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.
