We started in Warsaw by a very professional guided tour of the core exhibition of Polin Museum. The Museum of the History of Polish Jews opened its doors to the public in April 2013. For over a year it functioned as a cultural and educational center with a rich cultural program, including temporary exhibitions, films, debates, workshops, performances, concerts, lectures and much more. On October 28, 2014 the Core Exhibition, presenting the thousand-year history of Polish Jews was officially opened. The Museum stands in what was once the heart of Jewish Warsaw – an area which the Nazis turned into the Warsaw Ghetto during WW2. This significant location, coupled with the Museum’s proximity to the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, demanded extreme thoughtfulness on the part of the building’s designers, who carefully crafted a structure that has become a symbol of the new face of Warsaw. The Core Exhibition is a journey through 1000 years of the history of Polish Jews – from the Middle Ages until today. Visitors will find answers to questions such as: how did Jews come to Poland? How did Poland become the center of the Jewish Diaspora and the home of the largest Jewish community in the world? How did it cease to be one, and how is Jewish life being revived?
We continued our tour to the Jewish cemetery. Then the Warsaw Ghetto, the former ghetto area and the remains of the ghetto walls. In this Ghetto, 450 000 Jews were forced to live in inhuman, very crowded conditions. By the time deportation to the extermination camps began, about 100,000 residents of the Ghetto had died of starvation or disease. After the 1943 Uprising the ruins of the Ghetto were leveled, and a new residential district was built right on top of them, making the new buildings one level higher than the pre-war buildings had been. We visited the Synagogue, Korczak monument and the last location of the Orphanage building, monuments and historical sites including the Monument to the Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Remembrance Path, Mila 18 Monument and Umschlagplatz Monument, and others.
During the tour, visit to Jewish Historical Institute – documentary film on the history of the Warsaw Ghetto and meeting with a very exceptional person, Mr Jan Jagielski, the chief of Documentation Department and Photographic Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute. This was another unique visit and meeting.
We visited the Praga district and after that went to the Warsaw Jewish Community Center. JCC Warsaw offers today an array of educational activities focusing on the cultural aspects of Judaism and Jewish life. JCC Warszawa is a safe space for people to (re)discover and (re)develop their Jewish identity but also for their non-Jewish families and friends to join their loved ones in participation in Jewish communal life. They offer activities for preschoolers and primary school pupils, young adults and families, adults and seniors – some of them directed specifically to one group, others intergenerational.
During our stay in Warsaw, we were invited by Golda Tencer to the Ester Rachel and Ida Kaminska Jewish Theatre. She told us about the theatre and showed us a very exciting film about the legendary history of this place.
Shabbat service and dinner at Etz Chaim Warsaw Jewish community was another exciting meeting with Rabbi Stas Wojciechowicz and community members.
We left Warsaw and passed Tykocin, once an important trade centre owned by Polish kings, by 1800 became a typical Jewish shtetl. Before WW2, the town had 5,000 inhabitants, half of them Jewish. All of the 2,500 Jewish residents of Tykocin were taken to the nearby Lopuchowo forest and shot by the Nazis in the summer of 1941. Today Tykocin looks the same as it did before WW2 – you can still see Jewish wooden houses, one of the finest synagogues in Poland built in 1642 (now museum) and admire the perfect harmony of both Christian and Jewish architecture. Visit to the Tykocin synagogue.
The tour continued to Lopuchowo, where we visited mass graves and a memorial in the forest commemorating the extermination site of Tykocin Jews.
Next stop was in Treblinka located110 km (68 miles) northeast of Warsaw, established in 1941 as a forced labor camp for Poles. Within a year a second camp was built which became a symbol of the extermination of the central European Jews. Opened on July 23, 1942, as the Warsaw ghetto deportation began, it resulted in total 900 thousand victims. Handled with the utmost of secrecy, surrounded by two barbed wire fences was a scene of organized revolt of Jewish prisoners in August 1943, after which was liquidated in October 1943. Today a symbolic memorial monument and 17 thousand stones mark the site of the Jewish tragedy…
Our tour continued to Lublin. Jewish Lublin, the city once famous for its Hebrew and Yiddish publishing houses and Yeshivas. We visited The Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva, the famousmodern Talmudic academy opened on June 24 and 25, 1930. We continued to the Pre-war Jewish district of Lublin , the Old Town and the area of the former Jewish Ghetto. The Jewish Cemetery has the oldest Matzeva in Poland still in its original location. We had a very unique meeting with Mrs & Mr Matraszek in TSKZ of Lublin, Social and Cultural Association of Jews in Poland. Interesting mother and son, who only stay in Lublin to take care of this place, a very authentic place and meeting.
An exceptional and instructive visit to “Brama Grodzka – Teatr NN” and meeting with Mr Witold Dąbrowski – Deputy Director at “Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre” Center, manager, actor, singer and storyteller.
In the evening dinner at Madragona Restaurant (Jewish-style restaurant) in Lublin with a surprise concert by some actors from the Jewish Theatre in Warsaw, specially organized for our group!
Next stop was Majdanek Museum, a former concentration and forced labour camp, also used as the death camp. This camp was liberated by the Soviet army. During this time more than 79 000 people were murdered at Majdanek main camp alone (59 000 of them Polish Jews) and between 95 000 and 130 000 people in the entire Majdanek system of sub camps. Some 18 000 Jews were killed at Majdanek on November 3, 1943 during the largest single-day, single-camp massacre of the Holocaust named Harvest Festival (total 43 000 with 2 sub camps).
