Krakow Gets First Rabbi Since Holocaust
I found this story on Jewishgen ( http://lyris.jewishgen.org/listmanager). A subsequent story (http://www.forum-znak.org.pl/index-en.php?t=przeglad&id=1471) notes the existence of a rabbi in Krakow from 1997-2004.
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By Associated Press
October 17, 2005, 9:42 PM EDT
WARSAW, Poland -- The first rabbi to serve Krakow full-time since the Holocaust took up his post Monday, a mission that includes guiding a revival of Jewish life and helping people rediscover their Jewish heritage forgotten during the decades of communism.
Rabbi Avraham Flaks, a 38-year-old Russian-born Israeli, has been getting to know members of Krakow's small Jewish community over the past few weeks, but officially took up his duties with an evening prayer service marking the start of the weeklong festival of Sukkot.
Michael Freund, chairman of the Shavei Israel organization sponsoring Flaks' work, said he hopes the new rabbi will be able to "keep the flame of Judaism alive" in a city whose rich, centuries-old Jewish community was nearly wiped out during the Holocaust.
There are about 200 people registered with the community, but an estimated 1,000 Jews are believed to live in Krakow -- most of them people who only recently discovered their Jewish roots following the fall of communism in 1989, Freund told The Associated Press.
There are "quite a number of people who have gone through these experiences, suddenly learning that they were born Jews," Freund said. "Many don't know what to do with that information, what to make of it, what role it should play in their lives."
During the communist era, some Jews hid their religious identities, even from their children, to avoid discrimination. Many fled the country in 1968, following a government-sponsored anti-Semitic campaign.
This article originally appeared at:
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-poland-krakow-rabbi,0,7806208.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines
from the Chronicle, 8/12/05
The Chronicle of Higher Education
August 12, 2005, Friday
Raising Markers of Memory
BYLINE: SARA LIPKA
With toppled gravestones overgrown by more than 60 years of shrubs and weeds, a meadow outside the small village of Lunna, Belarus, was barely recognizable as a historic Jewish cemetery. This summer 19 students from Dartmouth College hauled away brush and righted headstones to restore the sacred landmark.
The cemetery was abandoned during the Holocaust when Jews were deported from Lunna to the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Treblinka. Most of them were killed, and none who survived returned to Lunna.
The Dartmouth students -- half of whom are Jewish -- prepared for Project Preservation, which is in its fourth year, by studying genocide. They also searched historical archives for any record of Lunna, and two students flew to Chicago to meet with Alan Welbel, an Auschwitz survivor who was born in the village.
In June the group traveled to Belarus, where, working with Rabbi Edward S. Boraz of Dartmouth and with Belarus's State Committee on Religions and Nationalities, the project has restored three other villages' cemeteries. In Lunna the students and their host families cleared undergrowth, erected a wrought-iron fence, and righted and cleaned more than 100 headstones dating from 1825 to 1938.
"We kept discovering more and more underneath the grass in the dirt," says Lydia J. Gensheimer, a history major who served as the project leader. Among the discoveries were gravestones bearing the name Welbel.
As their week of work wore on, rows of headstones began to form, making the meadow look like a cemetery again, says Ms. Gensheimer. Each stone righted was "kind of like bringing a person back to life," she says.
Miami Herald commentary: Death camp visit shows the worst of humanity
My response was printed on the Miami Herald website.
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BY LEONARD PITTS, lpitts@herald.com
KRAKOW, Poland -- The concentration camp is around the corner from a McDonald's. It is up the hill from a Shell station and next door to an apartment complex.
Plaszow -- that's the name of it -- was immortalized in Schindler's List. Oskar Schindler plucked hundreds of doomed Jews from this place and gave them shelter in his factory. If you saw the movie, you remember the house from which commandant Amon Goeth shot Jews for target practice. It's still here. Standing near it, you can hear the squeal of children in the apartment house playground.
