To walk Ghetto Hero’s Square is to understand that there was no escape route

After the memorial to inmates of Krakow’s ghetto, the buoyant optimism of a road trip is tempered by a reminder of the refugees’ 'choiceless choices'.

This article is Part Two in a Three-Part Series. Read Part One here.

The YIVO study tour group assembles on July 1. We are bussed to the Ghetto Hero’s Square, formerly known as Plac Zgody. The square is scattered with larger-than-life iron chairs, installed on the site of the Umschlagplatz where the ghetto inmates were assembled before being marched to the station. The chairs are arranged in a grid and fixed to the ground on metal platforms.

The memorial was designed by architects Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz Latak. Piotr stands on the pavement opposite the square and explains how they arrived at the design. They immersed themselves in the details of the ghetto’s history, read eye-witness accounts, and sifted through the archives.

The ghetto was established in March 1941, here, in the suburb of Podgorze. Jews from all over Krakow were enclosed behind purpose-built walls and barb-wire fences. The ghetto was liquidated in March 1943. The last inmates were killed on site or marched to the station to be transported to the death camps. They left behind a mass of possessions and rotting furniture. Lewicki and Latak chose the chair as representative of the abandoned belongings.

The square is still fronted by a bus station. The pre-war bus station, which was converted into the ghetto police station, remains intact. The date, 1941-43, is engraved on the pediment. Passers-by, consciously or otherwise, interact with the chairs, as they do with other objects: wastepaper bins, traffic signs, bicycle parks, and tram-stop awnings. To walk the square, and the surrounding streets, is to understand that there was no escape route. Wherever the inmates may have run, whatever part of the wall they may have scaled, they were easy targets.

My thoughts return to Mordechai Gebirtig. The Nazis occupied Krakow on September 6, 1939. Gebirtig and his wife and daughters were driven out of their home in October 1940. In his poem, Farewell Krakow, Gebirtig writes: The hitched wagon awaits outside my house/ the savage enemy hounds me out/as one would hound out a dog … For a year the family lived in a hut in the village of Lagievniki. In early 1942, they were incarcerated in the Krakow ghetto. Gebirtig continued to write. He clung to hope for as long as possible.

As the noose tightened, his songs were increasingly driven by rage and disillusion. His final song, written weeks before his death, is ironically titled, It’s good. It is a cry for a day of reckoning. “It’s good,” Gebirtig concludes, addressing his tormentors: “Your end will come soon.”

Gebirtig was marched from the ghetto square towards the station on June 4, 1942. There is a story told that he broke from the ranks and began to dance and sing at the top of his voice. Another tale has him shot while sitting on a stone in the street, writing a poem. Others contend he was shot at the train station, as his fellow inmates were boarding the cattle cars. Whatever the exact circumstances of his shooting, those who did make it to the trains were transported to the Belzec death camp. 

I RECEIVE A MESSAGE from Dale Umetsu: “I did get to the train station in time, but the train was delayed a bit. I had a great trip to Jaroslav and was picked up by my colleagues and taken to a small town further east. We’ve been going to Ukraine every day to visit several refugee centres, where we see 20-30 patients each time. The patients have many sundry problems, most of which we can treat with medications that we carry with us. 

“We see mostly adults, but some kids, with problems such as heart disease, post chemotherapy patients, arthritis, thyroid disease, respiratory disease, eczema, headaches, heat stroke and so on …I work with two family practice physicians, so I’m learning a lot from them.  We travel to several places in Ukraine and so far, everything seems safe. We spend about 30 minutes crossing the border, always taking the priority lines …” 

THE STUDY TOUR IS ON the road, on excursions from Krakow, first to the Wieliczka Salt mines, a labyrinth of saline corridors, chambers and chapels, and an underground church lit by rock-salt chandeliers, presided over by the mine’s patron saint, St Kinga. The following day: The ascent from the Vistula valley to the Tatra mountains, home to the highland people, the Gorale, master builders of multi-storied timber homes with carved facades and steep roofs of wood shingles.

I first travelled here from Krakow in the autumn of 1986. It was a journey of release back then. I continued by foot from the resort town of Zakopane, beyond the final bus stop, climbing towards the higher reaches, retracing the escape routes that Jews had taken to Slovakia guided by the Gorale people. I did not want to stop. I wanted to get as far as possible from that receding dot back in the Vistula valley, called Auschwitz, where my maternal grandparents and their extended family were murdered.

With each step I felt lighter, but I did not know then, as we are informed now, by the tour’s resident historian, Professor Samuel Kassow, that among the Gorale smugglers there were those who betrayed their Jewish charges to the Nazis for an additional bonus.