Next we made a stop in Izbica a former Shtetl and Jewish Cemetery. Izbica was oncea notable centre of trade and commerce, with time the town became a shtetl inhabited almost entirely by Polish Jews. During the WW2 the Izbica Ghetto was set up by the Nazis. The first mass deportation of ghetto inmates to the Bełżec extermination camp took place in mid-March 1942 conducted by the Reserve Police Battalion 101 with the aid of Ukrainian Trawnikis. During Operation Reinhard the ghetto served as a transfer point to the extermination camps in Belzec and Sobibor for foreign Jews deported from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and western Poland (Reichsgau Wartheland). Of all Jews of Izbica (over 90% of its prewar population), only 14 survived the Holocaust – one of them is Thomas “Toivi” Blatt, the Sobibor survivor.
After Izbica we went to Zamość, where Frida’s mother and her family were born. Zamość, the UNESCO World Heritage site, is an unique example of a Renaissance town in Central Europe, consistently designed and built in accordance with the Italian theories of the “ideal town,” built by the founder, Jan Zamoyski and the outstanding architect, Bernardo Morando. Zamość was a large center of Chasidic Judaism. The Oahal of Zamość was founded in 1588 when Jan Zamoyski agreed to settle the Jews in the city. The first Jewish settlers were mainly the Sephardi Jews coming from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Turkey. In the 17th century, the newcomers were recruited among the Ashkenazi Jews that soon constituted the majority of the Jewish population.
There we had a tour of Jewish and historic Zamosc including visit to the beautiful Synagogue and a meeting with the Righteous Among the Nation. Mrs. Halina Blaszczyk, a 89-year old lady, who told us the story how her mother hid a young Jewish boy Chanan during the war. He survived the war and moved to Israel. He invited her 3 times to Israel.
From Zamosc we continued to Sandomierz a beautiful medieval town, known for its Old Town. Sandomierz became a symbol of anti-Jewish stereotypes – in 2 catholic churches one can see a series of paintings with scenes with ritual murders committed in Sandomierz by Jews on Christian children. A plaque came up 1995 to explain that Jews did not kill children and did not draw blood from them, but the painting is still hanging.
Our next stop was Kazimierz Dolny – a picturesque small town on Vistula river, a major tourist attraction of the region with magnificent old architecture. Jewish community was present in the city from the time of Casimir III the Great (Kazimierz) in the 14th century. The king granted the Jews a writ of rights which caused the town to become a focal point for Jewish immigration. Short walking tour around the town and the remnants of Jewish past – the synagogue, the cemetery. One of the most famous Jewish residents of the town was the painter and sculptor Chaim Goldberg. Another was the noted journalist S. L. Shneiderman, who wrote about Kazimierz Dolny in his book The River Remembers
In Prztyk, we passed by the place where the Przytyk Pogrom occurred against the Jewish community on March 9th, 1936. According to historians this was the most notorious incident of anti-Semitic violence in Poland in the interwar period.
Lodz – Poland’s third largest city, was the next stop. We visited Lodz Ghetto area, the Radegast deportation station and the Jewish Cemetery.
One of Lodz’s most prominent 19th century citizens was industrialist and philanthropist Izrael Poznanski. His former palace is now the city’s museum and his factory is now a commercial and cultural center. We visited Piotrowska street, Jewish life before WW2, inc. the only surviving Synagogue. In the evening we were invited to a Shabbat dinner at Beit Lodz Community.
Day 10 and we are on our way back to Warsaw.
On our last day of the tour, we listened to an amazing Chopin Concert in the Lazienki Gardens and on our last evening we went to Warsaw Opera and saw Casanova Ballet. This beautiful concert and the dance performance provided a break to the intensity of what we felt during the trip and it was a fantastic ending of a very emotional difficult trip through the Jewish tragedies in Poland.
Many thanks to Frida, for organizing this trip, with amazing guides and an amazing program.
Letters of some Participants in the trip to Poland, after the trip:
Gaby and I have postponed our trip to Poland and Germany for over 50 years. Our feelings of ambiguity come from the loss of most of our parent’s families there. For Gaby, as being the daughter of an Auschwitz “survivor” mother and a Partisan father, and for my own background as born in a Japanese concentration camp as a result of what happened in Germany.
Having said that, our experience in Poland was profound, guided professionally and with sensitivity by extremely good local guides, and organized splendidly by Frida.
We will always be troubled by the Shoah. The loss of over one third of Jewish population, and its replacement by monuments and museums only made us concentrate on the sense of loss, the sense of incomprehension, and the impossibility to feel the pain and suffering of so many.
To be surrounded, as we were during this trip, by people who understood our mood, comprehended our pain, and shared it, was profoundly helpful. There was comradery, shared prayers, overlapping stories and backgrounds (“How did each of us in the group survive?”). To have friends (Malvina and Yaakov) along who had preceded us in the path through Poland and reminded us of the need for a break, the enjoyment of music, scenery, and dance provided a break to the intensity of what we felt.
Frieda, thank you for organizing the trip, for sharing your reunion with your family with our reunion with our past.
Leon and Gabi Rogson
PS: -Poland was a marvelous learning experience. The quality of our guides was incredibly high, the company congenial and interesting. Thank you Freda for your efforts, and it was great meeting you. Hope we can do something like this again.
Leon
I would like to thank you all for these wonderful days spent together in Poland. bIt was a meaningful, deeply moving and instructive trip, essential for our Jewish souls. I will never forget those days. Thank you so much, dear Freda, for giving us the opportunity to travel together, to enjoy your excellent guides and to share our feelings, not only the sad ones, but also our friendship and joy.
You were all a part of this essential experience. I am very grateful to Freda and willing to participate to any trip she would organize in the future. I wish all the best to you all and hope that we shall soon meet again.
With warmest thoughts,
Ewa Korulska
Plotkies – Jewish heritage trip to Poland May 2015 with Frida Schatz
