Warsaw 3

Natan Rappaport’s The Fight stands in what was once the heart of Warsaw Ghetto. One side of the monument shows the heroic, muscular figures of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising with Mordechai Anielewicz standing in the center. A woman holds her infant aloft. A man rises from what can easily be imagined as the ashes of the ghetto. Another militant woman clutches a gun and looks fearlessly on her opponents. 

The Jews look like Greek Gods; braver and more beautiful than human beings – let alone emaciated, oppressed prisoners with nothing left to lose. The monument of course has been thoroughly critiqued, including by the late Anielewicz himself, who said something along the lines of, “Do you think we ever looked like that?” Furthermore, the effort to portray the militants as exceptional Jews fighting for their dignity reduces their complex identities to something simple in our imaginations: heroes. Remembering them as such ensures that we forget the complexities, the infuriating intricacies of their identities. 

In a sense, the front of the sculpture can be seen as similar to the back of the sculpture: a line of Jews with ill-defined faces march to their deaths under the watchful eye of soldiers bearing ideologies of mass destruction. While they are intended to be shown as the ones that the resistors avenge, viewers are left with an impression that they were some how less knowledgeable, less able, inherently different from the exceptional figures represented on the front. Thus, they too are misrepresented, conflated with one another until we almost forget what makes their humanity theirs. 

It is worth saying that these critiques seem somewhat obvious to students of Jewish studies today who have the advantage of archives, seasoned professors, and hearing generations of scholarly debate. And so perhaps the most valuable part of the monument comes after the critique, when one tries to make the figures on both sides out, realizing that both sides of the monument post critique ask them the same questions. Who were they? What was it like to resist with nothing left to lose? What were all of those people thinking in Umschagplatz? What aspirations did they have? How did they define their Judaism? 

The questions are of course endless, and I can only imagine the ones that arose for my classmates. We too are subsumed under one identity but enjoy the richness of the differences between one another every day in this unusual and eerie place. We rushed off to the next Jewish history site before we could even discuss amongst each other, remembering the ambitions of our day and considering only for a moment what the resistors might think of us.

Ariana Lee '15

Krakow 1

What once was the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp has been burned to the ground and hidden by a rolling grassy landscape and only a few small signs, only cement foundations disguised by beer bottles and brush, only vast stretches of gravel that hint at mass graves, and only slabs of stone wedged into the ground would ever betray the late arbeitslager – a word that reduces mass violence, Nazis with moral platforms so dismantled that they shoot children before breakfast as a game, murder, bodies blasted apart, exposed sinews, cracked ribs, minds reduced to nothingness, blank stares, bodies so thin they no longer look human into a quotidian compound – and as I walked up the path hoping for a sign, anything, I thought that perhaps this place held the future, past, and present, and a power to remember us in this space and collect every detail that we notice, or that it has no memory at all and that knowing that nothing would be known was the source of my own internal bleeding, a lack of understanding that goes with the sense that a door in a nightmare has been flung open, only to reveal that nothing is what was expected and the horror is even greater than what was expected because what lies on the other side is nothingness and when I stared into the hollow eyes of commemorated survivors that stood at least thirty feet above me I was struck by a blood thinning terror, and a sense that even this moment I would not always remember and that our minds erode away even the most profound emotions, which lapse into oblivion rendering us hypocritical for suggesting that some things should always be remembered when in fact we cannot remember the overlapping, cannonading senses of helplessness, rage, and fear we feel in the instant we see something as shocking as a decrepit basement with bullet holes and names scratched in the wall as a last hail Mary to authenticate the humanity that was inherent to their bodies to Nazis who did not give a damn, when we see something as shocking as this place that has been erased, commemorated, and used for a picnic by aimless teenagers hoping that this beer will bring them a satisfying conversation in the deepening twilight juxtaposed to a lurking sense of the imminent specter of death.

Ariana Lee '15

Lublin

Dear Heniek,

This is a love letter. 

I know that may sound strange because you are long gone, because we have never met. 

But this is a love letter that I hope finds you well.

