Category: War

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My Grandfather’s WWII Letters Still Ring True Today

These are truly tumultuous times.  Many are making comparisons to other times in history, in particular to the Second World War. I’ve been immersed in the ripple effect of that war all my life. My grandparents (and my mother, in utero) came to the U.S. as Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Poland in late 1940 and watched in desperation as the world they knew and loved (and fought to improve as members of the Jewish Labor Bund) was annihilated.  

Between 1942 and 1946, my grandfather, Emanuel Patt (known as Monye), then in his early thirties, wrote a series of letters in Yiddish to his toddler daughter, Rifkeleh (Rebecca—my mother). In them, he shared his thoughts about the harrowing nature of the world they lived in and the brighter world he had dreamed of and worked for all his life.

The letters offer a portrait of both immeasurable loss and tenacious hopefulness—a determination not to give up faith in humanity and our power to turn things around. And they’re unique in having been written while those wartime events were happening, not in retrospect.

My grandfather saved all the letters, typed them up and gave them to Rifkeleh in 1958, on the occasion of her high school graduation, prefaced by a new letter offering them as a key to her foundation, roots and family as she made the transition to adulthood. She, in turn, saved and translated them to English and gave them to me when I graduated high school in 1987. They’ve informed how I understand the world ever since.

I’ve decided to begin publishing and sharing the “Letters to Rifkeleh” in my blog. Here, I’m including the full text of this 1943 letter to show not only my grandfather’s philosophical thoughts and lyrical writing but his full humanness as a young, immigrant father and family man.

November 23, 1943

My dearest nakhesdik [pleasant] little daughter:

Today you become 2 ½ years old. A big girl already. Mama went out for a while and left you in the apartment. So, you’re lying in your room, in your bed, and you’re sleeping. Have a good, sweet sleep!

Rifkeleh! When you grow up and will be able to read what your father is now writing, there will be a new, very different world than what we have now. Who knows if you’ll be able to understand your Papa’s thoughts on a November night in 1943?

Where is the world going? There is no one who has an answer.

But the world is not moving in the direction that your Papa and Mama wanted.

Your mother and father sold their souls to a dream. A dream of a beautiful world. The joys of wealth didn’t appeal to them and leave them cold. They themselves can manage with the minimum. But they have with passion and devotion dedicated their belief in justice and freedom and equality. Many names have been given to their beliefs. It seems to your father there here are the two critical things: that which is immortal in the history of humanity – the striving to self-betterment and advancement, that which is labeled humanism; and freedom, the soil without which humanity can’t exist, the air with which humanism breathes.

But these days there is no great need for these. The world has become a shelf of wares with which one trades. Peoples, countries are leftover scraps of fabric or cans of herring which with the big wholesalers trade in their business. And the individual person – the greatest and most important – is only a thread n the scrap of fabric or one of the pressed sardines

If only strength and physical power dominated – then it would even be tolerable. When the strength of a young hero manifests itself, it doesn’t necessarily have to be hooliganism. There is, after all, beauty in the powerful lifting and lowering of a hammer by a young, singing blacksmith! And this is also how it is in world politics. When a young nation begins to put a halt to destruction, begins building rainbow-bridges from the simple earth to the lofty sky – this is beautiful!

But today it is the power of cunning. It is the invincibility of cynicism.

If your father wasn’t such an incurable optimist, he would surely be coming to some very sad conclusions: we are the last of the Mohicans, Don Quixotes in a world that doesn’t understand what truth and purity mean.

But I want to believe that this is not true: that the elements of victory will wipe out all of today’s vile and common cow-trading. That the nations will delete all the accounts of this present time.

But I’m not certain about this. It could be – yes; and it could be – no.

But about one thing I am sure:

Just as the seasons of the year change, as Spring inevitably follows Winter, as surely will the dawn of humanism arrive, a time when ideas and ideals will rule the world; when words such as “truth” and “equality” will carry more weight than the grocer’s reckonings, when we will breathe freedom and not even be able to be satiated with enough brotherhood.