I don't know what I expected a concentration camp to be when I joined 24 other people on this ''interfaith pilgrimage'' to Polish Holocaust sites, but I didn't expect this. I didn't expect the place where human beings were enslaved, tortured and killed to be within sight of a warehouse superstore.
I ask our guide, Chris Huszczanowski, if all this development around the camp is new, something that has happened since the war. No, he says. This was always an urban area.
I had supposed a murder camp would be far from civilization, tucked into some dark, wooded place where its grisly business could be conducted in secrecy. It's a misconception that is, I now realize, first cousin to a misconception many Americans have about the lynchings of African Americans in the years between the Civil War and the civil rights movement. Many of us imagine those killings to have been done in shadow by a few depraved individuals. But the truth is, they were promoted by newspapers, memorialized by photographers and attended by women, children and men who acted as if they were going to the county fair.
In other words, people knew.
The same is true of the Polish people and the murdered Jews. How could they not know? The main camp of Auschwitz is across the street from a strip mall. From the guard tower at Auschwitz-Birkenau, you can see private homes. Majdanek is on a busy street, Belzec in a residential neighborhood. It is said that during the war, a little boy climbed a tree overlooking Belzec and drew ghastly, ghostly pictures of what he saw.
''It's such a funny thing,'' says Joe Engel, a 77-year-old Holocaust survivor who is with the pilgrimage group. ``People say they didn't know. All the camps were so close to the city. How could they not know? You could smell the ashes, the flesh.''
At this point, the people of Poland would want you to know a couple of things. The first is that they were a conquered nation. These camps were set up on Polish soil, yes. But they were set up by Germans. The second is that many Poles risked fortune and life to help the Jews. Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust education and commemoration group, maintains a list -- The Righteous Among Nations -- of non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. More than a quarter of the 20,757 now on the list were Polish, a higher proportion than from any other nation. All this is a matter of record.
But it is also a matter of record that many Poles collaborated, cooperated, pretended not to see, betrayed runaway Jews, happily joined in acts of mass murder.
Still, the question here isn't, ''What's wrong with them?'' It is, rather, ``What's wrong with us?''
Because this is not a Polish failing, but a human one. What is it about seeing some poor and bedraggled Other being mistreated that brings out the beast in us? Why does cruelty so readily beget more cruelty? How is it that the barbarism of others so readily gives license to our own worst impulses, so rarely encourages our best?
You always like to think you would do better somehow, do the right thing, regardless.
To be here is to question that smug assurance. It is to wonder: Who would I really be in the moment of decision? Would I be who I've always hoped, someone large and brave? Or would I be someone smaller, more niggardly and scared?
To be here is to realize that you don't know. And to hope you never learn.
two stories from the Boston Globe
July 3, 2005,
CELEBRATING PASSAGE TO FREEDOM: SURVIVOR, LIBERATOR MEET 60 YEARS AFTER CONCENTRATION CAMP RESCUE
By Deborah Fineblum Raub, Globe Correspondent
Frederick Grasso of Framingham and Henry Lefman of Wellesley live just a few miles apart.
Over the past 50 years, they could have bumped into each other any number of times and paid no notice, neither realizing that they had crossed paths at a moment that forever changed both their lives.
On May 6, 1945, Grasso's Army unit liberated Mauthausen concentration camp, freeing Lefman from more than five nightmare years in Nazi captivity.
A month ago, when they posed for the photograph that appears above this story, they learned about their connection.
It was taken at the 60th Anniversary Liberation Banquet on June 5, when 220 men and women, some with canes and walkers the survivors and the soldiers who liberated them gathered at Congregation Mishkan Tefila in Newton to remember the devastation that brought them together and celebrate the lives they've managed to build in its wake.
The organizers wanted a photograph of a soldier and a camp survivor. Grasso agreed to be in the picture, so the announcement went out over the speakers: "Any survivor here from Mauthausen?" No one answered. Then a second time and still no response.
