THERE ARE NO JEWS IN BIALYSTOK
Reflections and Memories
August 2000
We arrived at Warsaw. It was the first leg of a long-awaited
family trip that would take me back to Bialystok, the city of my birth.
In my heart, I always knew I would make the trip. While my
parents, Icchok and Faygl Melamdovich, were alive, I had often offered to sponsor a trip
that would take them back to where they grew up, where they were educated and became
teachers, where they were married. They had been at the forefront of Yiddish culture in
Bialystok, in the movement out of the shtetl so that Jews could become equal citizens in
the world society.
But they repeatedly declined. "There is nothing there left
for me," my father would say. Perhaps he was right. I wouldnt know unless I
found out for myself.
I was a child in 1939, when the German army attacked Poland and
began to turn Europe into an inferno of death. World War II had sprung its frightening
trap that would ensnare millions of Europeans and deliver them into the hands of the
Nazis. The story of our escape, as my parents, with me at their side, miraculously
outwitted the Gestapo and KGB is not material to these reflections. Our two-year odyssey
spanned three continents, six languages, the Trans-Siberian railroad, and Japan (a
life-saving transit visa was issued by Chiune Sugihara, Japanese Counsel General to
Lithuania), and happily concluded in the United States in 1941.
In this circuitous fashion, acutely aware that I was among the
few fortunate souls who escaped the horrors unfolding in Europe, I found myself on the
inner-city streets of Chicagos Northwest side. We settled in a neighborhood that was
an ethnic melting pot of Italians, Poles and Jews, and where "Hey, you dirty
kike,"was not an uncommon greeting. Still, despite my precarious start in life,
irrespective of the special strife I faced as do most foreign children unfamiliar with the
culture of their new homeland, one could say that my achievements exemplified the splendor
of America.
For it was here, in this land of the free and home of the brave,
that this refugee from Bialystok, without American roots, without wealth, without proper
credentials, without clout or influence, was given the opportunity to enter the world of
futures markets and climb to the top of its complex structure. Within that arena, at
a moment that was ripe for change, I was invited to use my imagination and skills, to
innovate and invent. I was lucky. The world in the early 1970s had entered the first
stages of globalization. There was a need for new instruments of finance. My colleagues
and I responded to the need and our ideas gave rise to the era of financial derivatives.
In this fashion, in a small way I was able to contribute to the growth of Chicago and
American markets. A contribution, which in the eyes of somethe editor of the Chicago
Tribune, for instancewould merit my inclusion in a list of the "Ten most
important Chicagoans in business of the twentieth century."1
While this background may be instructive and provide some
standing for my point of view, it is also not material to these contemplations. Two facts
are, however, germane to this story. First, emotionally, my parents never left the Old
World; consequently, I inherited a portion of their mind-set. Second, as a child, I had
never been to Warsawnot physically, that is. Spiritually...well, that was another
matter. In literature, theater, politics, culture, prose, song, and poetry, Varsheas
the capital of Poland is called in Yiddishwas alive for me, as if I were born there.
Varshe was a constant and consequential topic of conversation at our home whenever my
parents met with their group of Yiddish intellectuals as I was growing to adulthood.
Varshe, I learned quickly, hosted the modern Jewish thought that emanated during
Polands exciting years: the early 1900s through the beginning of World War II.
During that era, Jews flexed their cultural muscles, forcing the greater Polish society to
contain its imbedded anti-Semitism and at least begin to accept them in the social
structure.
Jewish roots in Warsaw are deep. They were there as early as
1414. But, Warsaws status as the main center of Jewish population growth in Poland
was not visible until the second half of the nineteenth century. In the 1860s, in an
effort to win support from Jews against the Poles, the Russian czar lifted from Warsaw and
its surrounding provinces many of the existing anti-Semitic taxes, as well as the
residential and employment restrictions against Jews, which were ubiquitous throughout
Poland. As a consequence, Jews fled the small towns of Poland and migrated to Varshe to
participate in the economic opportunities that the liberated laws allowed. This process
unleashed powerful evolutionary forces. By the end of the nineteenth century, Varshe had
been transformed into the Jewish economic, political, and cultural capital of Poland.