But there are days like this: a glorious Sunday, a sense of ease and well-being, summer crowds thronging the streets of Zakopane; and the winding road back to Krakow, with glimpses of sheep grazing on mountain pastures, and of storks peering from giant nests balanced on rooftops and electricity poles; and the idle walk from the bus back to the central square, where a black American woman sings New Orleans jazz in an outdoor bandstand while the setting sun strikes gold on accompanying trombones and trumpets.

But that night, V and her mother are back by the statue of the poet. She is agitated, something has changed. There are rumours of expiring limits on the number of Ukrainian refugees that Australia will guarantee residency; the borders may again be closing. V is weighing her options.

“It is a battle between heart and mind,” she says. “My brain says quick, book a flight to Australia before it’s too late. I don’t have enough funds, but there are friends and colleagues who have offered to help. They are urging me to get out. But my heart says: I must stay here with my mother until it’s safe for her to return to the village. I can’t abandon her. I can’t abandon my people.”

This is how it has been since the invasion: surely it will soon be over, the people believed. Surely by April, by June. Or certainly by autumn. But now it is sinking in, this war may go on for a long time. But what to do? Return to Ukraine? Cross the oceans, and venture so far from the homeland?

“In Poland,” says V, “at least we are in a similar landscape; every now and then, an exclamation of joy at the sight of a tree we have back in the village.” But the joy is short-lived. The panic returns. What can we do? What should we do? It is time for a decision.

THE STUDY TOUR HEADS WEST from Krakow to Wroclaw, by way of Czestochowa. Dariusz Kuzniar, tour director, streetwise storyteller, sardonic observer of political corruption and abuses of power, makes his way along the aisle dispensing good cheer and vodka. Each day he offers alternative brands and sings their praises: “This one is named after Mickiewicz; it will inspire poetry. Or perhaps you prefer Bocian, which means stork; it will bring you babies. And today, Soplica, it has a lovely fruity flavour. Just one shot and you will live longer. It’s good for you.”

The landscape flows by - fields of sunflowers, forests of oak and beech, and of birch and conifers. A tractor kicks dust on a country road; a chestnut tree towers over a village pathway. I have not travelled in Poland for 16 years and I am startled anew by a sense of recognition. I am returned to an autumn Sunday, 1986, when I first entered the country by train over the eastern borderlands. The terrain was familiar, the townlets as I had imagined them from the tales of my elders, and as depicted in the songs my mother sang of blessed summer evenings descending on silent forests.

Each one of us in this intimate group of 12 has affinities with the passing landscape, each one our yearning for familiarity, our oscillations between a sense of recognition and absence. Birds of prey circle the skies above the rotating blades of windfarm turbines. We are a band of Don Quixotes tilting at history’s bitter ironies.

And wherever we go, whatever stretch of highway, there is the good professor, Samuel Kassow. His resonant voice draws us out of our reveries. His observations are punctuated with names, dates, and data. They are the hard-won fruits of a lifetime of research in a multiplicity of languages: Yiddish, German, Russian, Polish, and Hebrew. But beyond this, there is Kassow’s skill in weaving the facts into a compelling narrative.

His talks seem to chart their own course, in sync with the rhythm of the bus charting its course westwards. He is both scholar and storyteller. He recounts tales of betrayal and courage, the depths of human barbarity, and the heights of human endurance. He weighs up contending interpretations of the evidence. He crafts his talks with patience. “Schweya, Schweya, slowly, slowly. Haste is from the devil,” the desert people say.  In Jewish mythology Samuel Kassow would be cast as the Messenger.

Yet there is something else. Patient though Kassow’s talks may be, there is an underlying current of urgency. He embodies the history. This is apparent one afternoon when, yet again, his voice rises from the silence in harmony with the tour-bus rhythm. He is recounting his own family history. The tale centres on his mother, Celia: resistance fighter, partisan, fierce keeper of family secrets.  It was a time “of choiceless choices”, Kassow cautions, leaving in their wake unintended compromises, desperate love-affairs, and acts of audacious courage. It is a harrowing and at times wondrous tale that finally returns him to a remote village in Byelorussia in search of revelations.

Perhaps this family chronicle is what has driven Kassow’s lifetime immersion in the brutal histories of Eastern Europe, and what binds him to the landscape we are now traversing. It is his tale to recount, and one that we urge him to write as a full-length memoir. It would be his crowning work, and we all know by now that the good professor possesses both the scholarship and storyteller’s instinct to do it justice.

CZESTOCHOWA, MID-MORNING, home to the Black Madonna. The icon presides over the hilltop Jasna Gora Monastery, where the chapel walls are crowded with the discarded crutches of pilgrims who claim the Madonna had healed them. But our few hours here are not focused on miracles. Instead, we are ushered down a flight of stairs from the pavement fronting the former assembly grounds of the Czestochowa ghetto, to a bunker where 27 inmates of the one family hid, while above them, murder and mayhem, the roundups of inmates destined for the death camps.

