From Poland to Israel: reveling in nationhood

David Lazarus
The Canadian Jewish News, May 26, 2005

JERUSALEM - March of the Living participants who landed in Israel last week after being in Poland could not kiss the tarmac as in the past because the gleaming new airport connects aircraft directly to the terminal.

But that mattered little. They were more than content, the consensus seemed to be, to kiss the Western Wall, celebrate Israel's 57th birthday with a May 12 March of the Living parade through Jerusalem, and leave behind Poland's relentless drizzle and nightmarish images of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and Majdanek for the glorious sunshine of the Jewish state and the sheer sense of empowerment that came with Jews reveling in their own nationhood.

Poland, many participants said, was a nation obviously struggling to come to grips with its past. The ghosts of three million Polish Jews haunt Poland, a country that was a victim of Nazi oppression, but also one where, as former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir once alleged, the children imbibed anti-Semitism along with their mother's milk.

One evening, marchers in Poland recalled the Polish citizens who risked their lives to save Jews - and such heroes did indeed exist. But so many others, apparently the great majority, either did nothing, looked away or fully supported the persecution of the Jews.

While earnest efforts are underway to revive Jewish life and recognize the legacy of the great Jewish civilization that once existed in Poland - about 20,000 Jews now live there out of a population of 38 million - it remained unclear whether awareness of such initiatives trickle down to the average Pole.

How, some March participants asked, could Poles live literally within metres of Majdanek, which is adjacent to Lublin, opening their apartment windows to see crematoria and gas chambers that look as if they closed down yesterday? How can some Poles take a shortcut path, walking right through that camp, between the mountain of human ashes and the ovens?

"It doesn't get any easier, that's for sure," said Max Eisen, 76, of Toronto, who was liberated in 1945 after surviving a death march. "It's very emotional."

This year, as in the past, the main goal of the March was to have new generations of Jews to bear witness once the survivors are gone, and the primary target was still 16-year-old Jewish high school students. But the scope was more ambitious because of the 60th anniversary of V-E Day. The total Canadian delegation of about 1,000 this year also included university students - Jewish and non-Jewish - young adults, municipal leaders, educators and adults, mostly from Montreal and Toronto, but also from other Canadian cities.

Ask the participants - from the youngest through to the survivors - the effects of the trip, and you got a full range of responses.

Sidney Nemes of Montreal saw the survival of his 75-year-old father, Robert, as a defiant victory over the Germans. "Three thousand years from now, this chain will not be broken," he said within yards of one of the only fragments remaining of the Warsaw Ghetto wall.

At Treblinka, under a canopy of green on an incongruously warm and sunny day, Hebrew University historian Paul Lipps spoke of the "confusion" involved in trying to "make sense" of what took place. He said he started to devote his life to Holocaust memory after seeing a Polish wedding reception on the grounds of Treblinka.

Montreal participant Adelia Bensoussan said she was "horrified by the lack of what I see" at Treblinka, where, in contrast to Majdanek, which remains completely preserved, the site has only stark monuments and a symbolic road of railway ties.

Non-Jewish students Meaghan Lang, 21, of the University of Regina, and Rafi Mustafa, 22, a journalism student at Ryerson University in Toronto, felt the trip gave them much to think about.
"It's been very emotional," Lang said. "It makes you question yourself." Persecution, she said, can start with something as simple as bullying and proceed from there.

Mustafa saw the Holocaust, "not just as Jewish problem, but as a human one."

On the trip as part of a project for a CBC radio documentary, Mustafa said it is vital to transcend the Holocaust's ethnic dimensions by seeing how other communities have also suffered from genocide.
At an event at Warsaw University honoring Righteous Gentiles the last evening in Poland, some Toronto teens told The CJN the trip was difficult but worthwhile.

"There was a lot more pain than I expected," said Melissa Rosenberg, a student at the Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto (CHAT). "When you come here, you really get a feel for what happened. Textbooks only take you so far."

