Although I was born in Australia, the first two languages I spoke were Polish and Yiddish. My parents left Częstochowa, Poland, just in time to avoid the Holocaust, but their relatives on both sides were murdered.
One of my mother’s sisters survived a forced labor camp and went to Australia after the war, but my mother’s parents and her two adolescent brothers were sent to Treblinka, never to return. My paternal grandfather also never returned from Auschwitz, but two uncles by marriage were Holocaust survivors.
To hell and back
Australia was as far as Holocaust survivors could get from Europe and the nightmarish existence they had endured. The majority who went to Australia were from Poland, and spoke Polish or Yiddish or both.
When they got together, they often talked about their Holocaust experiences with little rancor. It was not as if only one person had suffered and resented all those who hadn’t – they had all been to hell and back.
When such gatherings took place in our home, where my Holocaust survivor aunt and uncle and their infant son lived for a while, my mother tried to protect me from hearing the ghoulish details and sent me to bed. But when everyone was engrossed in conversation, I crept on my knees and went under the table, moving only to avoid legs that may have been stretched out.
The stories were always fascinating, even though some were definitely frightening.
Visiting Poland
When I was no longer a child, I wanted to go to Poland. But it was still under Communist rule, and very antisemitic. Any application to go there was met with a barrage of questions about the reason for the visit. My repeated requests were repeatedly denied.
After I came to live in Israel, I tried once more. Poland had a special interest office in Israel, having severed full diplomatic relations in 1967, along with most other Soviet Bloc countries.
My first request to visit was refused, but then I resorted to the most important reason for wanting to visit: my paternal grandmother, Gittel, for whom I’m named, had died before the war, and I had a photo of her grave that I showed to the person in charge.
“This is all that I have left of my father’s immediate family,” I told her. Bureaucrats sometimes have a streak of humanity. She promptly prepared a visa.
On that first visit to Poland, I never made it to Częstochowa, my parents’ hometown. Warsaw was so captivating, that I could not bring myself to leave.
Although commodities were scarce, and there was very little on the shelves in department stores, most of the people in the street were well dressed – and even those who weren’t maintained courtly manners.
On my second visit to Poland two years later, I went to the premises of the Joint Distribution Committee in Warsaw, and met a man who was reading the only Yiddish newspaper, Folks-Sztyme. I struck up a conversation with him. He came from Częstochowa and told me that barely a handful of Jews still lived there. I didn’t visit our family’s hometown that time, either.
But on my third visit to Poland, I found him again reading the Yiddish newspaper. He said that he had spoken to his Catholic wife, and they agreed that I could stay with them while searching for my grandmother’s grave.
Their house was very simple but welcoming. I apologized to the wife that I could not eat her cooked food because I only ate kosher food, and that all I could eat in her home was raw fruit and vegetables. That was a tall order in those days.
“Don’t worry,” she chirped. “When I was a young girl before the war, I was a maid in a Jewish house. They were religious, so I know all about kosher.”
Graveside stories
The Jewish cemetery at the time was surrounded by the Huta, a steel production factory. To gain access to the cemetery, one had to request special permission and arrive with one’s passport.
The taxi driver who drove me there asked if he could accompany me inside the cemetery. I was curious about his reasons. He had driven past there countless times, he said. Still, it wasn’t until he saw a production of Fiddler on the Roof that he became aware of Polish Jews and began delving into what had happened to them.
His curiosity was further aroused, he said, when he saw the engravings in some of the paving stones in the streets of Częstochowa. They were the headstones removed from Jewish graves during the Communist regime.
The man in charge of the cemetery was not Jewish, but it didn’t take long to find my grandmother’s grave. It was slightly defaced but corresponded to the photographic image.
Auschwitz was only an hour’s travel time away, but it took a few more years before I got there.
The first time was during a state visit by then-president Chaim Herzog in 1992. What moved me most were two of the display cases: one filled with shoes, and the other with suitcases of murdered Jews.
As a member of the press corps, I had to keep up with the president, and there was no time to linger and absorb the emotional enormity of those two displays.
Sing ‘Hatikvah’
The following year, then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin went to Poland for the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Even though diplomatic relations with Israel had been severed, the Poles kept up with annual commemorations of the uprising, and there were also exchanges between Israel and the Janusz Korczak Associations in Poland.
During that visit to Poland, Rabin also went to Auschwitz, where he and those accompanying him, which included some Holocaust survivors, sang Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikvah” – “the hope.” I happened to be standing near Rabin and saw him take his wife’s arm and say to her, “Leah, sing loud. In this place, you must sing ‘Hatikvah’ louder than ever.”
The next time I went to Auschwitz, three years later, it was with a group of Holocaust survivors led by Stefan Grayek, who had been one of the fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
On that visit, I could spend more time reading the names on the suitcases, but not enough.
The next time, I went to Auschwitz on my own. I stood in front of the display cases, trying to imagine who had worn those shoes and who had carried those suitcases, naively believing that they were going to labor camps to be temporarily incarcerated and then released.
I also explored Auschwitz to a far greater degree than on any of my previous visits. I discovered the Cinema Hall, where I watched documentaries of atrocities that had been filmed by the Nazis themselves. How can anyone deny the Holocaust when these films and many Nazi documents exist?
Official visits
All Israeli presidents and prime ministers who visit Poland in their official capacities go to Auschwitz or Treblinka or both. I was also in the press contingents of presidents Moshe Katsav, Shimon Peres, and Reuven Rivlin.
Visiting a death camp so many years later is something one never gets used to. There’s always something different – always someone from a Holocaust survivor family with a story one hasn’t heard before.
After the war, very few Jews were left in Poland – or, to be correct, very few people who openly identified as Jews.
One of my visits to Poland coincided with All Saints Day in November. I contacted Mordechai Palzur, Israel’s first ambassador to the Central European country, following the restoration of diplomatic relations in 1990, and asked him to accompany me to the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw.
“But it’s a Catholic holy day,” he said. “Why would you want to go to the Jewish cemetery on All Saints Day?”
I’d heard enough stories about Polish Christians saving Jews and marrying them after the war or living in a common-law relationship with them. I was sure that some of the offspring of such unions would visit the cemetery – and indeed they did.
No one knows exactly how many Jews remain in Poland today. Estimates are usually less than 10,000 and can vary, depending on the Chabad, Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform synagogues that function in various cities. Whatever the number is, however, it is still far short of Poles with Jewish DNA, whose forebears survived Auschwitz and other concentration camps.■