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More than a graveyard
By Haim Shapiro
The Jewish Post Newspaper
January 27, 2002 - 14 shevat
5762
www.jpost.com JewishWorld
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A square in Warsaw's Old
Town, where painters set out their easels.
(PRS/Andrzej Multanowski Warszawa)
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In the last of a series about
his roots trip to eastern Europe, Haim Shapiro discusses
how he found Poland to be not only a place to remember
Jewish suffering, but a pleasant, modern country worth
visiting. The weather is perfect, the town is beautiful,
the crowds are happy, only we are miserable.
We have arrived at Kazimierz Dolny, a town with a rich
Jewish past, on a perfect fall day, with clear sunlight,
highlighted by puffs of clouds giving a jewel-like appearance
to the fall trees.
There is a holiday atmosphere with hundreds of visitors
in the town square and the surrounding streets. Initially,
we are delighted, but when we begin to search for a
room for the night, we realize that the hustle and bustle
has its downside.
We start at the few local hotels, then walk along a
street lined with pensions, knocking at one door after
another. There does not seem to be a spare bed anywhere
in the town.
I consider myself a pretty resourceful traveler but
sometimes, when things seem to be at their worst, I
realize that it takes greater talents than mine. When
someone shakes their head and says they can't help me,
I go away.
For my wife, Francine, that is only the beginning of
a conversation. I tell her that she must find us a room
for the night. I point out two young men standing at
the entrance to one of the town's many galleries. Try
them, I tell her.
It works. The young men say they don't know of any place.
Since we don't go away, they then come up with a telephone
number we might try. But as we talk, we notice that
there is another man standing nearby, a picturesque
fellow with a cap and an elegantly trimmed beard. For
a few moments he stands and listens to our conversation,
then he cuts in.
'Excuse me. Would you like to stay in my home?' he asks,
in the slightly formal manner that educated Poles have
when addressing strangers.
Without hesitation, we tell him that we would be delighted.
Only as he leads us off do we realize that we have no
idea what kind of accommodation he is offering or at
what price. But the room, when we see it, is perfect.
Located behind the main house, it has its own entrance
and an adjoining bath. The price is embarrassingly modest.
Best of all, the owner, Franciszek Kmita, is an artist.
His paintings fill the room. Usually, I am uneasy when
an artist shows me his paintings, but these I genuinely
like. Over the bed is a large landscape of the town.
The synagogue, he says, is right here, in the front
center. He tells us that the town has been a favorite
retreat for artists even before the war, when most of
the residents were Jews.
We are visiting Poland as part of what is conventionally
known as a 'roots trip', visiting the places our families
have come from in Cracow, northwest Ukraine, and southern
Belarus.
Having returned to Warsaw from Minsk, we now feel free
of family obligations and are acting like ordinary sightseers,
but still we feel a need to seek out Jewish sites. Poland,
especially after the former Soviet Union, seems like
a breath of fresh air.
The country is easy to visit. Public trans-port is convenient
and cheap. There are plenty of coffee shops and Internet
cafes. It has all the convenience of Western Europe
at Eastern European prices. Along with that, landscapes
and towns are beautiful.
However, Kazimierz Dolny is not just a picturesque town
on the banks of the Visla River, it is a town that was
mostly Jewish for hundreds of years. Today, there are
no Jews to be seen.
Kmita is well aware of the Jewish past of the town,
and he tells us about it as he leads us to his studio
to offer us a drink of local brandy. His wife, Elizabet,
herself an art historian, hurries off to provide us
with linens and towels. She turns on the heat in the
room and the water heater for the shower.
When we saunter back to the main square a few moments
later, the town seems to have taken on a friendlier,
more intimate, atmosphere. As we sit outside at one
of the cafes on the main square, our landlord passes
and we greet him like old friends.
Kazimierz Dolny is named for Kasimir the Great, the
14th-century Polish king who extended the rights of
Jews in Poland. The king is said to have had a beautiful
Jewish mistress, Esterka, for whom he built a castle
nearby. A majority of the population was Jewish until
World War II.
We wander through the narrow streets near the market,
once the Jewish quarter, and admire the exterior of
the synagogue, which is closed. During the Communist
period, the synagogue served as the local cinema.
One former visitor even recalls that when an Israeli
group arrived, the film was stopped and the audience
was asked to leave while the group viewed the interior.
Now, we are told, the structure has been returned to
the Polish Jewish community, although there is hardly
any Jewish presence in the town.
Despite this, it is a popular destination for Jewish
tourists and groups of young people. We see some in
the market square, which stretches down from a small
but picturesque wooden building that was once the kosher
slaughterhouse and now houses a number of antique shops.
Nearby is the town square, its Renaissance homes evidence
of the economic importance of the town as a trade center
in former times. One building on the square, we are
told, has been restored to its former Jewish owners,
a wealthy family who escaped to Sweden during the Holocaust.
It is almost by chance that we discover the most moving
Jewish remains in the town, in the local museum, located
in a gabled 16th-century building facing onto a stream.
There is a small collection of Jewish ceremonial objects,
but these are not extraordinary.
Far more moving for me is a small room on an upper floor,
where the works of about a dozen artists are displayed.
The artists were born in different years, but they all
have the same date of death - 1942. Some of the names
are clearly Jewish and others less so. Their paintings
reflect a variety of styles and subject matter, but
it is clear why they have all been grouped together.
Only some of the paintings have recognizable Jewish
figures but when they do, the figures are not the stilted
depictions of rabbis that one sees in the souvenir shops.
The painters may have been killed, but the paintings
are full of life.
It is at times like this that I reflect on the fact
that we have come to Poland to enjoy ourselves. For
many Israelis, Poland is only a country of death camps
and anti-Semites. I am aware of the tragedy, as when
I see the paintings of the murdered artists, and I am
aware of Polish anti-Semitism, although everywhere we
have gone here, our reception has been warm and welcoming.