On the other hand, "there wasn't only pain on this trip, there was life, Jews all reaching out together," added Jordana Hart, also 16 and a student at CHAT.

At the ceremony, Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler, in remarks that stirred participants, said the legacy of the March of the Living trip has to translate into action, or the program is nothing more than rhetoric.

At Warsaw's Chopin Airport prior to leaving for Israel, 19-year-old student Zack Nemes, Sidney Nemes' son and a member of the Montreal young adult group led by Rabbi Reuben Poupko, said the ceremony at Warsaw University moved him greatly.

"Back then, Jews had no where to turn," he said. "Now they can go to Israel."

As has always been the case, organizers said, there was no one way young people would react to seeing the places where a whole Jewish life was wiped away in a few years. Some cried many tears, others nary a one. Some were members of the second or third generation of survivors, others had Canadian roots going back generations. Their common bond was their Jewishness and devotion to Israel.

The activities both in Poland in Israel were marked by small, memorable moments:

• At the 200-year-old, now neglected Warsaw Jewish Cemetery (Gensia), non-Jewish students from the Moscow International Film School sang Avinu Malkeinu, shedding tears for children they never knew;
• At the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes designed by Natan Rapaport, a man at one end of the plaza sold ghetto souvenirs to tourists; at the other end, a visiting Lubavitcher from Israel approached visitors asking them to lay tfillin;
• Sharon Levine, co-chair of the Montreal adult delegation, noted how, on the El Al flight to Warsaw, the pilot told the group how important the trip was. "Now we can come and go as we please," he said. "Our ancestors couldn't do that."
• The Sabbath was welcomed at a Kabbalat Shabbat at the Holiday Inn in Warsaw, with students singing and dancing in frenzied joy on top of tables, the boys and girls in competition over who could sing loudest. The noise was deafening, the gestures suggesting: "Here we are, alive Jews, and we will continue to be!" A similar outpouring of emotion took place at the Novotel Hotel, with young people going right out onto the streets.
• At Warsaw's Nozjek synagogue the next morning, which can barely summon a minyan on Shabbat, the shul teemed with visitors from the March. Irwin Cotler sat next to March national co-chair Ralph Lipper. Cotler was given an aliyah. A sefer Torah was donated to the shul, and there was more joyous dancing around the bimah. The only synagogue in Warsaw to survive World War II (there were 70 before the war), it was used by the Nazis to stable horses.
• At Majdanek, March of the Living co-ordinator Shauna Waltman, standing on a windswept monument surrounding the mound of human ashes, read a personal letter from her survivor grandmother, and cried.
• The first day in Jerusalem, in the back of the plaza near the Western Wall, Montrealer John Zentner proposed marriage to Jessica Glazer. She cried, accepted, and their entourage danced mazel tov around them.
• Yom Hazikaron was ushered in at an evening ceremony on the shores of Yam Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) in Tiberias. There were no speeches, only the sombre recitation of the names of those who have died. The audience was quiet. On a rooftop not far away, a security man watched every movement with binoculars.

Every group experienced other such moments.

Noah Kochman, 17, a student at Herzliyah-St. Laurent in Montreal, felt he was given a good "foundation' about the Holocaust and Israel before the trip. But his "emotional connection" came with identifying, not with the six million, but with one.

"I realized that it was best to make an emotional connection with one person and to hold the memories," he said, and then to bring that memory back to other people. "We are the next generation of witnesses."

Montreal survivor Rena Schondorf, who was on her third trip, was accompanied by her husband Mayer, also a survivor. She felt that because this year's group was so large, it was more of a challenge for "bonding" to take place among participants.

She said it's becoming more difficult because the survivor generation is dying off. It still remains an open question, at least to her, whether 20 years from now the message about the Holocaust will be carried by the next generations.

"I hope so," she said.

At a wrap-up session for Toronto participants, co-ordinator Michael Soberman told the group it took him awhile to realize that the March can only serve, most fundamentally, as a tool "to instil a sense of community.

"Our only goal can be to light that spark that exists in every Jew," he said.