Again, we are in a living memorial. Tactile. Suffocating. It is hard to fathom how the inmates could endure the tiny grotto-like warrens, the claustrophobia, the dread of being caught, and the imperative to remain silent.

It is a release to be back on the open highway. The sun is out, and another city is approaching. Wroclaw is a university city, with its fair share of youth. We will see them in the following days, gathering at night in the Market Square, and seated on the banks of the Oder River on a balmy summer evening as we cruise the waterways of the "Venice of Poland": a city adorned with 12 islands and 130 bridges, as the people of Wroclaw can tell you with precision.

Marcin Wodziński, director of the Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wroclaw, leads us through the streets of the inner city. Like Janusz Makuch, as a young Pole, Marcin was drawn by traces of an absence: “You need to understand the situation in the 1970s and 1980s in Poland,” he says.

“… After 1968 [and the government-led antisemitic purges], topics related to Jewish culture were unfavourably treated by the communist regime … At the same time, if you live in Poland, if you walk the street, when you travel, wherever you go, you see a building that is very distinct, very different to all the architecture around, and you realise, this is something different.

“Then you have these empty lots of space somewhere in the middle of town, with strange stones, covered with letters that you can’t understand, you can’t read, with beautiful symbolical images, and it’s there, and it’s obviously something that talks to anybody. You want to know what it is. So it started for many people … and it was also interesting to me, it was also attractive in the way that this was close and exotic at the same time, but it’s also a kind of moral obligation … the last remnants of a murdered culture.”

After years of scholarship, Marcin possesses within him the maps of Jewish Wroclaw. It is a glorious morning, and he is guiding us through an alternative universe. This is where, he points out, the renowned Yiddish actress Ida Kaminska performed, and there, under the archway, is the White Stork Synagogue, the only one to have survived the Holocaust. And here, in the synagogue forecourt, is where the Jews of Wroclaw were assembled for deportation. And there, across the road, is where a certain number of Jewish families were allowed to reside in the 13th century, to represent their community’s financial interests.

Among Marcin’s most celebrated works is his Historical Atlas of Hasidism. One of the many locations where Hasidic courts flourished is Slonim. My maternal grandfather, Aron Yankev Probutsky, was a Slonimer Hassid. Several times a year he would take the train, with his fellow Hassidim, from Bialystok to Slonim to spend time with the Slonimer Rebbe. Your grandfather had a beautiful voice, my mother said. “Reb Aron, geb undz a nigun”, give us a melody, his Hasidic brothers implored whenever he stepped into the Slonimer prayer house on Sabbath nights back in Bialystok.

A shot of brandy and the melodies would flow, and shoulder to shoulder they would dance in an ever-faster moving circle, beyond the drudgery of their daily lives, beyond the imperative to eke out a living, beyond their earthly struggles, to the higher heavens; and invariably, whenever she told me the story, Hadassah’s gaze would turn dark, and her eyes would be fixed elsewhere, on an absence called Bialystok.

And it is Bialystok that I invoke that evening in the White Stork Synagogue, where I trade stories with singer-songwriter and cultural activist Bente Kahan. Born and raised in Norway, since marrying exiled Solidarnosc activist, Alexander Gleichgewicht, Bente has divided her time between Oslo, and her husband’s home city of Wroclaw, where, in 2006, she established a foundation to help restore the White Stork Synagogue as both a place of worship and a centre of Jewish culture and education.

Our “stage” is the restored mikvah, the ritual bathhouse; the white-tiled wall is our backdrop, and the iron rails are all that divide us from the glistening green waters of the mikvah. One of the stories I tell is of a fragile exercise book. I thought I knew all my father’s Yiddish poems, and I had documented them after he died in 1992, both those he wrote as a young poet in Bialystok, and the final poems he wrote in his retirement after a 40-year detour working in factories and on market stalls.

I discovered the exercise book just three years ago, I tell the audience, as I was sifting through a cardboard box that contained some of my father’s eccentric jottings. It was inconspicuous, so easily lost, titled: Poemes fun meine yunge yoren, “Poems of the years of my youth”. The collection begins with my father’s first published poem: A Shepherd. I recite the opening six lines:

Oy vi gut a pastukh iz tzu zein/vi gut iz dukh der gantzer tseit/ven zun makht dukh ir veg/fun mizrakh biz tsu meyrev breg/un gist in moyl fun velt arayn/azoi fill emers varmen shine.

Oh, how good it is to be a shepherd/how good it is to spend that time/when the sun makes her way/from the eastern to the western side/and spills into the mouth of the world/so many buckets full of warm sunshine.

