Ponderings on Poland
It is not hard to feel that Poland is one vast graveyard if one had never been there. The history of the Shoah comes before it with force and clarity. It is harder to grasp this image when in Poland because of the beauty of the land. It is full of forests, rich and fertile soil, and abundant rivers and rain. How can such a land so full of God’s gifts harbor a people who would allow this to happen? And so fully as to virtually decimate one tenth of its population. One tenth. Ten percent. Three and a half million men, women and children from Poland alone. The flower of an ancient people.
I saw the forests that house mass graves, and the compounds which systematically collected, separated and confiscated (in many different ways), exterminated and disposed of the millions. I saw the synagogues, yeshivas, houses, city neighborhoods, and small towns – shtetls- the victims used to live in.
The Poles, of course, did not cause this. They did not build, collect, transport, or organize. It was the Germans, the Nazis- a people devoted to self-centered mastery over all. They had the state-of-the-art science, engineering, and organizational know how. Before World War II, it was that Germans who led, not the Americans, though time and
distance can shadow this awareness.
Imagine the billions of dollars (in today’s money) and thousands of man-hours it would take to collect a group of people from every neighborhood in every city, town, village and hamlet to the smallest collection of people on the European continent, and move them from their homes to concentration points within their region, as a first step. Then imagine the financial and organizational effort it would take transport them on the already existing infrastructure of train tracks (after adjusting them to fit this particular purpose), requisitioning trains organizing embarkments and disembarkments from places remote and close to Poland, their destination.
Then imagine the financial, human and organizational resources required to invent a new, efficient way to kill these people. To see the extent of this ingenuity, I am offering a context and time-line.
The killing didn’t begin in earnest until Germany invaded Russia in June of 1941. They just relied on the natural effects of crowding and poor resources to kill the collected Jews. It was effective, but slow and incomplete. It would not fulfill the ultimate goal of making the land ruled by Nazis free of Jews. By the way, no other group was collected and systematically and stolen from, like the Nazis did to the Jews. They were taken from their homes, allowed to bring what a suitcase would carry. Some brought carts. No cars, trucks, or other means of conveyance was allowed. All that was left behind was taken first by the Germans, then the indigenous peoples. Scattered apologies aside, there has been no talk of compensation for these stolen goods. In fact, Jews were still killed after the war by Poles who did not want to return their ill-gotten goods.
The Invasion of Russia began the germ of an idea which became concrete six months later at Wannsee, Germany. The problem- The Nazis inherited 3.5 million Jewish Poles and 2.5 million Jews under Soviet influence. No one else wants them, and Madagascar is too remote for an immediate solution. The answer– the most efficient way to remove the Jews from the Fatherland is to kill them. They started with trained SS units called Einsatzgrupen, who systematically killed mostly Jews in the Soviet occupied areas of Europe, including Eastern Poland. Mass graves containing from 800 to 33,000 Jews now mar Poland, and Eastern Europe. A good start, think the German scientists and planners, but it wastes bullets and some (not all or most) of their proud ‘soldiers’ are becoming demoralized from such close contact with their victims. Still almost 1.5 million killed this way is effective.
Next step- Chelmno, whose operations began on December 7,1941- moved Jews to their graves in sealed trucks, while pumping the carbon monoxide back into the cabin. It was a good start, the Nazis surmised. But it will kill only 800-1000/ day. And disposal is still an issue. Only about 300,000 were killed there. Not efficient enough for an advanced German scientist.
OK, now crank it up. Keep the carbon monoxide, but bring the people to chambers in camps where they can be gassed, then buried in mass graves. Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec did this effectively killing 1.5 million. Don’t let my glossing over diminish the amount of money and manpower needed to finance, build (both the camps and the connections to them) and staff these camps. The scientists are impressed, but they still can’t accept this as the epitome of achievement. More resources were devoted to a conjoint idea- using a concentration camp for labor and extermination as well.
Enter Majdanek, just outside Lublin. The other camps were far from urban areas, but this was an attempt to reduce travel time and be closer to resources. This was the first camp to use Zyklon B, a cyanide salt which aerosolizes upon exposure to air. I could see the characteristic cyan blue staining on the walls of the gas chambers. One could hold 100 people, another 200. The new gas reduced the total killing time from one hour to 20 minutes. At Majdanek, they started with mass graves (the old fashioned way), but introduced crematoria as another advancement. The ashes were spread over the adjacent fields. It was easier than mass graves. Furthermore, when the Nazis realized they might lose the war, they exhumed the graves they could find and burned the rotting bodies. 300,000 were killed there in this fashion.