In Israel, when people speak of the Poles as anti-Semites,
I point out that hardly any of the nations of Europe,
including those of countries that are favorite destinations
for Israelis, have a particularly clean record when
it comes to the period of the Holocaust. I am also reminded
of the words of our Jerusalem neighbor, Hava, who was
born in Warsaw and who stressed the beauty of the country
and the warmth of the people.
For every Jew who survived, she told us, five Christian
Poles risked their lives.
One of the reasons for the view of Poland as one giant
death camp is that it is the destination for Israeli
high-school groups who come to experience the sites
of the Holocaust. Our children, too, have been on these
organized trips to Poland and, like others, they returned
a bit more mature in their outlook.
But, at the same time, among the vast spectrum of impressions
and experiences, some of which have been very sobering,
they also had a good time. The same seems to be true
of the hundreds of Israeli youngsters we see at Warsaw's
sole remaining synagogue on a Friday night.
It would be difficult to imagine a more heterogeneous
gathering of Israeli youth. There are boys with studs
through their lips and boys with pudding-bowl kippot
and tzitziot, girls with bare midriffs and girls with
high necks and long skirts. Unfortunately, there seems
to be little communication or interaction between the
two groups.
At one point, the religious boys get up and dance spiritedly
in a circle, while the secular youth look on with bemused
expressions. The rabbi makes an attempt to make the
service comprehensible to those who are unfamiliar with
it by announcing page numbers and giving a brief explanation
of some of the prayers.
This atmosphere, Jewish residents of Warsaw say, is
characteristic of the times when the Israeli groups
come.
'When the Israelis come, it's a circus. The rest of
the year this is a normal synagogue', he says.
One reason the Israelis have such an impact is that
they always come in large numbers and outnumber the
members of the small Warsaw Jewish community. That is
because the groups have extensive security arrangements,
complete with guards, and they schedule the visits with
many groups at the same time.
We encounter several of the Israeli groups again at
Tykocin, a village 40 kilometers west of Bialystok in
northeastern Poland, which has a restored 17th-century
synagogue. To get there, we have stayed over in Bialystok,
itself once a major Jewish center but which now has
little to recall the Jewish presence. The sole remaining
synagogue building has been restored as a commercial
office building, with only a plaque to indicate its
original function.
There are, however, several monuments to Ludwik Zamenhof,
a Jew born in Bialystok, who was the creator of Esperanto,
which he proposed as a universal language. Based on
mostly Latin roots with a simplified grammar, Esperanto
represents just one of the many ways in which many of
the Jews of Eastern Europe reacted to oppression and
persecution by promoting brotherhood and understanding.
Today the office of the local Esperanto association
is located in the former synagogue building.
While in Bialystok, we search in vain for the bialy,
a flat onion roll commonly found in New York Jewish
bakeries. We can only assume that, like many American
Jewish delicacies, this too has evolved in the US rather
than in 'the old country.'
We take a public bus from Bialystok to Tykocin, together
with a group of about 20 high-spirited Polish high-school
students, kept more or less in line by two teachers.
They, too, are bound for the synagogue, we discover.
After one outburst of noise, one of the teachers gives
the young people a stern speech from which I only recognize
one word, 'gentlemen.' They are, I think, very much
like their Israeli peers.
The synagogue itself is large and impressive, with a
high lectern, surrounded by the synagogue's four supporting
pillars. The walls are covered with the painted texts
of prayers.
However, I am most moved by the modest display in what
once the women's section, where one can see everyday
household and ritual objects and photographs that had
been left behind by the Jewish residents. My attention
focuses on a simple pair of brass candlesticks, and
I find myself wondering about the former owners and
their fate.
It is this pair of candlesticks that brings home to
me the tragedy of Polish Jewry far more than any monument,
or even the display at the Jewish Historical Institute
in Warsaw, where there is a well-documented and extensive
exhibit on the Warsaw Ghetto.
It is there that I realize that in the first period
after the Jews were forced into the ghetto by the Nazis,
life had gone on almost as normal. There were even,
I discovered to my surprise, two functioning Roman Catholic
churches in the ghetto, with some 1,700 communicants.
In the end, the ghetto was reduced to rubble as almost
all of the rest of Warsaw was to be a few years later.
Today, the former ghetto is filled with modern apartment
blocks. The monument to Mordechai Anielewicz, with its
super-heroic figures, is in a park where mothers walk
with baby carriages and people exercise their dogs.
Another monument, at the point where Jews were sent
off to the extermination camps, is on a busy street
with cars whizzing past. Neither moves me.
It is only at the Jewish cemetery of Warsaw, curiously
enough, that we find a living link with Warsaw's Jewish
past.
The cemetery is overrun with greenery. Indeed, the many
trees threaten the very existence of the tombstones
but, at the same time, they seem to cast a protective
canopy over both the graves themselves and the visitors.
Here, one may find the resting places of thousands of
simple Jews and many of prominence, their tombstones
reflecting the way they lived.
There are tombstones in traditional style, with long
Hebrew inscriptions, and those inscribed only in Polish,
as well as some in Russian or German. There are the
resting places of bankers and socialists, writers and
actors, scholars and political leaders, rabbis and secularists.
One which we notice is that of Ludwik Zamenhof, with
an inscription in Esperanto.
Later, the director of the cemetery invites us to have
a glass of tea with him. He wants to bring a message
to the Jews of Israel and to the world. Curiously, for
a cemetery director, it is a message of life and not
one of death.
Tell them, he says, that they should
come to Poland, but they should do so to celebrate a
thousand years of Jewish life here, and not just tragedy
and destruction.
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