Joan and I just spent a week in Poland. We toured Krakow and immersed ourselves in the once-vibrant Jewish community. We stayed over in Lublin so we could visit Treblinka. We also visited Warsaw, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. I’m trying to process it all but it’s hard. At Treblinka, the forest feels too quiet. Birds sing and the wind moves gently through the trees. It is too peaceful and that’s what unsettled me most. This place is drenched in death and yet, seemingly sits so peacefully. Brutality happened here. All that is there now is a memorial of a jagged sea of stones. No buildings, no artifacts. Just stones marking the lives and communities erased.

In Tykocin, a village not far from Treblinka, the old synagogue still stands, turned into a museum. It holds artifacts, the remnants of a once-vibrant Jewish life. But outside, across the street, there’s a restaurant with Jewish style food on the menu. Inside there is a menorah, a picture of a “typical, white bearded rabbi” and Yiddish music playing through the speakers. It’s run by non-Jews. I imagine they mean well. I believe they want to honor what was lost. But it feels staged. It’s hard to put into words, but something about it rings hollow as if they’re trying to recreate a soul that can’t be saved with blintzes and borscht. That life was stolen.

Then there’s Majdanek. What was so disconcerting was the sheer scale of it, so close to the city, so visible, right off the main road then and now. I walk through and ask myself, could I have lasted a week here? Could anyone? The cruelty was well planned. It was in every structure, every system including the design of the gas chambers and the crematorium. All of Majdanek was designed for murder even though it was also a work camp. Through work they planned to kill you too. And right across the street today, people live. They look out from their balconies and see it. What do they make of it? Do they care or see it as part of their story too?

Our last day in Poland we went to Auschwitz-Birkenau. I grew up with images of Auschwitz as the ultimate example of the horrors. How many times did I see pictures of the infamous wrought iron gate with the notorious sign, “Arbeit macht frei, Work makes you free?” But to be there and walk through it was truly, hauntingly indescribable. Auschwitz was different from anywhere else we visited. It was part remnant and part museum. Walking through the massive complex ended up dwarfing Majdanek. It was here where we saw Bunk 10 where Mengele conducted his experiments and Bunk 11 which was used for torture and the very place where Zyklon B was first tested and used. We visited the spot of the largest gas chamber-crematorium ever built in human history. I walked the earth drenched in innocent blood. But for me, one of the worst parts was the Shoah exhibit, a multi-media film depicting Jewish life throughout Europe before the war. They were typical families enjoying each other, holidays and vacations. They weren’t just the stereotypical Hasidic Jew that is always shown. They were us. And when they showed little, sweet children, they were my grandchildren. Completely unimaginable. 

And to add to the distress, as I walked through these places, especially earlier in the week when we first experienced the horrors, I couldn’t stop thinking back to just a few months ago when we visited Israel.  I stood in Kfar Aza. I saw the fence where Hamas stormed through. That fence was supposed to protect families. Instead, it became the entrance to slaughter. They broke through and killed, tortured, and burned Jewish babies, grandparents and friends. I looked at the damaged homes, burned and shattered. And then in Majdanek and Auschwitz there were barbed wire fences to keep Jews in until their death. Different places and different times and the same urge to annihilate Jews.

At Treblinka, I thought of Nova. I went to the Nova Music Festival site. The memorial there is simple, posts in an empty field, each one showing the face of a young person gunned down by Hamas. Their images stare back at you. Treblinka is also just an open field. Another open sky and another mass murder. Both soaked in blood. And now in silence.

At Majdanek I kept comparing the fences. At Majdanek and Auschwitz barbed wire kept Jews locked in. At Kfar Aza, fences were meant to keep murderers out. In both cases, the barrier failed and in both cases, Jews died.

Even the way the killers were prepared connects through time. The Nazis got their soldiers drunk so they could shoot Jews into pits. Hamas gave their terrorists drugs so they could slaughter without feeling. Separated by 80 years, but fueled by the same inhuman drive.

And now I walk through these places, feeling their weight and trying to understand that which cannot be understood. How do you process what I saw in Poland and what I saw just months ago in Israel? Why does this hatred endure? The past may not exactly repeat itself but there is an echo of the persistence of hatred. 

Towards the end of the tour at Auschwitz there is a quote from Primo Levi, “It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say.” And so I wonder how many more fields and cemeteries will we have to bury our people in before the world finally listens. Before “never again” is the reality?

As I finish writing these reflections, I am sitting on a night train from Krakow to Budapest. Yes, after a day in Auschwitz-Birkenau, we actually took a night train. Perhaps it is fitting that the train got delayed, literally in the middle of nowhere, sitting idle. A six-hour delay allows for perspective. While I was relieved to leave Poland, I am grateful to have fulfilled what I believe to be a moral responsibility to bear witness by visiting the camps and the former thriving Jewish communities.