One-third of the population of Warsaw was Jewish when World War II began. By the end of the war, they were nearly all gone.
We walk the path they took at gunpoint: along city sidewalks, past a nursing college that was then a headquarters for the German SS and to a set of train tracks. Here, at the Umschlagplatz, or meeting place, trains of 58 cattle cars each loaded, 100 people to a car. The ride was 2 1/2 hours. It took 1 1/2 hours to kill the prisoners in the first 20 cars. Then the next 20 cars would be unloaded.
Tour participant Lawrence Shuman of Fairfax reads -- and reacts to -- displays at Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.
(Czarek Sokolowski/AP/special For The Washington Post)
|
|
A memorial stands at 18 Mila St., headquarters for the leaders of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. On April 19, 1943, Jewish fighters armed with a few smuggled weapons fought the German army. By May 16, they were crushed. To celebrate Germany's victory over starving men, a commander blew up Warsaw's finest synagogue.
We light candles at the memorial, and Simmons describes the ghetto's lesser-known "spiritual resistance" -- the Jews' quiet battle to maintain dignity and humanity even as they were being treated as beasts.
Ghetto residents waiting for death organized an orphanage and schools. They staged puppet shows for starving children. Simmons tells our group, "They kept faith with your culture up to the very last moment. They struggled against barbarism to their last breath."
We sing the Israeli national anthem, followed by a long silence. Simmons finally breaks it by leading a song she says was sung many a night in the ghetto.
I believe in the coming of the Messiah
Even though he tarries
I believe.
Sewer Scavengers
An elderly survivor recently returned to Warsaw with an odd desire: to find the sewage pipe that ran through the ghetto and came above ground in a Jewish cemetery just outside the ghetto walls. After days of searching in the overgrown cemetery, he found the sewage grate sunk in mud and weeds.
Children small enough to fit into the pipe, Simmons explains, would wade through the sewage from the ghetto end to come up at the cemetery, looking for food. The old man had been one of the sewer scavengers, and he wanted to see it one last time.
Staring at the grate, fellow traveler Judy Frank of Potomac imagines herself both as a child going through the sewer for an onion, and as a mother deciding whether or not to send her children.
"I stand here and feel myself grabbing my mother," she says. "I also feel my children and grandchildren grabbing on to me."
The marble stones and even mausoleums in this cemetery are pushed askew by trees and choked by weeds. Thousands of Jewish cemeteries across Eastern Europe are crumbling and being swallowed up by the earth because there is no one left to care for them.
