Later this month we will be travelling to
Poland. It remains one of the most religious countries in
Europe. There are Catholic shrines everywhere, and main streets
and airports are name for the late John Paul II, the Polish
pope.
I was born in the city of Czestochowa, site
of a well-known Catholic pilgrimage site, the Jasna Gora
Monastery, with its famed icon of the Black Madonna. It was July
of 1945.
Czestochowa had beoame one of the
most industrialized cities in newly independent Poland after
the First World War. In 1925, 136 factories including 17 big
textile plants operated in the city.
When the German Army
arrived on Sept. 3, 1939, Jews comprised approximately
one-fifth of a population of 138,000. By the end of the War,
fewer than 5,000 survived.
My parents, native Jewish Czestochowers, were
married in 1942, in the Czestochowa ghetto; the rabbi who
married them was shot later that same day.
Though they lost their entire families in the
Holocaust, they survived, after becoming prisoners in the Hugo Schneider
Aktiengesellschaft (HASAG)-Pelcery slave labour camp in
Czestochowa, established by the
Nazis in what had been a textile factory.
It became a massive munitions plant that,
ironically, produced small arms for the Nazis, until its
prisoners were liberated by the Russians in mid-January1945.
My mother was by then three months pregnant.
I often wondered how that happened, since I was conceived in
October 1944, but never asked. I only found out when listening
to a tape recording she made in 1995 for the Shoah
Foundation.
Even the married people in the camp lived in
separate barracks. However, the women’s barrack that my mother
slept in was so full of bedbugs and lice that the German
taskmasters allowed the married women to go to their husbands
for one night while the building was disinfected.
It was, she said, the only time before the
liberation that they slept together. Had the Red Army tarried by
just a few weeks, her pregnancy would have become evident, and
she would have been immediately killed, especially as the SS
itself took over HASAG from its civilian administration in
December 1944.
My parents, with me in tow, led Poland as
soon as they could and we spent two years in a displaced persons
(DP) camp in Germany before coming to Canada in 1948.
I’ve only been back to Poland once, in 1977,
when it was a Communist state, and I visited, apart from
Czestochowa, the Auschwitz death camp, Lodz, and Warsaw.
Back then it was, for a Jewish visitor, a
virtual wilderness. There were no tourist brochures or
guidebooks, and information about the Holocaust was almost
non-existent. In Czestochowa, no one even knew where the old
Jewish cemetery was located – though I eventually found it.
Upon my return, I wrote a series of very
pessimistic articles for a newspaper about the remnants of
Jewish life in Poland, with titles like “1,000 Years of Jewish
History Face Pitiful End” and “Polish Jewry in Final Death
Throes.”
But no one can predict the future. The end of
Communist rule in Poland after 1989 has seen the re-emergence of
a vibrant Jewish life in the country.
It is, of course, nothing like the pre-1939
community, when more than three million Jews lived in the
country. Today only some 20,000 Jews call Poland home.
Still, there are now functioning synagogues
with rabbis, an annual Jewish Cultural Festival in the old
Jewish quarter of Kazimierz in Kracow, Warsaw’s amazing Museum
of the History of Polish Jews, with a core exhibition comprises
eight galleries, covering 43,000 square feet, and there are even
tours of Jewish sites in Czestochowa.
Czestochowa today has a population of more
than 231,000; fewer than 50 self-identify as Jewish.
No comments:
Post a Comment