So we reach the end of our journey today but still have so much to learn and so many questions to answer.
We pick up our journey in Lublin last night with an opportunity to meet others who have made this journey. As I explained in earlier posts, the UK delegation was around 250 strong with all ages represented. Other faiths came too. And politicians. And we heard many of their experiences this week along with a selection of memorials, prayers and songs. An opportunity to thank the organisers and the survivors who truly made this experience more complete.
After a night in Lublin, this morning we made our way to Warsaw. A 2 hour drive through south east Poland.
Warsaw is often the place to start this story as the Polin Museum is one of the largest Jewish museums I have visited or seen. Here you can learn about the history of Jews in Poland over a period of 700 years or thereabouts. It was a thriving community with different stories of the contribution they made, the status they held and how different leaders treated them over the years. I can’t possibly try to do justice to their story as each generation had unique chapters and this is not a Jewish Polish history. But what this does is show how integrated the Jewish population were to Polands history, and explains how, by September 1939 there were 3.5 milllion Jews in Poland. 10% of the entire population. And by the end of the war that had fallen to a mere 250k. And fell further after the establishment of the state of Israel, and then again once the Soviet Union imposed its restrictions on Jewish life.
And while the descriptions I have shared here were not just targeted at Polish Jews, it demonstrates the magnitude yet again of what we saw.
So having got that background, what was the Warsaw perspective and how do we end our own journey today?
Warsaw Jews also experienced the same challenges of other towns once the Nazis invaded and their plans to eradicate all Jews was put into action here. By 1940, Jews were rounded up into a Ghetto, also in the most deprived area of the town. Thousands of families crammed into a few streets, with inadequate facilities or space to permit comfortable living. Comforts didn’t exist. The aim was to ensure the Nazis had the run of the town and there was no need to share anything with the Jews.
And yet again we asked how this could happen. And yet again we hear about Jews being forced to play an influential role of enforcing the restrictions. The Jewish police may have received favours or preferential treatment in doing so, but as the months and years progressed, their tasks would be expanded to include selection of people to go to Treblinka or other concentration camps. Or to punish and suppress resistance. Pitting Jew against Jew was another tool Nazis used to undermine the prior relationships or friendships and take away humanity during these darkest of times.
Being 20th April today, it was significant that we were in Warsaw today as it was 80 years, almost to the day of the Ghetto uprising.
The uprising cannot be decanted into a few sentences without me missing out vital facts so I’m not about to repeat the whole story here. Suffice to say it was the first significant demonstration of resistance against the Nazis. And now we know how brutal they could be, the bravery of standing up to such a group cannot be underestimated. And it was largely the youngsters (speaking as a 51 yr old) who did this. 23 or 24 yrs old. With the help of teenagers. With no formal training and very few weapons. And the story includes climbing into and out of the sewers to be able to maintain the supplies. As I say, rushing through the details may misrepresent the magnitude of the event but I hope you’ll forgive me. And we all know that however much they resisted, after a few weeks the resistance was quashed and the majority of the Jews in the ghetto were murdered at Treblinka if they even made it that far.
And so we reached the end of this chapter. It ended with a memorial of the sewer. And the representation of what could have been the end result if the Nazis had succeeded and the war had not ended as it did. If all Jews in Europe had been annihilated, if Jews in Asia had also gone to their deaths as was planned, what story would we be telling today? And who would write their story?
And so we came to the end of our journey and as you can see I have so many more questions. This is the introduction to the Holocaust that everyone needs to experience.
I know many will say I know what happened. Or I’ve seen the film and read a book. But nothing can replace hearing the testimony from a survivor directly. Or seeing the camps or the ghetto remains or the artefacts that I have done this week. And I have touched not even the tip of the iceberg.
I am grateful to those who encouraged me to come on this journey and to those who made it logistically possible for me to be here.
I am incredibly grateful for the chance to spend time with survivors.
I am grateful to my fellow travellers on Bus D. We cried. We were subdued. We laughed - you have to. And of course we drank whisky.
It is impossible to forget the places we visited; the stories we heard; the things we know happened there; and we don’t know even a fraction of the people that moved through these places before us and weren’t able to come home. We will remember them. And we will never forget any part of what we know.
Thank you for reading