I wanted to say that in Lublin, I felt your presence –

And your ringing absence too.

I walked through that place where someone you loved snapped a photo of you with your mother

And your father too.

I walked to that place 

where you clutched your knobby knees with your doughy hands.

I might have walked through the cobblestones where your house once stood 

Where you might have once walked potbelly-first basking in your family’s delight,

Where you learned your first words,

Where you learned what Judaism was and was not.

Dear Heniek,

This is a love letter.

I know that may sound strange because you are long gone, because we have never met.

A love letter to tell you that someone knows that you were a person.

That someone knows you noticed details of your life – 

your likes, your dislikes, 

the thrill of the open market square, boredom and grey emotions, 

the hardness of pews, the warmth of a human body, 

the palace on the hill,

the vastness of the unknown, 

or maybe the delight of predictability.

Or perhaps a smile flickering in the black of the ghetto.

Dear Heniek,

This is a love letter.

I know that may sound strange because you are long gone, because we have never met in person. 

I know it may sound strange to say that I met you 

after you were as some say

Resettled, transported, contained, and exterminated.

That I met you after people who lived their lives as 

acts of subtraction and division 

watched your ashes dissipate into the silenced landscape.

But dearest Heniek,

This is a love letter,

A toast to the sound of your soul,

A moment of silence to acknowledge that you were.

I hope you found some place to rest,

Perhaps among those slender and bony birch trees,

Perhaps where you cling to walls of family homes, bearing witness to their daily life.

But most of all, I hope

That you are still somewhere 

Dressed in all white – 

Experiencing normality, relief, and delight. 

Ariana Lee '15

Warsaw Part 2

Often when going through museums I find myself spending my time irregularly--minutes on pictures and seconds on text. I call it "going at my own pace," but what it really is, is me speeding through the parts that bore me and moving on to the interactive sections.

How do you react however, when your tour is being led by one of the men whom designed the gallery? There's no chance to speed ahead, only the opportunity to finally listen. The text and images on the walls of The Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw compliment each other in a way that leaves the story to draw the image, and conversely the picture can write the words. 

Professor Teller didn't begin his portion of the four and a half hour tour by simply restating the text written on the walls--he did what only the best of professors do and told us why the information is laid out in the way it is and why it needs to be remembered. The museum suddenly became less an abstract part of our ten day trip and more of a place I desired to absorb.

The extraordinarily detailed accounts of first person narratives of Jewish and Polish relations can only be felt at the museum itself, so I won't even attempt to summarize it here, because there is no summarizing that history. What I can attempt to do though is recount the extreme amount of detail that went into making the museum's interior decoration so vibrantly reinforce the stories inside. 

I'm currently in a class called Art of the Book, where I learn how the physical creation of a book can more effectively reflect its content. When we create our own books, we need to ask ourselves "why does this book need to exist in the realm of physical books, and why can it not be on the internet? Can it be a Buzzfeed Article?" 

The information in the Polin Museum, in theory, can be on the internet. A photo, and then click--some text. Another photo, and then some more text. What Professor Teller and the rest of the team behind Polin managed to create is a reason to ditch the screen and get off the couch, and travel 4,000 miles. They made Polish-Jewish history, as a series of events, a tangible experience that extends beyonds the classroom and beyond the history channel. 

In the museum, the roof of the synagogue model displayed the 12 zodiac signs. Underneath it, a touch-screen computer allows the user to click on the symbols and learn their significance to Judaism. That couldn't have been a buzzfeed article.

If you wanted to view some photos of Holocaust survivors, you had to "process" the photos in a shallow pool of virtual water. That couldn't be a buzzfeed article.

It was so dark at one point, that I had to squint when I walked through the entire section of 1939 to 1945. Not only was the room dark, but so was it's content and its spirit. 

Not every group can be lucky enough to have tour guides as thorough as Professor Teller and Joanna Ficus. That goes without saying. But for the first time in a museum, I didn't walk ahead. I stopped. I listened. I paid attention when I thought I knew what was going on. And for the first time in a very long time, I left a museum feeling like my soul had soaked up a thousand years of history.

