Shtetl
By Charles Martin Block

​

Early on the morning of May 19, 2008, in Warsaw, Poland, some 30 people boarded a bus to visit Sławatycze, a small Polish village. Among the passengers were my wife Vickie and me; our daughter and son-in-law Rebekah and Mike; my brother-in-law Alan and nephew Saul; representatives of a Polish-Jewish foundation; a young rabbi from Warsaw representing the chief rabbi of Poland; and two security guards, along with three elderly former residents of Sławatycze – Philip Garen, Henry Gitelman, and Sam Green, and their family members.

​

What follows are some personal observations, reflections, and memories of our visit and of the events leading up to it.

​

Sławatycze (pronounced “Swavaticha”) sits in northeastern Poland, about 120 miles east of Warsaw. As best I can tell, its only significance to the outside world is that it’s the region’s border crossing to Belarus over the Bug (”Book”) River. It’s also the small village, or shtetl, where Vickie’s ancestors lived and her grandparents left in the late 1890s or early 1900s to come to America.

​

We first visited Sławatycze in October 2004. Then, as now, the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches rose above the cottages, shacks, and the few rudimentary shops that make up the town’s center. The synagogue that once shared their prominence no longer exists. Before World War II, Jews comprised an estimated 40-50 percent of the population. All vanished quickly after the Nazis arrived in 1939.

​

The Catholic cemetery remains full and well-kept. We neither sought nor found the Russian Orthodox cemetery, but I assume it too still exists and thrives. During our 2004 visit, we sought and finally found the Jewish cemetery, which lay desecrated, filled with dense weeds and brambles twisting above our heads, littered with beer cans, empty cigarette packs, and more. We managed to discover the remains of two headstones with Hebrew lettering, the only confirmation of its identity.

​

On our return trip from Poland back in 2004, Vickie, my brother-in-law Alan, and I had a four-hour layover in the Paris airport before going our separate ways. We fantasized about the possibility of restoring the cemetery – which set off an unlikely chain of events that led to our 2008 trip.

​

Remarkably, Alan was able to track down a dispersed handful of survivors of war-torn Sławatycze, now living in the US and Canada, as well as an organization called the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland, involved in restoring Jewish synagogues and cemeteries. In 2005, we met with five of the survivors and some of their family members in Chicago and put together an action and fundraising plan to restore the cemetery.

​

The survivors told fascinating stories about their lives in pre-war Sławatycze and during the war. Sam Green (now in his 90s) and Henry and Sam Gitelman (both little children at the time), managed to escape across the river to the Soviet Union when the Nazis arrived, were captured by Russians, and spent the war years in Siberian gulags. Young Phillip Garan  (then age 12) survived by hiding in the surrounding forests throughout the war years.

​

Sadly, Henry Greenspan, who met with us in Chicago and was truly committed to the cemetery restoration, died late in 2007. In 1939, young Henry was saved by a courageous Polish family, who risked their lives to hide him from the Germans and are now honored as Righteous Christians at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. Henry, who survived to become a resistance fighter with the Polish Underground during the war, was quite a guy. His son Willie joined us in Chicago in 2005 and again on this 2008 trip.

​

I really didn’t know what to expect when our bus arrived in Sławatycze. I knew there would be some kind of a dedication ceremony. I admit to vague concerns of angry villagers waiting for us with clubs, rocks, and pitchforks, though I didn’t really expect that. But I certainly didn’t anticipate what actually happened.

​

We arrived about an hour before the scheduled ceremony and began strolling leisurely though the town’s main street in groups of two and three and four. The survivors wanted to find their former homes; their family members were curious to see their own origins.

​

At first, the villagers seemed guarded. A handful of passersby looked away, glancing at us from the corners of their eyes. Some locals watched from their windows, others from back yards.

​

Suddenly, Sam Green began speaking in Polish with a villager, who told him that his 90-year-old father remembered everything that happened. The father came out. He and Sam began reminiscing about life in the village, people they remembered, school teachers, a quirky local policeman. They were laughing and waving their arms – an incredible sight.

​

Eventually, the three survivors each had emotional conversations with locals; and it was difficult to pull everyone together in time for the dedication ceremony.

​

The dedication took place in front of the cemetery, which had been cleared out, cleaned up, and fronted by a handsome entrance gate. To my surprise and delight, a number of villagers turned out.

A plaque was unveiled, honoring the former Jewish residents and their contributions to the town. There were speeches by the mayor, the Catholic priest, the Russian Orthodox priest, the rabbi from Warsaw, other local dignitaries, members of the foundation, and all three survivors.

​

Then, in a moment of high drama, Willie Greenspan told tearfully about the family that had rescued his father. And he actually brought descendants of that family out of the crowd to thank them and to acknowledge publicly, for the first time, what their family had done.

​

To everyone’s surprise, a group of high school students presented a Jewish headstone that had been hidden in a local barn for the past many years. I wondered – could there be others?

​

And finally, we spent some time walking through the grounds of the cemetery before getting on our bus and traveling back to Warsaw. It was quite a memorable and emotional day, the culmination of four years of thoughts and plans and activities.