I promise you, my little girl, that when that time comes, and you and the youth of your generation will tear away the cobweb-covered windows and begin breathing the free air of humanity – then you will find your father and your mother, the incurable dreamers, by your side.

And it is our most fervent desire, our aim in life – to make you ready for that day.

If you will grow up and make these ideals part of your way of life – then this will be your mother and father’s greatest joy. If we will be unable to protect you and your soul becomes poisoned with the cynicism and nihilism of the times – then we will have failed in our task.

You are lying, little Rifkeleh, in your small bed. The golden curls fall down over your forehead. You sleep peacefully and your dream is of a little flower, a kitten, the little piglet that cries because its mother went away. You don’t know anything about your father’s thoughts and the grand philosophies he spins about you.

So sleep sweetly, our comfort and hope!

Your Papa

 

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WHY I VOTE…IT ALL STARTED IN 1940

For me, Election Day is the story of a refugee family walking to a brand-new life over ashes.

My grandparents, Brucha and Emanuel (Monye) Patt, fled their home city of Warsaw in early September 1939, four days after the Nazi invasion of Poland and just weeks before their city was occupied. They were 24 and 27 years old, respectively, and had married the year before. In 1992 I managed to get my grandmother to tell me a little about their escape. “We walked out from Warsaw,” she said. “We were told that any day the Germans will come. We were mountain climbers, so we put on our mountain climbing shoes. And we walked for a long, long time…until we came to Vilna. It’s like a dream, we kept on walking and walking and walking.”

The distance between Warsaw and Vilna—then still a part of Eastern Poland—is some 270 miles. Google Maps tells me it can be walked in about 90 hours. My grandparents carried nothing with them but two rucksacks, and I have no idea how they procured food, where they slept, or what they did in Vilna, where they ended up staying for many months.

This was the first leg of an exit journey from Europe that took the better part of a year and included my grandfather’s immediate family: his sister Emma and their mother Rifke, along with Emma’s fiancé, Motl, and his parents and brother. Following Monye and Brucha, and in between various bombardments and relocations, the others left in separate groupings from Warsaw, Bialystok and Lodz between September and December 1939, all managing to arrive  and meet in Vilna (Vilnius). By this time, Vilna was occupied by Soviet forces and had been transferred by the Soviet Union to still-independent Lithuania.

All of my escaping family members belonged tothe Jewish Labor Bund, the secular Jewish socialist party in Poland and Russia. For my grandparents’ generation, the Bund was more than a political party; it was a way of life. Besides fighting for democratic socialism and fair treatment for all working people, the Bund campaigned against anti-Semitism, defended Jewish civil rights, and worked to preserve Jewish culture and the Yiddish language. My grandfather Monye and Motl’s father Efroim were well known Bundist leaders.

When the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania in the summer of 1940, that country became a dangerous place for members of the Bund, which did not support Stalinism. Fearful of being arrested, at some point Monye assumed a fake identity and went into hiding in nearby Kovno (Kaunas), where he was less well known. (He later returned to Vilna.) At the same time, the German army was continuing to advance eastward (occupying Lithuania in the spring of 1941).

The entire family scrambled to get exit visas that would allow them to leave Lithuania and Europe entirely. Eventually they received so-called “Curacao visas” from the Dutch consul in Lithuania, Jan Zwartendijk—essentially, a stamp on their papers stating that Curacao did not require entrance visas for foreigners. Over 2,000 Jewish refugees received these, although none ever made it to Curacao; the “Curacao visas” were a strategy to get approval from Soviet authorities to leave the country. But anyone wanting to leave also needed a transit visa to someplace outside the Soviet Union. Here, the Japanese consul, Chiune Sugihara, stepped in and issued more than 2,000 ten-day visas to Japan for the refugees, even though most had no valid destination visas.

My grandparents and the rest of their group all obtained Sugihara visas. But before they could leave Lithuania, Rifke Pat, my great-grandmother, suffered a heart attack and died. She’s buried in Vilna; I have her unused Sugihara visa—apparently a very rare document.

