-First in a Series-
By Jeanette Friedman
WARSAW–My first glimpse of Poland came through an airplane window. The thick turbulent clouds had just thinned, and from my aisle seat I could see a lush checkerboard of fields punctuated by small forests, and realized that these were the fields and forests where the Jewish Partisans I wrote so much about lived and hid during the Holocaust.
When they told me their stories, they were building word pictures in my mind. As I wrote what they described, those places seemed to be tinted in shades of gray or sepia. I was unprepared for the vivid, startling bright greens that were impressed on my retina.
Then there was nothing more to see, as the plane landed and I went through an airport that was no different (perhaps a little smaller) than the airports in the U.S, What was different was the language, but two hours earlier, I had changed planes in Frankfurt-Am-Main, where my father had been a student in the yeshiva. The language there was German, but everywhere, people spoke English.
On the first leg of the journey from Jersey to Germany, I sat with two high school students, two girls, one from Miami and one from Prince Edward Island. They told me they had studied the Holocaust and were told that antisemitism was alive and well in Germany. One wants to be an anthropologist and work in the Smithsonian. The other wants to open a 4/20 cafe in Holland. It was hard to keep a straight face!
The program they were in was created soon after World War II to promote racial harmony between nations–and their intention was to push the envelope if they had to in order to squash any racism they encountered.
I thought about the girls as my very Polish cab driver drove me to the Warsaw city center to the Marriott hotel, a Marriott like any other Marriott on the planet, except this one had a huge poster informing guests that the hotel was equipped with a special kosher kitchen. Even the Marriotts in New York and New Jersey don’t make such a fuss! It was unexpected.
The cab driver asked me why I had come to Warsaw. the Jewish star hanging around my neck was clearly visible, but I chose my words carefully. I said I had come to see the city where my mother grew up–in a pension (essentially a bed and breakfast) and reception hall owned by her mother–who died there of typhus in 1942.
Instead, as I looked at the wide boulevards and the skyscrapers in the distance, I said my mother had begun her journey in Poland, then had gone on to Slovakia and Hungary (where she was put on the Kasztner transport, but I didn’t tell him that), thence to Germany (to Bergen-Belsen, but I didn’t say that either), Switzerland, Palestine, France and finally New York. He thought that was funny, and them pointed to the Marriott. “Five more minutes, Pani!” he said.
And then the adventure began. I was attending the conference of the World Federation of Jewish Hidden Children & Descendants, where I was going to participate in 2G workshops. People came from as far away as Melbourne to attend. We came to figure out how we deal with our past in the place where it actually happened, and what we will do about it in the future.
Warsaw was a city rich with Jewish history, and Poland, until the Holocaust, was filled with the largest Jewish population in the world. It was a Jewish population that came from all walks of life–from sophisticated city dwellers to ignorant peasants, from the magnificently wealthy to the wretchedly poor, from communists to Zionists, to Hasidic dynasties and the anti-Hasidic Jewish scholars who despised them. Things have changed dramatically since then, but I only heard about it over Shabbos, in the different workshops, where the Polish 2Gs finally found the courage to come out and speak up.
But on Sunday morning, I was determined to leave the Cocoon and venture out into the city itself.
More to come. Pozdrowienia z Polski–it means greetings from Poland where the only word I can pronounce is Tak–yes.
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Friedman is bureau chief for the Greater New York City area for San Diego Jewish World. She may be contacted at jeanette.friedman@sdjewishworld.com