Every time I travel I have the odd sensation of feeling like a stranger in a strange new place–especially when I don’t know the language. There is always a lurking feeling somewhere in my gut of a certain non-belonging, a visceral voice in my head shouting “What are you doing here? You should go home–even though if you do you’ll want to leave, you KNOW home. Better surely, to stick with the Devil you know, even if it kills you.”
I felt this today as we landed in Warsaw, but fortunately, I’m able to block out the voice in my head until it silences itself. I can’t help, however, but think that, for a trip like this, the voice might be somewhat apropos. If there is one thing I come to understand every time I’m in Israel, it is that notion of Jewish nationhood–and the fact that such a nation of nomads has always felt like a stranger in a strange new place, never fully at home in whatever modern Mitzrayim it has found itself. And yet there is something comfortable about the discomfort, something familiar, something that the Jewish people know. It’s home, after all, even if it’s not always ideal.
This, according to the tour guide with whom I recently interacted at Yad Vashem, explains the reluctance of the 1930s-1940s era Jews in Germany and especially Poland, to leave before the Holocaust: even when things get bad, Warsaw, or Krakow, or Berlin, or Hamburg, or wherever thine might live, is home. It’s uncomfortable, sure, but it’s a known sort of uncomfortable. And this is better, surely, than the alternative.
Of course, history tells us that nothing is further from the truth.