All these led up to Auschwitz. There was a camp in operation already, were unspeakable atrocities were performed, (and they did have a small gas chamber) but it wasn’t until the construction of Auschwitz II- Birkenau that the killing began there in earnest. This was an area of 40 sq. km. newly constructed to accommodate all the ideas and experiments for killing from the previous sites, and only one year after the decision for the Final Solution was made. It would kill 1.1 Million Jews. Expansion plans were made for collecting and killing the world’s Jews in a section of Auschwitz called “Mexico”- a subject for a different time.
Auschwitz II- Birkenau was a concentration camp for labor in factories surrounding it. Mostly the slaves worked to death at the I.G. Farben synthetic rubber plant some kilometers away. They were tattooed with a number upon arrival and showering (in a large building in the compound called ‘Canada”). Most never got there, but were immediately separated at the disembarkation station in the center of the camp to be stripped naked and go directly into one of four gigantic gas chambers. Each was capable of gassing 2000 people at once. 15 crematoria supported each crematorium and when than was not enough, the remainder of the corpses were burned in pyres, like Belzec and Majdanek.
This was literally accelerating on from December, 1941 to the time when each camp was liberated by the opposing force. In other words, despite decreasing resources to fight a war that was going against them, the Nazis consistently diverted those resources to kill Jews. Some say the diversion was the decisive factor in their losing the war. I don’t think so, but for me, it talks about priorities. It was more important for Hitler and his minions to destroy Jews than to destroy opposing armies.
But what does that say about the Poles? Were they really as overwhelmed, and incapable of fighting the invaders? I heard many accounts of Poles who both protected Jews, and those who turned them in or killed them themselves. It’s a mixed bag. There is no doubt, however that what complicity an individual may have had, few were sorry to see the Jews go. As the old saying goes, “ Don’t go away mad, just go away.”
It did not end there. Of the 3.5 million Polish Jews before the war, only 200,000 survived. Many who tried to return to their homes were murdered in the attempt. Eighteen months after the Russian army freed Western Poland, something happened in the city of Kielce, where 75,000 Jews lived before the war, became a crushing denouement. 200 Jews who had been in hiding, or escaped to Russia, returned to their former city to try to reestablish their lives. On July 6, 1946, a rumor spread that Jews were murdering Polish children to make matzos for Passover- the traditional ‘blood libel’ (no one particularly cared that Passover was already three months past). Within a short time crowds gathered before the building starting a bloody pogrom in which 42 Jews were massacred to death and twice as many wounded. Participating in the massacre were people from all walks of life: peasants, factory workers, house wives, soldiers , students and even members of the intelligentsia. Thousands rushed out into the streets to actively take part , or at least to see the horrors.
This incident convinced the great majority of Polish Jews that there was no home to come back to. And they left for good. It is estimated that there are only 2000 Jews living in Poland today. It left a black mark on Poland and the Church, whose local bishop refused to intervene, though given timely warning, claiming the it was the Jews who brought Communism to Poland.
Anti-Semitism has continued to persist from incidents around Auschwitz to Lech Walensa’s 1991 presidential campaign where he claimed to be 100% Polish in contrast to his opponent’s staff who were ‘hiding their Jewish origins”. It is believed that this turned the tide of his last successful campaign to a victory.
I myself saw many people looking at us, a very Jewish tour group. Most looked with benign curiosity, one in Crakow greeted me with a “shalom”, but a number looked at us, and me directly, with disapproval and rancor. They were older, for the most part. Ironically I saw most of these looks from people who apparently lived in the area which housed the former Warsaw Ghetto, where 500, 000 to 600,000 people were forced to live in a space which formerly housed 130,000 people. At its height 5000 people per month died of starvation.
There is a story of Alexander the Great who visited with the seventy rabbis who translated the Torah from the Hebrew to the Greek. In the course of his visit, two farmers came before the rabbinical court with a problem. One man sold land to the other. Shortly thereafter, the buyer found a large treasure on the land and tried to give it back to the seller.
“I only bought the land”, he claimed.
The seller refused the treasure, saying, “When I sold you the land, I sold you everything in it.”
The rabbis considered the argument, and asked one, “You have a daughter, do you not? And you, a son?” Both answered in the affirmative.
“Then marry them to each other and give the treasure to them as a dowry.”
Alexander laughed, “I would have disposed of them both, and taken the treasure for myself.”
The rabbis asked, “Does the sun shine in your country?”
“Of course,” Alexander responded.
“Does the wind blow and the rains fall?”
“All in their time, and in abundance?”
“Do you have animals and plants there?”
“Of every kind and variety,” Alexander exclaimed.
“That must be it.” said the rabbis. “It is for the sake of these plants and animals that Hashem allows the sun to shine, the wind to blow and the rain to fall.”
It is said that to know how civilized a country is, one need only look at how it treats its prisoners. I would paraphrase that to say to know how civilized a country is, one need only at how it treats its Jews. So it must be in Poland, a beautiful country whose civility must be questioned because its inhabitants have lost their rudder, that Hashem protects its plants and animals.