In return, Bente performs Gebirtig’s much loved song Kinder yorn, “Childhood years”; and she recounts a tale of her father, and the basement of his Oslo home, containing his collection of Yiddish books, among them a hand-written notebook with his repertoire of songs and their musical notations. Bente holds the notebook up to the audience and performs one of the songs: Mamme kum tsurik. “Mother come back”. Our tales turn to our bobbes, our tough grandmothers, and our mothers, and their quests for modernity.

We are a generation who never knew our grandparents, says Bente. Absence and a craving for restoration, this is the tension that fuels our performance. And at this moment, onstage, in the mikvah of the White Stork Synagogue, the pendulum arcs towards restoration.

THE STUDY TOUR IS MOVING WEST; each kilometre takes us further from the fraught eastern borderlands. Only as we walk the streets of Dresden do I realise there have been no border checks, just an imperceptible flow from one country to another, in sharp contrast to the heavily policed-border I encountered in 1986 en route to walled-off West Berlin by train from Warsaw.

We are joined by Berlin-based tour guide, Ronan Altman-Kadar. If you would have stopped in Dresden, before the reunification, he says, you would have seen many historic buildings left in ruins by the East German authorities as a symbol of the Anglo-American bombings. After the reunification the money poured in, and the city was fully restored to its former glory.

But I am disoriented, dwarfed by the grandiose castles, palaces, and churches. Something is not right. I can appreciate the artistry, and the feverish imagination that informs the baroque architecture: its gilded angels and clockfaces, the ornate arches and doorways, swirling pillars and copulas. But on this bleak, showery morning, it strikes me as an architecture of imperial conquest. It unnerves me.

A song my mother often sang comes to mind, The Naked Young Man from the Swamps, written by the Soviet-Yiddish poet, Itzik Feffer: Look at that cottage that stands not so far/who was it that built it, who was it?/Who was it that built it of brick and of clay?/The naked young man from the swamps. On August 12, 1952, after decades of singing the praises of Stalin, Feffer was executed, along with 30 fellow Soviet-Yiddish writers and intellectuals. There is no escaping the brutality of tyrants.

MID-AFTERNOON WE ARE on the outskirts of Berlin, moving past the Tempelhof fields, the site of the former airport, and Samuel Kassow and Dariusz Kuzniar are trading tales of its chequered history. During the 11-month siege of Berlin, the airport became the conduit for supplies flown in from the west. There were 700,000 missions; a plane landed every 62 seconds. Several years ago, two hangers were used to house Syrian refugees. The grounds of the airport are now a public park. Berliners are out strolling, flying kites, biking.

Late afternoon we disembark at the Topography of Terror, a museum built on the bombed site of the former Nazi regime headquarters. Here stood the head offices of the SS, the Einsatzgruppen, the SD, the Sicherheitspolizei, and the Gestapo. We are left to wander a rectangular glass edifice, housing an exhibition that traces the rise of the Nazi party — the evolution of an apparatus of terror, its structures, and key figures.

The black and white photos on display are distressing — images of public humiliations, the cold indifference of passers-by, the public shaming of couples who dared love beyond cultural borders, and of SS men and women carousing and picnicking. They are blunt and revelatory, their impact heightened in the spacious well-lit display hall.

It is poetry that I turn to, in the face of the horror, and to Bente Kahan, the previous evening, onstage in the mikvah of the White Stork Synagogue. She is singing In the Middle of Life, a work by the Polish poet and playwright, Tadeusz Różewicz. Born in 1921, in the town of Radomsko, during the Nazi occupation Różewicz fought with the underground Polish home army. What he experienced was to haunt him for the rest of his life.

In his writing, Różewicz battles to affirm the sanctity of human life, against the antithetical human impulse for evil. His poem, In the Middle of Life embodies his struggle.  After the end of the world, after his death, a man finds himself in the middle of life. He recreates “people, animals, landscapes”, the objects of everyday life, and he names them, and in the naming, he attempts to rebuild his life:

…This is a window I kept saying this is a window/beyond the window there is a garden in the garden I see an apple tree the apple tree blossoms/the blossoms fall off fruit forms/ripens/my father picks an apple the man picking the apple is my father/I was sitting on the front steps of the house that woman/pulling a goat on a rope/is more needed/is worth more/than the seven wonders of the world anyone who thinks or feels/she isn't needed/is guilty of genocide ...

Main photo: Symbolic chair in memorial to ghetto inmates, in Ghetto Hero's Square, Krakow

All photos: Arnold Zable

TUESDAY

'The paradox: here, at Lieberman’s villa, at the lake associated with genocide, I feel at home'
ARNOLD ZABLE arrives in Berlin, a city consumed with memory, and grapples with a contradiction that may never be resolved.

The quote from Marcin Wodziński is from a 2013 interview by Christa Whitney for the Yiddish Book Centre. V is an assumed name for reasons of privacy. The fragment of ‘In the Middle of Life’, by Tadeusz Rozewicz, was translated by Joanna Trzeciak.