Many other cities, within Poland and elsewhere in Europe, made
significant contributions to the total body of Jewish culture. Near the top of any list
would be the legendary city of Wilno (Vilna in Yiddish), known as the
"Jerusalem of Lithuania." In the latter half of the eighteenth century, under
the influence of the fabled Vilner Gaon, Rabbi Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman, Vilna
blossomed as the center for rabbinical studies and for the Haskala, the Jewish
Enlightenment movement. A century later, in 1897, The Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter
Bund ("the Bund"), a Jewish faction of the Socialist movement, was conceived in
Vilna.2 My parents were ardent Bundistn, and I most certainly would have
been inducted into the movement had the world not been turned upside down by Adolf Hitler.
Over the years, Vilna, which produced some of the greatest Yiddish writers and poets,
evolved as a flourishing source of Hebrew and Yiddish literature. Chaim Grade, Shmerke
Katsherginski, Moyshe Kulbak, and my personal favorite, Avrom Sutzkever, were among them.
The acclaimed Vilner Teachers Seminary, where my mother earned her teaching degree, was
situated there. And, of primary significance, Vilna was the birthplace of the Yiddish
Scientific Institute (YIVO), the preeminent center for the study of the Yiddish language,
literature, and folklore. Founded in 1925 under the direction of Yiddish linguist Max
Weinreich, it was miraculously transplanted to New York in 1940. For Yiddishistn,
such as my parents, the YIVO was the equivalent of the bible on matters of Yiddish
language.
Still, no other city could equal Varshe as a center of Jewish
cultural life at the beginning of the 1900s. Varshe represented the largest concentration
of Jews in Europe, and the second largest in the world, after New York. (At the start of
the Second World War in 1939, Varshes population included 380,000 Jews, or almost 30
percent of the total population.) Varshe became the unquestionable capital of modern
Jewish thought and the epicenter of an emancipation movementa
metamorphosisthat was sweeping over Jewish masses and uncoupling world Jewry from
its ancestral religious moorings. Yet this transformation did not diminish traditional
religious participationin the 1920s, there were over 400 synagogues within Varshe.
In the first three decades of the twentieth century, Varshe
evolved into a vibrant and dynamic center of secular Jewish life. The city became the
headquarters for a large number of diverse political parties, including a strong orthodox
religious faction. Jewish cooperatives, credit unions, orphanages, hospitals, newspapers,
publishing houses, theater companies, orchestras, choirs, sports clubs, and cultural
societies were formed there, and became the center of a European network that reached
every touchstone of Jewish existence.3
Most important, Varshe was also the official seat from which
Icchok Leybush Peretz presided over the Jewish cultural renaissance of that era. Without
taking anything away from the other two classic giants, Mendele Moscher Sforim and Sholem
Aleichem, I. L. Peretz has to be regarded as the most influential Yiddish writer of all
time. From 1890, when he settled in Varshe, until his death at the beginning of World War
I, Peretz shaped Yiddish literature into an instrument of national cohesion. His writings
served as a pulpit from which he educated, admonished, and, in the words of historian Ruth
R. Wisse, "[led] Jews away from religion toward a secular Jewish existence without
falling into the swamp of assimilation."4 Under his influence, the
city became the center of a rapidly growing modern culture that was based in the Yiddish
language and acted as a magnet for Yiddish novelists, poets, journalists, and thespians.
From his Varshe home, Peretz transformed the teachings of the Ten Commandments into a
modern paradigm of moral consciousness. He taught uneducated Jews how to liberate
themselves from the controls of orthodoxy. He inspired young Yiddish writers to join in
his mission of creating a national literature, and he championed the Yiddish language,
declaring it central to Jewish life. He educated Jewish workers to understand their own
self-worth, and he freed Jewish women from subjugation to male domination. Peretz gave the
Jews hope that a new and better world was coming: Hof Un Gleib, Nisht Veit Is Noch Der
Freehling (Hope and Faith, Spring is Not Far Away).