​

But the cemetery still stands bare. The weeds and brambles and litter are gone. The ground is empty, with just three broken headstones (now four, with the one rescued from the barn) spread randomly across the area. Perhaps what’s needed is a memorial of some kind – maybe a tomb of the unknown, or a cluster of symbolic headstones as in other Eastern European memorials.

​

Still, the cemetery has an identity now, as do the lives and souls of all the generations of Jews buried there who once lived in Sławatycze – including the forebears of my wife, her brothers and cousins, and all their children and grandchildren.

 

 

Oswiecim, Poland
By Charles Martin Block

​

There’s a town in a scenic area of southeastern Poland located some 20 miles west of Krakow and about 15 miles north of the Slovakian border. It has a population of about 40,000 people, fast food restaurants, a railroad junction, nearby coal deposits, and a variety of industries, including the production of farm implements, chemicals, and leather.

​

The town is called Oswiecim, and its name seems benign enough – until you discover its terrible secrets.

​

Oswiecim is its Polish name. The nazi occupiers during World War II gave it a harsher name. They called it Auschwitz; and they used it for various purposes other than producing farm implements and leather – namely starvation, experimentation, extermination, cremation, and genocidal elimination.

​

Auschwitz comprised a number of camps and sub camps, among them Auschwitz I, the original camp, and Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Auschwitz I serves as a museum now, a chamber of horrors. But Auschwitz II-Birkenau remains much as it was at the end of the nazi occupation. The following personal thoughts, feelings, and observations relate to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, drawn from my memories of our visit there not long ago on a gray, cold October morning.

​

There were four of us – my wife, my brother-in-law, my stepson, and me. The day of our visit was fittingly bleak. My first impressions at Auschwitz II-Birkenau were of infinite silence and an ironic sense of peace and serenity, or maybe eternity. It seemed eerie, like visiting an enormous cemetery. I had a feeling of vast emptiness and thought I could still smell ashes in the air.

​

At the entrance to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a deserted tower rises above an archway at the center of a broad, single-story building, watching evermore over an empty railroad spur that passes under the arch. Barbed-wire fencing surrounds the camp, with 10-foot-high goosenecked fence posts leaning overhead menacingly and bearing electric conductors front and back and from top to bottom.

​

We entered from the parking lot via a walkway through a second arch, perhaps 12 yards to the left of the track and parallel to it. Both track and walkway stretch across the depth of the camp, a distance of some three quarters of a mile, to clumps of trees at the far end. The track ends abruptly just short of the trees, with both rails pointing to empty air.

​

A platform stands alongside the track about 150 yards from the front entrance. We stood there, where SS guards had once unloaded prisoners from boxcars and made them undergo a deadly triage. Those judged healthy enough and strong enough to work survived; the others were force-marched directly to gas chambers located beyond the trees, for immediate extermination and cremation.

The track and the adjacent walkway are flanked by row upon row of 50-yard-long, low, narrow buildings, hundreds of them stretching across the depth of the camp and to both sides – brick buildings extending far to our left; wooden ones to our right, though not as far. These were the barracks and latrines for the surviving prisoners.

​

We saw the latrines – long, hollow concrete slabs with rows of jagged holes lining the tops, where people had to endure the harsh, abrasive surface in order to relieve themselves. We stood inside the barracks, dismal, cold, and crammed with wooden bunks in which huddles of prisoners slept each night on tiers of wooden slats stacked three high.

​

Prisoners on average survived about three months, until they died of starvation, overwork, punishment, random cruelty, or disease and were replaced by others.

​

As the liberating Russian forces approached Birkenau in January 1945, the SS destroyed as much evidence as possible before they fled the camps. They slaughtered many of the prisoners and tried to burn the gas chambers, the crematoria, the wooden barracks, and as many incriminating documents as possible. They never completed the task, leaving ample proof of their “accomplishments” among the refugees and amid the ruins, rubble, and remaining buildings.

​

I find it hard to grasp the reality of all that happened at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. I had viewed hundreds of photographs; read dozens of accounts. I had expected, and feared, that, somehow, I would “see” the events themselves and experience something of what it was like. Instead, I walked the grounds, stood on the platform, smelled the air, and felt a profound sadness for the victims and for that aspect of human nature that can inflict such malignity – and even relish it.

​

At one point, hundreds of birds suddenly swept across the sky above us, startling us with their shrieking and flapping wings. To me, it seemed to symbolize something profound: Maybe departing souls. Or the ashes of all the victims. Or maybe lost spirits doomed to circle above the camp throughout eternity.

​

A memorial stretches across the back of Auschwitz II-Birkenau, roughly the size of a football field, with steps leading from the ground in front and on both sides up to a broad cobblestone pedestal, topped by formations of large, rectangular-shaped, stone objects. Its abstract and asymmetrical design bothered my sense of form and logic and composition, which wanted balance and symmetry – until I realized that there was nothing balanced or logical or symmetrical about anything I saw that day.

​

Dozens of plaques stretch across the front of the memorial, each in a different language, all bearing the same message.

​

In English, it reads:

FOR EVER LET THIS PLACE BE A CRY OF DESPAIR AND A WARNING TO HUMANITY, WHERE THE NAZIS MURDERED ABOUT ONE AND A HALF MILLION MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN, MAINLY JEWS FROM VARIOUS COUNTRIES IN EUROPE.

AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU