By: Keiron O’Connell
In Warsaw. Up at 6:15 am (Paula was up earlier), had breakfast at the hotel. We boarded the bus at 8:00 am and drove to the Umschlagplatz, the final staging area before deportees from the ghetto were loaded on the trains to Treblinka.
We left the Umschlagplatz and began the drive to Treblinka. A 45 minute train ride at the time of the Shoa is a 2-½ hour journey today over narrow country roads through small villages. However, that 45 minute train journey may have taken a day or more under conditions of excruciating suffering. On the way we made a 15 minute pit stop at a McDonalds to relieve and reload. On the bus Avi had everyone introduce themselves. Each of us in-turn paraded to the front of the bus, took the microphone, and told a little something about ourselves. It was an excellent bonding experience and I’m sure began a drawing-together that will only grow in the days to come.
Arrival at Treblinka. Imagine a bucolic country scene under an azure sky with small puffy clouds and bright sunshine. We are in a clearing in the woods. Birds are singing. Otherwise, there is silence and peace. I imagine similar days 75 years ago while half a kilometer distant industrialized mass murder is underway. Children, women and men are being unloaded from rail cars, forced to strip naked, have all body hair shaved by Jewish sonderkommandos, and rushed to their deaths by carbon monoxide poisoning in a gas chamber. Finally, the lifeless bodies are reduced to ashes on pyres, and disposed of in one of 5 pits.
We stop in the small museum to view a model of the site when it was in operation. Avi explains the process, how it functioned.
The murder sight was dismantled by the barbarian Nazis after the final transports from the Warsaw ghetto had been “liquidated” to eliminate the evidence. Such horror could not be hidden. After the war the site was converted into a memorial by the Communist government. Enormous symbolic railway ties lead the way to the disembarkation point where the rail cars disgorged their human cargo. Then, a line of standing stones, seven of them, memorialize the countries from where the victims came, Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, Yugoslavia, U.S.S.R., Belgium. These stones usher the witness to venture further along a cobbled road into a field of thousands more standing stones, naming the individual towns and villages of origin of more than 800,000 murdered Jews. In the center-front stands a colossal stone structure, almost Megalithic in nature and scope. Maybe an ancient Stonehenge, but not designed to catch the solstice light, more to reveal the darkness that can afflict the human soul. Maybe a symbolic pyre to record the sacrifice of innocents. Whatever, this is a place of unrequited evil, and only that. We come to witness and remember and to re-commit. What is done cannot be undone. The suffering that happened here can not retracted, the evil done never forgiven.
We gather around Howard Chandler as he tells us of the taking of his mother and younger brother to Treblinka to be murdered. He tells of how, by stealth and luck, he escaped their fate, and with his father survived to be used as slave labor. We then stand with him at the stone that lists the name of his town of origin and recite together the Kaddish. Finally, we regather for a memorial service conducted by the students and teachers. We try to connect with heaven, from the entrance to hell. Truly, “Out of the depths we cry to you oh Lord”.
I leave bemused. My psyche cannot take this in. A blessing! Who would want such understanding. Who could carry the burden of such knowledge.
Silently we return to our bus in the parking lot, and lunch.
We return to Warsaw. On the way the bus driver takes a wrong turn and we, literally, come to the end of the road. A couple of miles in reverse and we get back on track. First to the site of Mila 18 , now just a mound of earth, and the story of Mordecai Anielewicz and the ghetto uprising. Then to the incongruous monument to the uprising with its strange images and ignorance of the part played by female fighters. Rushing now, we hasten to the synagogue where a bright young Rabbi expounds on the state of the Jewish community of Poland, and a brief appearance is made by the Chief Rabbi.
Exhausted, we return to the hotel, shower, change, re-charge briefly, and leave for dinner.