On the third try, a woman called out: "My husband, my hus band was at Mauthausen!"
She helped her husband to his feet, and the couple made their way slowly to the front of the building, where the photographer and Grasso were waiting.
"You were at Mauthausen?" Grasso asked.
"You were one of the liberators?" Lefman asked in return.
Then the two elderly men Lefman, who was a 17-year-old "walking skeleton" on that long-ago day, and Grasso, who was a battle-hardened private fell into each others' arms and wept.
"Thank you, thank you, thank you," Lefman said. "Thank you for saving my life."
"People don't believe what you went through," Grasso answered him. "Even now, they still don't believe it."
But 60 years ago, Grasso was already determined that others would comprehend the horror of what he and the rest of the US Army's 11th Armored Division had seen. He still carries a worn envelope stuffed with faded black-and-white snapshots he was forbidden to take. In disobeying his superiors and using a buddy's camera to record the terrifying sights, Grasso managed to preserve a slice of history in all its chilling detail.
Grasso's story
Over the years, Grasso now 83 has shared his experience with schoolchildren and community groups, on TV and in newspapers. "People don't realize there were thousands and thousands of them lying on the ground when we got there women, guys, and kids," he said. "They were in rows as far as we could see."
At war's end, the division had weathered the Battle of the Bulge and were told they had an assignment in Austria. "We didn't know what was next," Grasso recalled. It wasn't until they arrived at Maut hausen that their officers said, "Help them. Do whatever you can do for them."
It also fell to these GIs to help bury the dead.
"My outfit had to bulldoze the bodies into the hole. It was a huge mass grave," Grasso said. "The whole bunch of us were sick to our stomachs for three days."
Grasso said the soldiers drafted residents of surrounding villages to do the hands-on work of burying the dead, forcing them to confront the grisly remains of the death factory that they had willfully ignored.
"We're the ones who opened those gates; the Germans were all gone by the time we got there," Grasso said. "We fed them our K-rations. We gave them whatever clothes we had. You wouldn't believe what those people had to do just to survive."
Three days later after transporting the weakest to hospitals and helping the more able-bodied return to what was left of their homes, their families, and their lives the Army pulled out of Mauthausen. But Grasso's memories have haunted him for six decades.
"I saw a TV show where a fellow said the whole thing was nothing but a farce, but when I called the station, they wouldn't put me through," Grasso said. "I could have told them that it was real, all right the rows of bodies, the ovens filled with bones. And the stench that was real, too."
Now retired from his sales job with Coca-Cola, Grasso continues to give talks about Mauthausen. And he brings along his pictures.
"A lot of people can't take it. They look away," he said. "They couldn't believe it then the average American didn't know about concentration camps; it was kept quiet and they don't want to believe it now. My own son couldn't believe it until I showed him the pictures."
But until last month, Grasso had never met one of the survivors he'd helped liberate. Not until he met Henry Lefman. "He's the first one I've ever met from there," he said quietly. "Was it ever good to see him."
Lefman's story
Lefman was 12 years old when the Nazis occupied his hometown of Radom, Poland, on Sept. 8, 1939. He and the town's other 30,000 Jewish citizens were crowded into ghettos, where many succumbed to starvation, epidemics, and beatings. The punishment for failing to wear the yellow Star of David was death.
In the summer of 1942, the survivors were told to report to the railway station, where 600 older people and children were shot and 6,000 others, including Lefman's mother, Sara, and his brothers, Mendel and Shlomo, were deported to Treblinka. Lefman and his father, Ignacy, were sent to Majdanek.
In the fall of 1943, the camp's captives were evacuated. As they headed to the railway station, a guard struck Lefman's ailing father across the head with the butt of his rifle for moving too slowly. That night, his father extracted a promise.
"I have to tell you something very important, and you, my son, must promise to fulfill what I am going to tell you. You must live, no matter what will happen to me. You must live to tell the world what happened. You must live to remember your family."
His father died in the night. He was 42.