In early September 1940, the group made their way to Moscow, then took the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, a distance of some 4,000 miles. Today, this trip takes seven days; in 1940 probably twice as long. From Vladivostok, they took a Japanese steamer ship to Kobe, Japan. They were among the minority of Jewish refugees in Japan able to leave quickly for the United States; indeed, only a tiny handful of all European Jewish refugees were permitted entry to the U.S. during this period.

It was only through their connections with the Jewish labor movement that this was possible. My great-grandfather, Jacob Pat, was a journalist, writer and activist in the Bund before the war. In 1938 he had traveled to the U.S. on a fund-raising trip and was compelled to remain there due to the war. He threw himself into rescue efforts, working with the U.S. Jewish Labor Committee to obtain US entry visas and the necessary funds for some 170 Jewish refugees—all involved with the labor movement— to sail from Japan to the United States between 1940 and 1941.

My family group boarded the Heian Maru, a Japanese passenger-cargo ocean liner, in October 1940. My grandmother would recall how fancy the ship was, and how exotic and unfamiliar the food (reportedly American style). She kept the menu as a memento of this part of the journey, when they were pretty much assured to make it to safety.

At the end of October, they landed in Seattle, where they boarded the Transcontinental Railroad for the east coast, another 3,000 miles. Finally, they arrived in New York City, on Tuesday, November 5, 1940—Election Day.

For the rest of her life, my grandmother treasured this memory, and spoke of it often. To her, arriving in New York on Election Day meant arriving to freedom, to a land where people’s voices mattered. This was the Roosevelt era, on the heels of the New Deal, and she was impressed by all the social programs and benefits for ordinary citizens that had their start under FDR. Indeed, 1940 was a presidential election year, in which the incumbent Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt roundly defeated Republican corporate business executive Wendell Willkie to win a first-ever third term in office. It was an exciting time for a refugee from fascism to arrive here. (Despite, of course, the persistent closed-door immigration policy and still isolationist stance on the war.)

Brucha and Monye went to the apartment in Sunnyside, Queens where Monye’s father lived, dropped off their rucksacks, and went straight back out to Manhattan to observe the crowds in the city center, many of whom were headed for the polls. She felt the mood electric. They went to a diner in midtown, where she drank tea, opening and emptying the teabag (something she’d never seen before) into her cup.  “In America, to serve tea like this!” she thought, baffled. She described her first afternoon in New York to me as being full of wonder, symbolically enhanced by the fact that it was Election Day, a holiday of democracy.

Brucha was exceedingly proud to be an American and described herself as a “sickening patriot.” This did not mean she agreed with everything the U.S. did or that she never questioned the government, or other citizens. She was outraged at the racism and other gross injustices of her adopted country. But she understood that creating and maintaining democracy involved active and thoughtful participation on the part of ordinary individuals, and that began with voting. She considered voting a sacred obligation and responsibility of every citizen and was frankly appalled at the idea that anyone would choose not to do so.

My grandmother died in 2002, and I certainly don’t know what she would say about this year’s election, or about the long chain of oppressive and regressive events of the past several years. I imagine she’d be horrified, terrified, and furious to see her beloved United States flailing in disunity, conflict, irrationality and inhumanity. But of one thing I am certain: she would be voting, and calling everyone she knew to make sure they voted too.

Everyone in my family is a passionate voter. That’s the ripple effect. Despite the obvious problems and biases of the electoral college, the limitations of a two-party system, the absurdity of campaign financing, and all the rest, I still vote. I still feel a little bit excited when I go to the polls, remembering the promise that this day held for a young refugee couple pregnant with the promise of democracy (and, in fact, with my mother by the time they arrived in the U.S.—but that’s for another post).

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COVID Mourning Diary: Don’t Let It Dominate You.

As the number of U.S. cases of COVID-19 is climbing and the White House becomes a ‘super-spreader’ of the virus, this seems an appropriate time to share this newly updated piece that I originally wrote back in May, on Mother’s Day, one month after my own mother died of COVID. I offer it as a glimpse into the oppressive, defective, largely for-profit eldercare and healthcare systems that average Americans have access to.