Jake Moffett '15

Warsaw Part 1

In the wake of World War II, surviving Poles and Jews were used to the idea that life in Warsaw was not perfect. However, the communist government’s antisemitic campaign of 1968 that accused Jews of being too supportive of Israel hit too close to home for Jews. About 80 percent of Jews fled their homes and Jan was among them. He was only sixteen. Born seven years after the war, he was taking no chances.

Today, Jan lives in Warsaw, which he believes “is still a holy Jewish city” despite the fact that Jews have been reduced to a mere thousand or so when they once were a third of its population. He is a member of what his rabbi calls a “reformadox” synagogue in the heart of Warsaw. He seems to be one of the most loved and respected members of the community and it’s pretty clear why – he’s the oldest and he’s outgoing and charming too. When we all crowded around him immediately for question and answer despite the fact that there were several other Polish Jews in the room, someone said, “it’s because he’s the wisest.” Jan first laughed humbly and then smirked and whispered in my ear, “They’re right, you know.” 

Jan was born into a Jewish family, but his parents were certainly different kinds of Warsaw Jews. His mother was Hasidic while his father was liberal and, according to Jan, a “Polish patriot.” They met in music conservatory and subsequently became professors When the Germans invaded in 1939, Jan’s father, who was also a firefighter, stole a fire truck, packed his family into it, and drove his family to Romania where they waited for the war to end. When it did, they returned to Poland only to be greeted by a communist government that had little interest in Jews. 

Jan’s father clearly dictated the culture of the house; Jan was a relatively secular Jew, and did not identify strongly with his faith. When he fled Poland, however, Jan first stayed with a cousin in Belgium and then looked for work in Canada where he met his first wife, a practicing Jew. He was embraced by her family and quickly learned more about his own traditions under their wing.

Jan’s Jewish-Polish identity, however, still lived within him. When he visited Poland with his wife who was embarking on “The March of the Living” – a march from Auschwitz to Birkenau to prove that Jews live on – he was unnerved that the organization would not let her leave her hotel to socialize with Poles and/or Polish Jews. It seemed to him that popular Jewish memory sought to conflate Poland with death and Israel with life while he knew Poland was much more complex than that. He reflected, “We resent that…we want them to see that there is Jewish life in Poland.”

In 1999, after a divorce, Jan moved back to Poland “for love.” He had met another Jewish womyn who he had subsequently married. He once again settled in Warsaw and this time he felt his Jewish identity strongly. He calls Polish Jewish identity “a big mess,” but he also loves that messiness and accepts it for what it is. He loves Israel. He hates Obama. He believes that Poland is one of the safest places for Jews but fears that Russia could invade, that war could be upon Poland at any moment, that history could repeat itself. 

I spent a half hour or so speaking with Jan after the formal question and answer period was over. When it became clear I was not Jewish, he said asked me what I was. I said that I was Iranian, Chinese, and American, but it’s complicated. The truth is that allowing identities to live within me has been a complex process with which I am still engaging. Giving priority to one identity has always elicited feelings of inauthenticity from knowing that I was silencing the others. I envy Jews in synagogues, because there are no physical spaces, rituals, and histories that I feel comfortable claiming as my own. Holding my identities has meant searching for answers in people, places, and books, reconstructing a narrative of my past out of the fragments of my present, knowing that complexity and intensity will always be uncomfortable and yet the places that I feel most comfortable. And when Jan asked me if it was difficult for me to not feel I was from a place, I was touched that he was able to understand so quickly and told him that that was why I enjoyed talking to Polish Jews. He told me that the combination was a good one and gave me a warm smile. 

We moved on quickly: I suggested that he read a book about Eugene Braunwald and he said he would try but also – I think genuinely – asked me if I could translate it into Polish. I guffawed. We spent the rest of our conversation laughing together and exchanging jokes about our cultures. When we parted, he shook my hand and told me to enjoy the rest of my time in Poland. I know I will.

-Ariana Lee '15