Other camps followed for Lefman. Plaszow, Wieliczka, and then, with the Russians close on their heels in March 1944, the Germans transported their prisoners to Mauthausen.
"During all that time, only my promise to my father kept me going," Lefman said.
Mauthausen, he discovered, was "an extermination factory where prisoners exhausted by the forced labor from neighboring camps Gusen and Ebensee were sent to the gas chamber."
Lefman's first assignment there: hauling rocks in the stone quarry.
After a year of deprivation and back-breaking labor, Lefman began to hear bombs exploding nearby and rumors that the Allied forces were getting closer. The prisoners' meager rations were nearly gone and, one May morning, the guards didn't show up at all.
Weak and disoriented, Lefman walked through the camp's open gate.
"I have no family, no country, and no home," he recalled thinking. He cast off the uniform he'd worn for so long and wandered less than a mile before a jeep full of soldiers pulled over.
"At first I was frightened, because I didn't know what they wanted, and I was almost fainting from the hunger, but they explained they were American soldiers and had come to help me. I realized it was a godsend, a miracle. They were very kind."
The GIs drove him to an American hospital in Bavaria, where he slowly recovered his strength. He enrolled in a university in Munich, learning enough German to earn a master's degree in engineering. He came to the United States in 1950.
"Here I became a free man, free from oppression, free from being brutalized . . . but not from nightmares," he said. Lefman was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust.
Retired from his career as a nuclear engineer, Lefman has had several strokes that severely impaired his ability to walk and speak. His wife, Tania, who spent the war years hiding with her mother in the Polish forest, serves as his interpreter. Nonetheless, he keeps his mind sharp by playing chess online and he takes joy in his three children and five grandchildren. "He's a survivor so he can survive anything," his wife said.
And he can still savor a joy that only a survivor can know.
"For anyone to meet his liberators is a great event," he said. "They were the lifesavers. There are no words for it. I'm still blessing Americans and America itself for saving my life."
Finding Lefman after 60 years also had a powerful impact on Grasso.
"I was so glad to see him," he said. "I was so glad just to see he's alive."
Deborah Fineblum Raub works for Combined Jewish Philanthropies, one of the cosponsors of the 60th Anniversary Liberation Banquet.
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The Boston Globe
July 17, 2005,
POLAND'S NEW FASCINATION WITH JEWS
BY JEFF JACOBY
IN A 1973 ESSAY, Cynthia Ozick speculated on how Jews would be remembered if, like every other nation of antiquity, they had vanished long ago. As people speak today of "the glory that was Greece," she mused, the achievements of the long-gone Jews would be celebrated as "the genius that was Israel."
"How if there were no Jews the world would be enraptured!" she wrote. "The people that stood at Sinai to receive a desert vision of purity, the people of scholarly shepherds, humane prophetic geniuses, dreams of justice and mercy" how admired they would be. In a world without Jews, the memory of Jewish civilization would be endlessly fascinating. "Christian ladies," Ozick imagined, would "study 'The Priceless Culture of the Jews' at Chautauqua in the summertime" or create Jewish prayer shawls at "a workshop on tallith making."
Well, Jews haven't vanished from the world. They have, however, all but vanished from Poland. More than 90 percent of Poland's Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and most of those who survived emigrated long ago. The result is that a land that once was home to 3 million Jews 10 percent of Polish society, the largest Jewish population in Europe is now more than 99.9 percent non-Jewish. Millions of Poles have never knowingly met a Jew. But, oh, how enraptured they are with the genius that was Israel!
I arrived in Krakow near the end of the annual Jewish Culture Festival, a nine-day extravaganza of concerts, lectures, films, and exhibitions all with the aim, to quote a festival brochure, of "presenting Jewish culture in all its abundance." An elegant catalog, 160 pages long, lists a dizzying array of offerings: lectures on "Talmudic thought" and "Jewish medical ethics," forums on European anti-Semitism and the Hebrew poetry of Haim Nahman Bialik, concerts of klezmer music, liturgical music, and "Songs of the Ghettos and Jewish Resistance," workshops on Jewish cooking, Hasidic wedding dances, and celebrating Hanukkah with children.
