In many ways, this was the most exhausting day of our trip to date. We didn’t walk all that much, not like yesterday or the day before. But we went to the site of the extermination camp at Treblinka where over 800,000 Jews were killed. Unlike Auschwitz-Birkenau that is teaming with tourists, Treblinka is still in the middle of nowhere. Only one other group was there. It’s a quiet place meant for contemplation. A circle of stones indicates the towns, villages, and shetetls where Jews were arrested—their homes. The site memorializes communities that are no more. The brutalities at Treblinka were worse than at Auschwitz-Birkenau if you can believe that because people were often beaten, raped, or tortured before they were killed. It’s a difficult site to see, moving and painful. Later we re-emerged in 2019 in Warsaw for a tour of the city and a feast at a great restaurant…feeling conflicted and confused. Does one have a right to enjoy oneself after Treblinka?

Here I am with Jan Karski, a Polish Resistance hero who informed the Allies about the Warsaw ghetto and other aspects of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. He is a hero in Poland, and his statue is everywhere. (Notice Jan is smoking)! There’s also a shot with my wonderful students on our way to Warsaw via train.

“Every Jewish street in Warsaw was a town of its own.”   So said Isaac Bashevis Singer who grew up on Krochmalna Street in Warsaw, and made the street come alive in his novels. “Shosha” is my favorite.  When I was a teenager, I devoured Singer novels, and I could well image the courtyards of Warsaw with all the joys and sorrows of that life, the center of Yiddish culture in the prewar environment.  That world is long gone, destroyed by the Nazis in World War II. On October 12, 1940, the Nazis ordered that a ghetto be established in Warsaw, and it eventually included 400,000 people in 1.3 square miles.  The inhabitants starved; disease became rampant, especially tuberculosis which was more serious than the typhus epidemics one hears about so often.  During the summer and fall of 1942 most of the Jews in the ghettos were deported to Treblinka although some were killed in the ghetto.   The well-known ghetto uprising began on April 19, 1943 and lasted until May 16, 1943 and during that time the remaining Jews were either killed in their bunkers or eventually captured and deported, but they had put up heroic resistance.  World War II ended the rich Yiddish culture that had existed before the war…what Singer wrote about.  Today, virtually nothing exists excepts some monuments put up to commemorate what was.  I exhausted my students today walking them around the former ghetto where there is nothing to see. Everything was destroyed.  I hope they realize that “presence of absence” and what it means.  Even my beloved Krochmalna Street exists only in my imagination.  It’s just a dirty street today with nothing but a plaque to indicate what it was, what it had been to a young Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Holocaust Landscapes by Tim Cole, the chapter on “GHETTO” tells the accounts of Janina Bauman and her family who are Jews, and live in the Warsaw ghetto. Janina had a privileged upbringing and the status of having the means, gave the Bauman’s an opportunity, most did not have in the ghetto. They were able to pay smugglers to get food, medicine, other items from the other side of the wall. As I am reading this, I’m imagining a wall, maybe of average, even a little taller in size.
While on our tour of the Krakow ghetto, our tour guide, Maciek Zabierowski pointed out that the Krakow wall is the original wall from the war. After he stated that fact, all I thought about were the smugglers and what it took to scale the walls for not just the Bauman family, but others too. The ability to be completely incognito and transparent from the guards, both leaving and returning to the ghetto is simply… remarkable. The lengths these individuals went through, risking their own lives, daily, just to provide a piece of benevolence from the outside world.

On this trip to Birkenau the sky has been difficult to understand. Lots of big clouds, but today there was a rainbow over Birkenau. A rainbow. I don’t think I can say more than that. Earlier, while in the Women’s Camp B1A, I was searching for the section of the camp built by women deported from Western Europe in the summer and fall of 1942. They were the first women to arrive in Birkenau. Esther Fersztenfeld, the teenager I’m writing about, was among them. She arrived on convoy 34 from France and survived about six weeks, dying on October 28, 1942. Auschwitz-Birkenau is hard to understand; the landscape is difficult to read. I thought I would come once, but this is my sixth trip.

Rainbow over Birkenau; 2) Big sky over the Women’s Camp at B1A; 3) Near exit gate from Women’s Camp, B1A, where some of the first barracks were built at Birkenau beginning in March 1942.

Students mean the world to me. They are a gift that always makes me think about things I might otherwise ignore. Most students would never come on a Holocaust Study Abroad. Why would anyone want to spend time with such a devastating subject? I’ve learned it takes special students…those who want to contemplate that slippery slop that can send the human pursuit on a destructive fall. I hope the students who come with me to this place will always remember the lesson I try to teach…we have to be constantly vigilant about understanding who we are as individuals and what values we want to cling to, otherwise, anything is possible.

On this trip I have 7 amazing students and a great colleague, Dr. Tom Chapman. In the photo the students observe the Bedzin exhibit in Birkenau…faces of those who did not survive.

Before World War II, Krakow was home to around 65,000 Jews. The current Jewish population is officially unknown, but unofficially thought to be anywhere between 300-600. Just like the population itself, Jewish history in Krakow, and Poland in general, is a shadow of its former self. Traces of Jewish history can be seen on a simple walk through town, with scars on door frames where Mezuzahs once sat, to dilapidated synagogues that have been converted into book stores, and to sites like the former concentration camp of Plaszow. It has been 70 years since the Holocaust, and the Polish government is still trying to figure out what to do with the memory present at Plaszow. Just last year, it was riddled with litter and graffiti, and we witnessed a biker riding through and a father pushing his son in a stroller as if they were wandering through a park. Signs have been added to alert people that they are in fact entering a site of a former Nazi Concentration Camp, and the state is working on establishing a small museum on location.

One of the first things I realized upon my return to Krakow was the increase in tourism around the city, specifically in Kazimirus. Everywhere I turn there are street cars plastered with labels for tours of “Old Town, Schindler’s Factory, Kazimirus, Ghetto,” all in one for less than 50 Zlotty (the Polish currency, equivalent to $12.99). Restaurants have been created in the recent years to mimic “Jewish style” cuisine and atmosphere. Whether or not they are successful may not matter to most visitors, as the Jewish Quarter has become a sort of Jewish ‘Disneyland’ in Krakow. Ruth Gruber addresses the issue of Jewish Commercialization in her article, “Scenes from a Krakow Cafe.” Although she is not a fan of the commercial exploitation of Jewish culture via wooden figurines depicting stereotypes of Jews, Gruber also recognizes that some good does come from this new sense of awareness of Krakow’s Jewish History. Schindler’s List started conversations about the Holocaust in Krakow, and the city and its Jewish inhabitants are attempting to understand how to exist out of and move away from the shadow of Auschwitz.

For as long as I can remeber, apple pie has been the go-to dessert after anymeal, including breakfast. Because let’s be real here, who doesn’t eat apple pie for breakfast? A slice of warm apples sitting in its gooey goodness of sugar and cinnamon and nutmeg, embrassed in a hug of a flaky buttery crust, tends to hit the spot. Ordering dessert the other night while in Krakow, my slice of apple pie was cold. First thing that crossed my mind was, “Who eats apple pie cold?” The anticipation and hype I created in my mind, waiting for that warm slice of apple pie, was a bit of a let down.