On April 18, 2020, the day after my mother died, I wrote in her death announcement that “we lost her to COVID-19 and the colossally broken eldercare-healthcare-economic-political system in her beloved America.” That same week, the New York Times reported that one-third of all U.S. coronavirus deaths were in long-term care facilities for older adults. My understanding is that in some states the percentage was even higher. I think it’s important to share—and hear—some details of what one family experienced that go beyond the headlines.  

Please understand this is the tip of the iceberg. Although I’m writing here largely about a single facility, in the past several years I’ve experienced others that shared similar characteristics—chiefly, the equation in which a for-profit business offering care services to families with few other options equals less care and more hardship and heartache. The eldercare system is in a dysfunctional marriage with everything also broken about healthcare and insurance, along with oppressions that operate around disability, mental health, race, class, and so on. It’s all worse during the pandemic. This is a snapshot through my subjective lens, but what my family has gone through is not unique. 

My mother had Alzheimer’s dementia and for the past year lived on the memory care floor of an assisted living facility that is part of a national chain. Even in “normal” times, there were issues with staffing and care (e.g. number of staff per resident, amount of training, degree of patience and care they offered). Senior staff had a tendency to be evasive and act put off by questions or concerns from family. It became even more complicated if, like my mother, your loved one was seen as “difficult” because of their behaviors or demeanor. But Mom seemed overall safe and comfortable there, we were able to afford some hours with private aides to offer her one-on-one companionship, and things were pretty stable before the pandemic.

The last time I was with my mom was at the end of February; my uncle visited her the first week of March. Then the facility went on lock-down, canceling all in-house activities and prohibiting visitors. On March 11th I began receiving a daily letter from the Executive Director explaining the steps they were taking to confront the virus. Initially these missives were reassuring, proclaiming in large-font italics that “none of our residents or team members are ill at this time with the COVID-19, Novel Coronavirus.” He repeated this statement in each daily email.

On March 17th, exactly one month before my mother’s death, the Executive Director announced that all public dining areas in the independent assisted living were being closed; residents would receive room service for all their meals. As for Mom’s unit: “On the second floor, we will serve meals in smaller groups.” This was the first and only mention of the memory care residents. Subsequent emails omitted any reference to these most vulnerable elders. 

Ten days later, on March 27th, the daily email omitted the sentence about nobody being ill that had allowed me to sleep at night. I wrote to the Executive Director for clarification. He responded tersely, “Nobody in the building is positive.” I worried that this implied some people were indeed sick but hadn’t tested positive yet. The facility was not doing testing, which allowed them to be vague about it. This was the beginning, from my perspective, of a maze of evasion, lack of transparency, and apparent neglect for the memory care residents (and staff).

One day later, the email update reported: “We have 3 residents who are positive for the COVID-19 virus. Two are in the hospital and out of the community. One resident is in the community and quarantined to their room. I cannot provide any additional information on the affected residents out of respect for their privacy.” Although I understood that this reflected HIPAA regulations, it felt frightening that nobody could tell me whether these sick residents were in assisted living or the completely self-contained memory care floors. Was my mother safe or not?  

I wrote to the Executive Director again asking for assurance that community safety and health measures were taking place in the memory care floors. He never answered.

I started hearing rumors that some residents in memory care were ill and had been hospitalized. A trusted insider reported that memory care residents were never served meals in smaller groups or shifts, as promised in that earlier email. They reported that Mom’s tablemate was sick and coughing, yet still sitting just inches from my mother. When I asked the floor nurse about this, she snapped at me, “What would you have me do, Donna?”  At the time, I was angry with her. But I later found out that this same nurse was working double shifts, sometimes alone, heroically carrying on when many other staffers were no longer coming in. I understood then that she was probably receiving little or no support from management to properly care for the elders in her charge.  