Such a cornucopia would be impressive in Los Angeles or New York. In Krakow, with just 200 Jews in a metropolitan population of 1.5 million, it is astounding. More or less as Ozick imagined in 1973, Jews and Jewish culture are being embraced far more ardently in their absence than was ever the case when they were such a visible presence.
I caught part of the festival's closing concert, a kind of Jewish Woodstock that grows bigger every year. In the heart of what used to be Krakow's Jewish quarter, before an outdoor stage dominated by a giant electric menorah, 10,000 exuberant Poles swayed, cheered, and sang along as dozens of Jewish artists performed. The concert lasted for seven hours and was broadcast live on TV. In a country with no more than a wisp of Jewish life, where does such an appetite for things Jewish come from?
For some Poles, interest in Jewish culture is simply fun, or a fad; several in the crowd told me they had come because the concert is such a popular scene. But others, like 26-year-old Ola, who attended with her two young daughters, were drawn by an inchoate attraction they couldn't explain.
"I can't imagine Krakow without Jewish culture," she told me. But when I gently pressed her to say what "Jewish culture" means how, for example, would she explain it to her daughters? she replied, vaguely, "It's more about feeling than knowing. 'Jewish' to me means a warm feeling."
Then there are people like Tomasz Sierkierski, a 30-year-old computer programmer who was one of a dozen Poles honored during the festival for preserving Jewish landmarks. Searching for a way to reclaim some of Poland's lost Jewish heritage, he discovered a forgotten Jewish cemetery in Skarszewy, a small town not far from Gdansk. "It was really destroyed," he said, "full of trash and weeds." He recruited a group of teens from his old high school, and they spent the summer of 2004 carrying away the rubbish, cleaning and righting the fallen gravestones, and building a stone border.
Why do Poles like Sierkierski and there are many go to so much trouble? Of all the causes to care about, why worry about Jewish memory?
"Because," he told me, "it is Polish memory too." He knows that nothing will bring back the rich Jewish culture that was so much a part of Polish life. But he wants at least to keep it from being forgotten.
When he first came to Skarszewy, he couldn't locate the cemetery. No one knew anything about it. Eventually an elderly woman pointed him in the right direction, and he found the neglected graves.
"Before this project," Sierkierski said, "no one even knew a Jewish cemetery existed. Now the whole town knows." That, it is clear, made the whole thing worthwhile.
Final list: What I loved about Poland
1) all the wonderful people I met
-Kasia, who dreamed up this entire project, and whose mother and daughter make fabulous fruit pierogies
-Lynn, who so generously met me at the airport in Warsaw and accompanied me to Krakow
-Bridget, who I had a ton of laughs with. We also discussed lofty topics such as heinous fashion trends
-Liz, who showed me how to walk like a monkey and who has enormous zest
-Christie, who has the world's worst luck about luggage and the best smile
-Dan, the only person I could talk to about baseball and who has the face of a model but won't stop wearing his pants down around his butt
Lynn, Bridget, Liz, Christie, Dan and I were the first crop of this summer's volunteers. There were only a few days that we were all together, but I really marvel at how well we got along. No fights, no major disagreements, it was if we had all decided we were going to put petty crap aside for awhile and enjoy each other and our adventure.
-Gregorsz and Mariusz, who know how to climb fences and find all the best nightspots in Krakow
the indomitable Polish volunteers: the Magda's, Kuba, Joanna, Anka, and those of you whose names I've sadly forgotten
-Jupi, Sigmund, and Krystyna, who showed me such wonderful Polish hospitality during my trips to Koszalin and Pultusk
-the Patria staff, who put up with lots of questions, requests to use the phone and hand gestures to request scrambled eggs
The people really made this trip great!
