And now for something completely different
Leszek Andrzej Kleczkowski
More than a graveyard
By Haim Shapiro
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 Kazimiercz 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 cafŽs. It has all the
convenience of Western Europe at Eastern European prices. Along with that,
landscapes and towns are beautiful.
However, Kazimiercz 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 cafŽs on the main square, our landlord passes and we
greet him like old friends.
Kazimiercz 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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Smart questions to stupid answers
Pisz z sensem - rob dwie spacje po kropce