My inside source told me that the company was not at that time offering their regular employees hazard pay or adequate PPE and that many had stopped showing up for work. There were issues with housekeeping: at one point the memory care floor, including residents’ rooms and bathrooms, received no cleaning services or trash removal for three days in a row. They normally had eight PCAs (personal care assistants) working at a time. Just before my mother was hospitalized, they were down to just three PCAs for thirty high-needs residents. No wonder they couldn’t feed them in shifts.

Missing in this situation seems to have been a decision at the corporate level to prioritize resident care and staff safety over profits and executive salaries. They needed to swiftly hire extra staff, bump up the pay for their regular employees, and of course, be clear with everyone about what was happening and provide appropriate protective gear and sanitization. This apparently did not happen.

At the end of March, my mother developed a urinary tract infection, with fever. Unable to get there for a few days because of her now overwhelmed schedule, the doctor agreed to call in a prescription for what turned out the be the correct antibiotic. But after finishing the prescription, Mom wasn’t improving. She still had a fever, was groggy and had very low appetite and energy. The weekend of April 4th I got reports that she’d fallen out of bed twice and sustained several bruises. I hoped they were telling me the truth; I’d heard PCAs sometimes got impatient with the “difficult” residents. The floor nurse initially suggested we buy Mom a new, firmer mattress that would be harder for her to wriggle off. But the next day, when I offered to have one delivered, she discouraged me, suggesting I wait and see how my mother did over the next few days. I think she suspected Mom was already sick with COVID.

I then learned that doctors would no longer be visiting the facility and that all medical issues would be handled by phone. How would this work for residents with dementia, many of whom were non-verbal or, like my mom, resolutely committed to saying they felt fine in an effort to preserve their independence? The floor nurse said she could “neither confirm nor deny” that anyone on the unit had COVID. On April 6th I tried to reach the Executive Director, whose daily updates had ceased mentioning anything at all about active COVID cases in the building. Again, no response.

I then heard from the Resident Care Supervisor. She confirmed “a few positive cases of the Corona Virus” on my mother’s floor, adding that, “The residents who are confirmed positive are sitting together for meals. We are trying to keep them as segregated from the rest of the unit as possible but due to their cognitive limitations, it has been a difficult task.” I already suspected from what the floor nurse had said and not said that residents were not being separated in any meaningful way. The Resident Care Supervisor wrote that she was unable to test any more residents based on a directive from the Divisional Director of Nursing, someone at the corporate level. I wondered how many residents had been tested to begin with and why they were told to stop.

By this time the doctor, unable to see Mom in person, had given her a presumptive diagnosis for COVID. We waited anxiously, hoping she would pull through as she had with several prior heath crises. I went to the facility to drop off some supplies and saw an ambulance waiting outside the building; I later learned it was for one of the janitors, a young man who went in and out of the memory care unit regularly. I hope he’s still alive. I wonder why he was still working while he wasn’t feeling well. Perhaps he wasn’t offered paid time off for illness? And how did he slip through the supposedly airtight daily employee screening system that monitored each and every symptom? 

In the early morning of April 8th my mother spiked a very high fever and had to be hospitalized. Our last conversation took place just before she left her room in memory care; I was able to FaceTime with her. Mom was fully dressed and sitting upright, alert. She became angry and scared when I told her she was going to the hospital. I said I loved her and that she had to go there in order to get well. She shook her head and covered her eyes. I never saw her again.

That day my sister and I did, at last, receive an email (cheerfully addressed, “Hi ladies”) from the Executive Director, confirming that the ambulance had picked up our mother. He subsequently removed me from the daily email recipient’s list.

The rest of my mother’s story includes a stay at a small local hospital where she tested positive for COVID but was stable with nasal oxygen, temperature down. The doctor reported her chest X-ray showed pneumonia consistent with COVID. Mom was out of it but still speaking and eating. After five days we were told she no longer needed hospitalization and would be sent to a rehab facility, that we had to move fast before she lost the room. We requested a second chest X-ray to monitor any progression in the lungs but were told they only performed repeat X-rays on intubated patients. Was this rush to move her because they needed the hospital bed for someone else? I’ll never know.