2) few overweight people. For the most part, Poles seem very slim and trim.
3) the goat's cheese, especially grilled. I had something similar in China many years ago and loved that, too.
4) spending a large percentage of every day outside
5) forcing myself to rely on my feet for transportation
6) being able to participate in this great program and learning more about what happened to Poland and its population during World War II
That's it. I hope to post more pictures, but I'm finished with my essays now. Hope you liked it!
more about Warsaw
At this point, I’m probably just writing for my own benefit, to remember what I did in Poland. Of course, to a certain extent, that’s been one of the primary reasons I started the blog. So I plan to detail my final weekend in Warsaw, add a few “parting comments,” some pictures, and put this baby to bed, so to speak.
The trip to Warsaw was enhanced by the presence of Bridget. Had she not accompanied me, I probably would have stayed in the dorm from Hell and I probably would not have wasted, oops, spent money on “Monster in Law,” the new Jane Fonda movie. To remind me of our age difference, I had to explain some of Jane Fonda’s history to my 18-year old companion. So be it.
We arrived in Warsaw and I was filled with dread that it would be impossible to find our way out of the train station, find the bus, find the stop for the dorm, find someone who spoke English so we could register there, etc. Silly me to have worried so much; the logistics turned out to be simple. The only reason for dread was seeing our room in the dorm. Cheap, it was, which was a primary concern for me. But the place was just too depressing. And I didn’t even tell B about the bathrooms. Nothing was particularly dirty, it was just all so run-down. The concept of having seen better days doesn’t even apply. I don’t think there ever were better days for this place. To gladden ourselves, we went for lunch, to a very nice place, where the waitress ran out of the restaurant after we had left to return B’s credit card. How nice is that, eh?
I haven’t mentioned the rain, but a serious downpour began when we were on the bus, traveling aimlessly. It was just luck that made us get off where we did, where that nice restaurant materialized out of nowhere. But not til we waited under the little bus depot for about 10 minutes during the worst of the rain.
After lunch, another place materialized, an Internet café. B jumped onto Expedia and we found a decent price at the local Holiday Inn, which we reserved posthaste. After being ripped off mightily at the Internet café, we devised our strategy for checking out of the dorm –okay- we devised our lie. They were very nice, and returned all our money, a total of about 20$, to us.
We took the bus, yet again, -the rain had cleared- to the HI, and it felt like paradise. For about 60$ a night total, we had beds with mattresses and box springs, a shower and bathtub at arms reach (instead of down the hall), a direct-dial phone and cable TV, complete with English language stations and a huge breakfast buffet included. We could barely believe our good fortune.
So then we went exploring. B had this crazy idea that she wanted to see a movie. I wasn’t against the idea, the only problem was that there were only two English-language movies showing and one of them was War of the Worlds. We got tickets for the Jane Fonda vehicle and then split up for awhile to explore on our own. Talk about good fortune, the Cow Parade (cowparade.com) was in Warsaw! Unfortunately, I didn’t have a map, but I just wandered around and took photos of about 6 or 7 Polish cows. What a treat.
Had a potato pancake for dinner, went to the movie, and then went back to our palatial hotel. I wanted to make an early night of it since my trip to Pultusk began fairly early the next day.
