It’s been two weeks since I returned home from leading my first “March of the Living” group to Poland and I am still sorting out my thoughts and feelings. Like many, I have my doubts of whether or not Jews should travel to Poland at all.

Poland – The country, the landscape, the horizon – all seem to have forgotten the Jews. Has it really only been 60 years? Driving past the fertile farmland through the small towns and shtetlach which were once heavily Jewish it’s hard to imagine Jews in this tableau. I can’t picture Hasidim walking here, and I can’t imagine Yiddish being spoken here.

I think that I expected to sense large gaps of space and presence where the Jews used to be – to be able to feel where they are missing today. But there are no empty places where one feels the absence of the Jews. It’s as if the memory of the thousand years of Jewish life in Poland has been erased and that the over 3,300,000 Jews who were here before the Nazis murdered them never existed at all.

The memory of the Jews of Poland lingers only within the boundaries of the old cemeteries and the walls of the old synagogues – totally separate and distinct from the reality of Poland of today.

But the Polish people seem to remember. Oh, how they remember – with sneers and snickers, rude gestures and words. They seem to like their Poland without her Jews and don’t understand why we have come back. (I did have the privilege of meeting some Poles who want Poland to confront it’s past and it’s shameful record of anti-Semitism, past and present. But as they themselves sadly note – they are a tiny minority and are the exceptions which prove the rule.)

We visited sites of the former Jewish communities of Warsaw, Tykochin, Cracow, Tarnow, Lyszansk, Lodz, Rayshe and Lancut as well as the Nazi death camps Treblinka, Auschwitz/Birkenau and Maidanek. In Warsaw, Lodz and Cracow we encountered Jewish communities which are still functioning (barely) – but mostly we celebrated the Jewish life that was and is no longer, in the mostly overgrown cemeteries and in the empty synagogues. We sang and danced in each of these places in an attempt to bring sparks of Jewish life and memory to these empty and dead spaces. We needed to do that – in their memory certainly – but perhaps more urgently in order to comfort ourselves and to reassure ourselves that we – the Jewish people- live on.

One of the more moving places that we visited was the ruin of the synagogue in Tarnow. All that remains is the gate to the synagogue courtyard with it’s “magen david” and the bimah that was at the center of the synagogue. The bimah, from where the Torah would have been read stands today all alone in the synagogue courtyard, like a silent sentinel or witness on “Jew Street” where thousands of Jews were murdered by the Nazis in 1942.

I have my doubts whether the Nazi death camps are appropriate places for Jewish memory. These were death factories which were created by the Germans for the sole purpose of wiping out the Jewish people – places of torture, horror and mass murder. Shouldn’t we remember the last 3,000,000 Jews of Poland – who were murdered by the Nazis and their allies – for how they and their ancestors lived rather than for how they were murdered? The grave of Reb Elimelech of Lizsansk (founder of Hassidism in Poland) or the synagogue of the great Rabbi Moshe Isserless in Cracow seem to me more worthy of our attention and energy than Birkenau or Treblinka. Were it not for the ever successful efforts of our enemies to transform Holocaust denial into a legitimate point of view, I would advocate destroying the camps, in a reflection of the old Jewish principal of “Yemach Shemam VeZichram” -May the memory (of our enemies) be blotted out and erased.

Thanks for letting me share some of my thoughts and feelings with you, as I did with the participants in the Toronto March of the Living delegation. We shared a powerful experience together – the high school students, parents, teachers, chaperones, community leaders and Holocaust survivors. Despite my strong doubts and questions I think on balance, that it is important for young Jews to visit Poland, if only to begin asking themselves whether we are any better prepared today to meet the challenges of Jew hatred than we were in 1930s and 1940s Europe. Danny Ehrlich is a Tour Guide in Israel

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