Mom was transferred on April 13th to a rehab facility. Hours later we learned she’d arrived in a fetal position and non-verbal, a delirious condition far from her normal baseline and from which she never emerged. “Well, this is her new baseline,” the nursing supervisor told me when I finally reached her late that evening. Mom refused to eat. She was turned down for physical or occupational therapy services because she “doesn’t follow commands” but they could not treat her for delirium. I raced up to that facility with a package of family photos and familiar items to help her orient, but of course could only drop it at the door of the building. The rehab was so overwhelmed that it was impossible to reach anyone there directly; we had to call an off-site social worker who was able to read us notes in my mother’s medical record but could offer no hands-on reports. At no time were we able to speak with the doctor there.

Four days later, on April 17th, like so many COVID-19 patients, Mom crashed. We received a cryptic message in early afternoon from the social worker that there was “a setback”; it was 7:30 PM before we could reach anyone who had seen my mother, and by 9:30 PM she was dead. Within moments of delivering this news, the rehab nurse apologetically asked me to please call the funeral home right away; they needed the body picked up within the next few hours.

POST-SCRIPT:  On what turned out to be my mother’s last day at the assisted living that had become her home, I received a long email from the CEO of the corporation—a pretense-laden load of PR mumbo-jumbo from a person I doubt has ever spent a moment working directly with elders, or, indeed, with workers. Here are some highlights from the letter, with my interpretive “translation” (I’ve changed the name of the facility to “Our For-Profit Company”): 

“Since the spread of COVID-19 was confirmed in the United States, Our For-Profit Company teams have moved swiftly to implement numerous protocols and precautionary measures throughout our communities to safeguard the health and well-being of residents, clients and team members.”  TRANSLATION: We’re cobbling together whatever precautions we can without losing too much money.

“Our For-Profit Company quickly established a cross-functional, inter-disciplinary COVID-19 task force that continuously monitors developments and facilitates ongoing dialogue between our community leaders and health care professionals across the country.” TRANSLATION: Last year, after a prior year net loss of over $74 million, we hired 82 new executive directors and 9 other senior executive level staff, and these high paid executives will confer on Zoom from their homes while our thousands of low-paid and under-appreciated frontline staff try to cope. [Note: Actual figures from an online industry publication article.]

“Our highly experienced health care professionals continue to ensure that best practices are shared across our communities through open and direct lines of communication between all levels of community leadership and frontline, health care practitioners and caregivers.” TRANSLATION: We will keep transparency to a minimum, ensuring that neither frontline staff, nor residents and their families know what’s really going on.

“Our For-Profit Company team members are dedicated professionals, and we commend them for their tireless, ongoing efforts to minimize opportunities for exposure and transmission of the virus.” TRANSLATION: We will not immediately offer our employees hazard pay, prompting many of them to call out indefinitely. We will not hire enough additional staff to keep everyone safe.

“Our For-Profit Company communities are taking proactive measures, such as ensuring the highest standards of cleanliness, enforcing social distancing, screening all team members and essential visitors before entering communities, and vigilantly monitoring the health of everyone living and working in our communities.” TRANSLATION: As a result of severe understaffing, some cleanliness and sanitizing practices will fall by the wayside. Residents with special needs such as dementia will not be physically distanced from each other, which may exponentially increase their risk of exposure and death.

“We have sufficient levels of the products required to meet the needs of residents and protect our communities, including personal protective equipment. Please know that we are making every effort to safeguard our communities, our residents and our team members while continuing to provide an exceptional experience.” TRANSLATION: We will provide PPE to our staff only when we finally have to admit there are COVID cases in our facilities. We are reluctant to offer PPE to private aides working with our residents, even though they’re in our communities every day making our workload lighter at no cost to us.

