of Poland’s Jewish Historical Institute (JHI), describes the POLIN as a catalyst for some Poles who, after Nazism and Communism, have discovered a hidden Jewish heritage.
There’s a silence for Polish-born Israeli historian Alex Dancyg, murdered in the October 7 Hamas attacks. The anniversary event has drawn attendees from around the world. Among them is Eva Hussain of the Australian Society of Polish Jews and their Descendants (ASPJ). Raised in Melbourne, philanthropist Irene Kronhill-Pletka, an avid supporter of New York Jewish research organisation, the YIVO Institute, is a POLIN benefactor.
Indeed, global Jewry has a big stake, says Rabbi Michael Shudrich, Chief Rabbi of Poland. In an interview with The AJN, he greets Jews of Polish descent in Australia. “This is also your museum. You should come and visit and if you can’t visit, you should check it out online. We need to hear from you, we need to be involved together.”
We visit the JHI, Poland’s repository of documented Jewish history. Its director Michal Trebacz and Michal Majewski, CEO of the umbrella organisation, Association of the JHI in Poland, visited Australia this year. Among its units is a documentation department, where Jews can trace their genealogy. ASPJ president Ezra May uncovered eight generations of his family back to 1730.
The JHI houses the Ringelblum Archive, a collection of 35,000 documents amassed inside the Warsaw Ghetto by historian Emanuel Ringelblum, murdered in the Shoah. He founded Oyneg Shabbes, a clandestine group which was determined that the ghetto’s history would be told by the victims, not the perpetrators.
White-gloved archivists show us the collection that Oyneg Shabbes hid away – a part of which is now featuring in the Melbourne Holocaust Museum’s Underground exhibition, the first time the archive has left Europe. Children’s drawings, typewritten testimonies, SS notices proclaiming punishment by death for violations large and small, confront the eye. A metal box, which contained some of the hidden documents, is enshrined in its own small room.
Unearthed in 1946, the first box was brought to the Bersohn and Bauman Children’s Hospital where paediatrician Dr Janusz Korczak treated children dying of starvation. In August 1942, Korczak refused to remain behind when the Nazis transported almost 200 children from his orphanage to Treblinka, where he died with them.
The hospital site is the location of a Warsaw Ghetto Museum (WGM), due to open in 2027. One of the containers of Ringelblum documents discovered in the postwar years will feature there. On loan from the JHI, the box will serve as a symbolic juncture to multiple galleries – on occupation, ghettoisation, everyday life, and Nazi Aktion Reinhard and its transports to Treblinka and Majdanek. On April 19, 1943, it triggered the Jewish uprising.
The museum, authorised by the Polish government in 2017, is being built with cooperation from the JHI and POLIN, says WGM director Albert Stankowski in a briefing. Katarzyna Person, WGM deputy director, exhibition programming, says large windows with views of today’s Warsaw will be juxtaposed with life-sized photographs of the city in WWII, a stark link to the city’s dark past. The Ringelblum Archive is central to the museum, says Person, because it “unearthed the voices of people who would otherwise now be silent”.
On a tour of the former ghetto, west of the River Vistula, we visit the last remnant of the ghetto wall. Elsewhere a sign for Krochmalna Street evokes memories of acclaimed Yiddish literary figure Isaac Bashevis Singer, who lived at Number 10 before emigrating to the US in 1935.
The graves in the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery on Okopowa Street span centuries, with inscriptions in Hebrew and later in Polish. Many headstones stand askew in a forest whose tree roots now threaten them. Witold Wrzosinski, pioneer of Poland’s Foundation for Documentation of Jewish Cemeteries, relates his struggle with conservationists opposing the removal of some trees.
We encounter a field of hewn rocks, the mass-grave of nameless Jewish victims from the ghetto. The Nazis executed many within the cemetery itself.
In Krakow, a few hours south of Warsaw, the narrow streets survived WWII intact. The city could not look more different to Warsaw and its broad Soviet-era boulevards and faux-retro architecture, rebuilt from the rubble of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.
The Jewish Community Centre (JCC) of Krakow is vibrant. A banner for the October 7 hostages greets us. (Poles have had a muted response to the Gaza war, unlike in western Europe, or indeed, Australia and the US. Pro-Palestine signage is rare).
Photos: Peter Kohn
JCC executive director Jonathan Ornstein, a transplanted New Yorker, briefs us on his Krakow community, numbering 25,000. There’s been an influx of more than 200 Jewish arrivals from neighbouring Ukraine since the start of the Russian war. The JCC offers daily essentials for Ukrainian refugees of all backgrounds.
Ornstein emphasises the centrality of Poland to the Jewish world, noting the prevalence of Polish-descended Jews in Melbourne, where he visited in 2016, and that 75 per cent of American Jews claim Polish heritage.
In fashionable Kazimierz, south of downtown, we see hipster bars and galleries interspersed with restaurants offering “Jewish-style” cuisine. But it’s not a Jewish haunt. Some describe the local trade as “Jewish style without Jews”.
Not far from Kazimierz stands a memorial site to the Nazi slave labour camp of Plaszow. Nearby is a former enamel factory where German industrialist Oskar Schindler sheltered some 1100 Jews as workers. Photographs of the rescued Jews adorn the windows. Among them are musician brothers, the late Leo and Henry Rosner of Melbourne. At Plaszow, Leo was forced to play his accordion for notorious commandant Amnon Goeth. But the brothers would live to entertain at simchas in Australia.
Young Poles today are curious about Jews. Some are fascinated. Polish school students care for Jewish cemeteries. Academics, such as Ewa Wegrzyn, Ruth Magdalena and Karolina Koprowsca, who we meet at the Institute of Jewish Affairs in Krakow’s Jagiellonian University, specialise in Jewish history and Yiddish. The Jewish millennium portrayed at POLIN has ended, but green shoots persist.
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