My parents generation embraced Peretzs ideals as
gospel and used them to build the Bund into what Motl Zelmanowitcz described as "a
vision of democratic and liberal socialismnot as a dogma, but as a way of
lifeas a garland of values which incorporate social justice, internationalism, and
brotherhood of nations."5
That was the Varshe I knew without ever stepping inside its
borders; or sitting within its restaurants and cafés and listening to heated discussions
by Varshever Jews of current events, politics, or the latest literary works; or attending
one of its plays in which the fabled Ida Kaminska reigned supreme and taught the Yiddish
masses the cultural value of theater. That was the city I visualized even though I never
participated in the plans of its residents for the new world that was soon to come, and
even though I was far too young to join them in singing Di Shvue, the Bundist
anthem that, in the lyrics written by the renowned Shimon Anski, swore boundless loyalty
to the Bund.
The images of that Varshe remained alive for me
untiluntil the moment our British Airways plane touched down at Okecie,
Warsaws international airport. They were instantly shattered. My father was right
on. The Jewish Varshe that was frozen in my memory, placed there by his reminiscences, had
vanished from the face of the earth. Intellectually, I had always known this fact, but I
was unprepared for the psychological impact of facing the reality. To be fair, I suppose
my reaction was a purely "Jewish" reflex. Were I, say, an Indian or a Brit or a
Pole, or anyone except a Jew coming to todays Warsaw, I would not have had to endure
the devastating emotional letdown that I experienced. What I found was a nondescript city
bereft of vigor, rebuilt cheaply by communists after World War II, with hardly a trace
remaining of its historic and distinctive past. And, for all intents and purposes, it was
devoid of Jews. For me, without Jews, Varshe might as well have been the capital of
Azerbaijan.
From this point forward, I was sleepwalking, as if in a dream. I
was conscious of peoplemy wife, Betty; my daughter, Idelle, and her husband, Howard;
my four grandchildrenand of the places and things on our tourold buildings,
statues and sights tourists should see. But, for me, a strange surreal silence, the
silence of those who were missing, enveloped everything and everyone. Author Jozef Hen, in
defining Warsaws old Jewish Cemetery, which contains the grave sites of some
esteemed historical personages in our culture and was somehow left virtually untouched by
the Germans, explains: The cemetery is a peculiar monument, unique evidence of what has
happened. No, not because of the graves of those resting here. On the contrary, because of
the graves that are not here. The Absent give evidence to the crime committed.
In a similar vein, the greatest impact to my consciousness was
caused by what was absent from Warsaw. The Yiddish language was gone. It was missing from
the names of shops and restaurants, from the chatter of voices on the streets, from the
haggling between buyers and merchants in the marketplace, from the babble of discussions
in the coffee houses, from the playful cries of children on the streets and in the
courtyards.
The Polish government, with help from the Ronald S. Lauder
Foundation and others, has done its best to mark the sacred and notable sites. The Polish
tour guides are very professional as they carefully escort their clients through the
history of the city. We too had done our part in preparing ourselves and telling Joshua,
Aaron, Jared, and Mara, our grandkids, who ranged in age from sixteen to seven years, the
story of the Holocaust. The older two boys had visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington, DC, and were provided with written material that they judiciously studied.
But how is it possible to do justice to demonic acts that, in President Dwight D.
Eisenhowers words, beggar[ed] description?6
The missing voices that I sought have been replaced by plaques;
the haunting sense of vibrant Jewish life has been marked by monuments. These were all
around me. I found it difficult to repress a sudden desire to run away, as if somehow, by
leaving, I could preserve the images of the Varshe that had been infused in me. My fingers
trembled as I touched the plaque for Icchok Kacenelson, the great Yiddish poet. As a
child, I had recited his words. His voice was silenced in Auschwitz. My heart pounded as
we stopped at the plaque for Janusz Korczak, the Polish physician, a non-Jew, who chose to
perish in the Treblinka death camp, together with the Jewish children from his orphanage,
rather than continue to live when they were being taken to their death. I couldnt
find the words to explain to my grandchildren the majesty of his martyrdom. There is a
plaque honoring Icchok Nyssenbaum, the Rabbi leader of the Mizrachi and a member of the
Warsaw underground. He perished in Treblinka. The members of the Bund who died in the
Ghetto Uprising also have a plaque. Another, in the form of a manhole cover, memorializes
the sewers through which Jewish inhabitants clandestinely entered and escaped from the
ghetto; still another is dedicated to Shmul Zygelbojm, a member of the Warsaw
Ghettos first Jewish council. He escaped but later committed suicide in
Londonhis way of protesting the worlds indifference to the Holocaust. His
final words were addressed to the exiled president of Poland: "I cannot remain
silent, nor can I remain alive, while the last remnants of the Jewish people perish in
Poland." The plaques and monuments house the ghosts of those who lived and
perished here. Their silence speaks volumes.