In April, I read an article in HuffPost that quoted a Yale epidemiologist who said the way the coronavirus pandemic is being mishandled in the U.S. is “close to genocide by default.” He was referring to the vast majority of deaths from COVID-19 taking place in communities of color and called it “mass death by public policy.” I agree. I’d add that many private, for-profit corporations seem to be following the lead of the government’s total lack of unified response to the crisis. Their disregard for people whose lives are considered dispensable extends to communities of elders and people with disabilities (including cognitive decline). And, of course, to the wage-earners who make those very businesses function. I know that no one ever anticipated or prepared for a pandemic like this. But, as so many of us are being forced by the current circumstances to reconsider our priorities, it’s enraging not to see that same deep reevaluation in the institutions that promise to care for those we love. 

Around the time of this writing I learned that eleven of the thirty residents on Mom’s memory care floor had died of COVID, and three more were hospitalized and perhaps have since died as well. You do the math. Elder care facilities are only required by law to report the number of residents that die in-house. So, the deaths of my mother and her neighbors are not in that particular public record.

The rehab facility where my mother died did report her death—but not of COVID-19. When we finally received the death certificate, many weeks after her harrowing demise, the cause of death was listed only as, “cardiac arrest.”

©Donna Gallers

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Why I’m Going to Auschwitz Again

A year ago, before my first trip to Poland (to attend an international workshop on healing from war that included visits to the death camps Auschwitz and Birkenau), I’d never have imagined going back. It was on my bucket list, something I felt I needed to do, but surely only once.  As the granddaughter of Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Warsaw, I felt terrified to even set foot in Poland, much less in the death camps. My singular focus was on surviving the trip; I didn’t consider that I might actually want to return.

And yet, here we are.  The plane ticket is booked and I leave in a few days, back to Poland to continue building my relationship with that place.  It’s not a vacation, but I am looking forward to being there.

Why? I’m not just returning to bear witness to the horrors of history, or to further ponder what may have happened to my forever-lost family and community members.  One trip may have been enough for that.

I’m going back because I believe in the possibility of healing from war.  Many years into working on my own war-related hurts, I feel hopeful enough to continue the process, despite how hard it remains.

Like many of us, I’m grasping for hope these days. I don’t need to summarize the catalog of domestic and international challenges and disasters that our world is facing.  As a human being, I feel scared. As a Jew, perhaps even more so.  Ongoing public and often violent declarations that it’s okay to be racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, misogynist, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, anti-working class, anti-science, and in denial about climate change (and so many more rigid and irrational ideas) often leave me feeling overwhelmed, immobilized and ineffectual to change any of it.

So, it’s good for me to remember a recent time when I did something powerful, despite my gut-crushing fear.  Here’s just a taste of what happened when I went to Poland and Auschwitz/Birkenau last year:

When my plane landed in Warsaw, I felt inexplicably like I’d come home.  I’d been conditioned to fear everything Polish, but I connected viscerally to the zest my grandparents must have had for their pre-war lives there, and I also loved it. The experience of being there fleshed out what had been a rather flat picture in my mind.

I toured the former Warsaw Ghetto with a Polish genealogist who shared stories of how her own gentile grandmother risked her life to smuggle food to her Jewish friends inside.

I toured the huge Jewish Cemetery with a Polish scholar who’s devoted her career to understanding the Jewish socialist movement – the Bund – that my family was active in.  She showed me things in the cemetery I never would have known about.

I stood on Nowolipie Street where my grandmother’s family lived. Not one building remains from before the war, but I pocketed a tiny chunk of what I like to think may be rubble from that time. I felt a sense of peace in the quiet residential neighborhood that’s there today.

I met Polish Jews who grew up in the post-war years and under Communism, and Polish Gentiles who’d learned as adults that they have Jewish heritage.

I attended one of Warsaw’s well known outdoor Chopin concerts in Lazienki Park and deepened my appreciation for the love my grandparents and their comrades had for music and the arts.

At the Healing from War workshop, I met people from around the world who are committed to healing from war and ultimately ending it. We pulled out the stops to listen to each other’s stories, and to tell our own – no matter how gruesome or difficult.  We cried, shook with fear, raged, laughed, shared meals together.

I heard firsthand accounts of the effects of war on people from Africa, Japan,  Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Israel and elsewhere.  I held hands and listened to people who have fought in wars, been displaced from their homes, lived in colonized places, lost their native languages.

I told significant parts of my family’s Holocaust story to a group that included a German grandchild of a Nazi, and I heard significant parts of her story.

I observed many people whose native language is other than English working hard to communicate in my language, and was inspired to dispense with my shyness  (and privilege) to speak in every language I know even a little bit, no matter how many mistakes I made.

I gave a presentation entirely in Yiddish to a group of 75 non-Yiddish speakers. I did interpreting for groups from Spanish into English, and from English into Spanish. I learned a few words of Polish, Japanese, Greek, Euskera (Basque). I resurrected my extremely rudimentary French to have conversations with my Polish roommate, who spoke French fluently.

My Polish roommate and I became dear friends and trusted allies.  I showed her the few photos I have of my grandparents before they left Warsaw, and she was able to identify some of the locations. I learned how devastated the Poles had been by the Nazi occupation, and how terrorized.  I had never considered I could have a Polish Gentile friend, but I experienced the possibility of human connection to bridge the vastness of difference and suffering.

And finally, yes, I went to the death camps. Auschwitz, with it’s orderly brick buildings and neat sidewalks, and Birkenau, with its barren blocks of wooden bunkers – the concentration camp I’d always imagined.  I walked through the famous “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate to be surrounded by barbed wire fences. I saw jumbles of shoes, piles of pots and pans, a mountain of shorn women’s hair.  I stepped inside a gas chamber.  I stood just a few feet from the ovens.  I walked by the pond where the Nazis used to dump the ashes. I wept. I was furious. I felt numb.

Yes, yes, yes, I did all those things. And yes, I’m going to do them again.

Why?

Because I’m not finished healing from war yet. And because I’m grateful that I have the resources and relationships to try to.

Because in doing “healing from war” work I’ve finally connected with my grandparents’ legacy of activism in a way that makes sense to me, and I’m starting to figure out ways to bring that home and spread it around.

Because although I’m still afraid, I’m also more certain I’ll survive.

Because the camps are a terrible reminder of the worst inhumanity imaginable, but their emptiness today encourages me that I don’t have to live inside them in my imagination anymore.

Because the deer that bound freely through the fields between the birch trees at Birkenau are beautiful and benign.

Because I’m buoyed by the thousands and thousands of visitors from all backgrounds who dare to look and truly listen to this story (despite some who are so shut down emotionally that they take Instagram pictures of themselves clowning around at the camps.)

Because I’m moved by hearing people who have lived through recent wars in their countries but never learned much about the Nazi Holocaust, and perhaps never met a Jew before, immediately understand and relate, and say that we are one.

Because I have Polish friends and colleagues now, and I can tell we care deeply about one another.

Because I’m learning Polish so I can speak with my new Polish friends in their language – and I will know both languages spoken by my family there.

Because after returning home last year I got an incredible job working with veterans and I have better attention to listen to their stories because I’ve been here.

Because healing from war in Poland is helping me to finally see that I can thrive.

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Dreaming About War

I’ve been having Holocaust dreams lately.  Not actual scenes of concentration camps or ghettos, but disturbing scenarios with enough related resonances  to let me know I’m in the territory–cozying up with the inherited terror of my family’s refugee/survivor history.

In one dream, my husband comes upstairs from the laundry room carrying a huge sack of clothes slung over his shoulder. Someone has stolen our brand new laundry cart, which I’d left downstairs.  I rant about the cost of a new cart and fret about not being able to trust our neighbors anymore.  In real life, the next morning, my husband reported that I’d cried out in my sleep, “What are we going to do?!!”

In another dream, I’m overseas at a huge conference center.  My flight home is in a couple of hours but I haven’t packed yet and can’t remember where my room is. I begin a race against the clock to find my room, get my stuff, and make it to the airport.  Nobody will help me, so I run around anxiously, in and out of buildings and through wooded paths.  Finally, I see some members of my group descending a giant staircase with their suitcases. “Wait for me!!” I cry, desperate not to be left behind, alone. Continue reading “Dreaming About War”