2: Arrival.
We made it. It’s nice being with everyone in Poland. Mostly everything from the airport reached its owners without alarm. Our bus and bus driver are nice, and everything has gone smoothly thus far.
Our first stop in Warsaw was the old Jewish cemetery in which Jews from the last two-hundred years are buried. Our main tour guide, Jonti, could not go with us farther than the front of the cemetery because he comes from the Jewish line of priests. He said priests are to be around life rather than death because death no longer can change or improve. The dead have lost the constant change and inner movement of life. Where there is no change, there is no longer life. There is only death, silent as a tomb and still as a stone. The legacies and memories of thousands of those buried are stopped still because all their relatives and friends either were murdered or have forgotten them. The stories of those under many of the graves are buried with the bodies. But some have not been forgotten, for we saw flowers and stones at several graves. Then, there were the mass graves. They are two large patches of grass divided by a path in the middle. Beneath the grass lie the bodies of fifteen to twenty thousand bodies of Jews of the Ghetto uprising and Catholics of the Warsaw uprising. We then moved onto the memorial to children whose lives were taken in the Holocaust. Their memorial was a brick wall with stones at its bottom with candles and photos on them. On each side of the brick wall there are quotes from and about children in the Ghetto and Holocaust. So much potential, just gone. As students, history again shows us how grateful we should be. Finally, out of all the memorials and graves we saw, one among them seemed the most alive. It had been raining when we reached the statue of Janus Korczak, the Polish-Jewish man who ran an orphanage before and during the war until he went with his orphans into the gas chambers at Treblinka. One million children died in the Holocaust. When the rain hit the statue heads of Janus and his orphans, it dripped down their faces over their eyes, making it look as though they were all crying. But Janus’ face looked to be in the most anguish of them all. How could the children know what was coming? They were children, and Janus was the adult to help them to the end. But, I think, Janus was crying not just for his children, but, perhaps, for the vulnerable child inside himself that was afraid to die. May they all rest peacefully in eternity. They and all those victims of the Holocaust are forever now. Fortunately, Janus got to make a statement to the world about its children before he was murdered, but so many others who were murdered have but a legacy of death to the rest of the world. They are stones. They are forever.
After the cemetery, we got lunch at a mall then went to the last remaining synagogue from the World War Two era. All two-hundred-ninety-nine others were destroyed. This synagogue survived because the Nazis used it as stables and storage space during the war. The Rabbi there told us how younger generations are revivifying the Jewish community in Warsaw and elsewhere in Poland. The Rabbi also talked of tolerance and that intolerance is to be stopped when it firsts shows itself in smaller, subtler forms. Cutting off evil at the thought and written or spoken word is how we are to stop it from growing. We must not give evil the fear that it wants. We must starve it. But, before we can combat the evil of the world, we must first see it in ourselves. We must then say yes to the good.
While we were at the synagogue, we picked up a Polish teen that had joined our group out of curiosity and brought him back to the hotel. His name was Łukasz, and he was very nice. He’s seventeen and going to university next year, though he’s not sure of his career path. He and I talked about Polish views on the Holocaust as well as the Communist rule of Poland and its rather shocking political leftovers. People in Poland vote for politicians that are basically communists from that era, and Łukasz showed me how that made the debt increase moment by moment. He said the middle class just wants money from the government and always finds something about which to complain. I told him America has similar problems.
At dinner, one of the chief founders of the Polin Jewish-Polish museum spoke to us as well as a journalist about our reasons for coming to Poland and the history behind the Holocaust and its eventual buildup. People were convinced things wouldn’t get worse, that they would survive, but by the time most saw the truth, they had gone too far into the system to escape. A lot of times, I think we try to tell ourselves that things will not get worse. Unfortunately, ignored problems just have more room to grow. And our problems will grow if we try to push them away. If we do not reach out to a problem first, it will eventually come reaching for us. And by then, its grasp is stronger than it was and maybe stronger than ours. We might be choked to death even. But that is the price of avoiding problems. Let us openly talk as many before us have been unable to do and discuss our problems and those facing the world.