On the mandatory tour through the "Memorial Route of Jewish
Martyrdom and Struggle," I steeled myself and tried to overcome the icy chill that
encased my being. The tour route begins at the Monument to the Heroes of the Ghetto, runs
down Zamenhof Street, past Shmul Zygelbojm Square, and arrives at the memorial to Mila 18,
which gives special honor to Mordechai Anielewicz. His name has been etched in my memory
since childhood. His plaque is silent, like so many of the others. He was the
twenty-three-year-old commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization, known in Poland as
the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB) who, on April 19, 1943, the eve of Passover, stood
fast with his brave contingent of 750 Warsaw Ghetto fighters and faced the onslaught of
the powerful German army.7 The story has assumed hallowed proportions and is
recited at all uprising commemorations. On the exact day when Jews throughout the free
world would sit down for their traditional Seder feast, SS Gruppenfuherer Jurgen
Stroop, Commander of the Warsaw occupation forces, led a trained German army into the
ghetto to deliver its final liquidation. By then, only 50,000 Jews were left in the
Varshever Ghetto. No longer did anyone have illusions about their destiny.
Anielewiczs Resistance Fighterspoorly armed with handguns, a few rifles and
grenades, iron rods, and Molotov cocktails, some made from light bulbs filled with
sulphuric acidstood ready to greet the foe.
They were prepared to die fighting. Against impossible odds,
without military training, they inflicted considerable casualties on the Germans and were
victorious in forcing the invaders to leave the ghetto and regroup. Although the outcome
was a foregone conclusion, it took twenty-eight days of intense fighting and the full
might of the German Wehrmachttanks, artillery, and fighter planesto
firebomb the ghetto and quell its defenders. Not until May 16 could Stroop report:
"The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw no longer exists."
In 1951, Jurgen Stroop was sentenced to death and executed in
Poland.
Mordechai Anielewicz couldnt have foreseen the full
significance of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In a defiant act reminiscent of the heroic
deed of his brethren, centuries earlier, at Masada, he and some of his brave compatriots
committed suicide in their Mila Street bunker rather than allow themselves to be captured
alive. But he sensed that the ramifications of the ghetto battle would go far beyond
military reports and casualty statistics. In his last letter, written two weeks before his
death on May 8, 1943, Anielewicz wrote: "I feel that great things are happening and
that this action which we have dared to take is of enormous value."8
Indeed, news about the uprising inspired Jewish underground resistance elsewhere. There
were revolts in more than 60 ghettos and in about 100 regions. Including those
well-documented in Kovno, Vilna, Minsk, Bialystok, Lachva, Novogruok, Lublin, and Krakow.9
And, ignoring the certainty of severe retribution, and irrespective of fences, guard
towers, machine guns, searchlights, and vicious dogs, uprisings occurred in death and
concentration camps, including those in Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz/Birkenau.10
Of a different dimension and of incalculable magnitude is the fact that the Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising will forever remain an exalted flashpoint of pride for Jewish people everywhere.