Sunday, July 10: B decided to go with me and we took a local bus to Pultusk, arriving a little after 9am. Krystyna, my guide, met us at the station and the oddysey began. We drove to what K referred to as the Jewish section of Pultusk, which was made up of two old buildings and a monument. While Pultusk is a nice small town, the tour of it was a little underwhelming. I think it’s because what I was looking for (more traces of the Jewish community) no longer exists there. She did mention that the local history museum has in its collection some headstones from the local, no-longer existing Jewish cemetery, but unfortunately the museum was closed. While in Pultusk, K made us at home at her apartment, which was very cute. She served us a delicious blueberry pastry. Later, we drove to Ciechanow, another town that my ancestors lived in. While Pultusk had a lot of charm, Ciechanow was a bigger city, with a lot of large apartment block buildings, and a generally run-down appearance. K showed us a large open area in the center of several apartment buildings. She told us that it’s likely that the open area has stayed open because it is the former site of a Jewish cemetery. Near the edge of the area is a monument, but other than that, the area is unmarked. Our final destination was the town of Makow, which before the war was almost entirely a Jewish town. Three buildings survive, but you wouldn’t know it to look at them. One was probably a synagogue, and is on a street that translates, from Polish to Hebrew into a word similar to “synagogue.” At least I think that’s what K was telling us. In Makow, we also looked at a monument to the Jewish population that is built of headstones. It’s a very impressive site.
On our return to Warsaw, we had dinner in the old part of the city, which is lovely, but not real. Warsaw was leveled during World War II, and the old town was reconstructed, It appears to be very realistic, with lots of narrow, windy streets. The oddest thing we saw was a street performer dressed in the unmistakable sheet of a KKK member. That was a little jarring, to say the least. This is not my lasting impression of Warsaw; I’m just mentioning it for effect.
Warsaw vs. Krakow
Yes, I am back, safe and sound, in the USA, but I still have more to say. I will make a few final postings, and put up some pictures, and then close the blog.
I spent 2.5 days in Warsaw. Even though I had spent a few hours there the day I arrived from Boston, I didn't take it all in at that time. My impression of Warsaw is not as favorable as my impression of Krakow. Warsaw feels huge, huger than huge, and very modern. Krakow retains a lot of real, old-word charm and interest. Warsaw's office buildings are very tall, with much in the way of late 20th century-designed steel and glass structures. And its streets felt positively cavernous.
I guess Warsaw would look entirely different had it not been bombed to rubble during WWII.
ironic fame
Remember the other group I mentioned who is/was (today was their last day) at the site, who had all the "connections." They were referred to in the daily paper today, however the picture features us. See http://miasta.gazeta.pl/krakow/1,44425,2809871.html for our mugs, well, in profile. red shirt, me, facing me, Bridget, in back, Dan, to my left, Magda.
plans and pictures
Tomorrow Bridget and I leave for Warsaw on the 8am train, which unlike American trains, will arrive in Warsaw on time, I am certain. We'll check in at this dorm we're staying at and then wander around, sightseeing.
Sunday I go to Pultusk, where I will meet a woman who will take me around to hopefully see some ancestral places. I have no idea what to expect, but she is hugely willing and I am hugely grateful.
Monday AM, to the Chopin airport and then home!
I assume I'll have internet access in Warsaw, so I'll try to check in. Remember, if you want to email me directly, please use my yahoo address: sabol1355@yahoo.com, as I don't always have access to my Tufts account.
When I get back home, I will collect all my pictures, put them into some kind of order, and post more of them on the blog.
last day is in the books
We had a shortened final day today. When we appeared in the office, we were asked in to sit and have coffee and cookies. This has never happened before, but we were only too happy to partake. The jovial mood may have been due to today being the birthday of one of the staff members.
We got to the site about 10:15, with our new broom that promptly fell apart. We worked on several areas til I wandered off to take some pictures. At the edge of the cemetery there is a monument. I was standing there taking a picture and two Polish women (roughly of my generation) started talking. I stumbled through "I don't speak Polish," in Polish and they answered, in Polish, with repeated thank yous. It was clear that they had a great deal of appreciation for the work being done and Plaszow, and it was very fitting to run into them on my last day. Unfortunately, they lapsed back into the 99.9% of the language I don't know, but as they walked away, they were saying, in thick Polish accents, "thank you very much," over and over again, interspersed, I'm sure with "is that the right way to say it?" in Polish. It was a great moment and I wish I had had the presence of mind to ask if I could get a picture with them.
I'm sure I should have something very pithy to say now, but I'd rather retreat quietly, remembering the 2 Polish ladies.