Elie Wiesel, a Nobel Laureate author and a Holocaust survivor, in
his Introduction to On Both Sides of the Wallthe memoirs of Vladka Meed,
whose real name was Feigele Peltel-Miedzyrzecki and who acted as a courier during the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprisingasks a puzzling question: Where did Mordechai Anielewicz
"draw the strength, the knowledge, to go out in battle against the most awesome army
in Europe?" One might think, Wiesel muses, that, as a consequence of German
atrocities, the Jews would turn into animals. After all, as he suggests, "there are
limits to human endurance. One must break at last." And yet, "the hangman was
mistaken." Throughout the ghetto years, Wiesel writes, the Jews refused to break:
"The ghetto, half-a-million souls, for the most part did not become a jungle. Quite
the contrary; people tried to help each other." Therefore, as Wiesel points out,
"One must marvel even more at the fighters and couriers. Instead of falling into
despair, they found reasons and strength to help others."11
The silent Anielewicz plaque tried valiantly to tell my
grandchildren all of that.
The Memorial Route then took us to its conclusion. We followed
the tour guide down Stawki Street: past numbers 5 and 6, which once housed the SS Unit
Command; past numbers 6 and 8, the former school and Jewish transit hospital; and to the
intersection of life and deaththe entrance of the Umschlagpatz. At this
place, Varshever Jews were loaded into cattle cars and delivered to the gas chambers of
Treblinka or other extermination centers. To distinguish the ignominy represented by this
site from the evil of the others, four plaques, inscribed in Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, and
English, silently explain: Along this path of suffering and death over 300,000 Jews
were driven in 1942-1943 from the Warsaw Ghetto to the gas chambers of Nazi extermination
camps.12 It doesntit cantdescribe the starvation,
disease, terror, and torture that were daily fare for those who managed to survive long
enough to be brought here. Next to the Wall Monument are the remaining traces of the
brickwork comprising the gate of the Umschlagplatz. Above the gate is this inscription
from the Book of Job, XVI, 18: O Earth, Cover Not My Blood, And Let My Cry For Justice
Find No Rest. Jobs words dont register; instead, I hear the ringing words
of children singing: "Hof Un Gleib, Nisht Veit Is Noch Der Freehling"Hope
and Faith, Spring is Not Far Away.
Visiting the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery proved to be a momentary
respite from the oppressive strain of the ghetto experience. The contrasting psychological
effect between the death we encountered along the Memorial Route and its counterpart
within the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery was as remarkable as it was immediate. There is silence
here too, but this silence represents normalcy. As Jozef Hen notes, "Silence hangs
above the place, but it is not a deathlike silence, not torpor." It is the
silence of historic acknowledgmentof reverence toward past deeds and
accomplishments. Whatever events defined the life and death of someone who found a final
resting place in this venerable cemetery, they have no compelling comparison to the
circumstances surrounding those who perished in Varshe during the Holocaust. The fact that
this Jewish cemetery, the largest in Europe, exists at all is one of the wonders of the
world. During the Nazi occupation, the cemetery was part of the ghetto. How and why the
Nazis forgot toor chose not todestroy it will forever remain an enigma of
wondrous proportions.
Established in 1806 and surrounded by a brick wall, the Warsaw
Jewish cemetery contains some 250,000 tombstones. The celebrated names inscribed
therenames spoken with reverence in my parents householdoffer a rare
walk through Jewish history. They include: Shimon Askenazy, a historian and diplomat; Adam
Czerniakow, President of the Warsaw Jewish Community, who became head of the Warsaw
Judenrat and took his life rather than obey the S.S. order to deliver 10,000 Jews to the
Umschlagplatz; Bronislaw Grosser, a Bund activist for whom the Yiddish school at which my
parents taught in Bialystok was named; Esther Rachel Kaminska, the "mother of Yiddish
Theater;" Ber Meisels, a legendary Rabbi of Warsaw; I. L. Peretz, the father of
modern Yiddish literature, whose funeral on April 3, 1915, was attended by more than
100,000 people from all over the world (Peretzs monument, created in 1925 by
sculptor Abraham Ostrzega, is shared with writer Jacob Dinezon and with Shimon Anski, the
author of The Dybbuk, which premiered in 1920 at the Warsaw Elizeum Theater);
Feliks Perl, a political activist and head of the Polish Socialist party; and Ludwik
Zamenhof, who created the international language Esperanto.
Visiting the grave site of Esther Kaminska, who was compared
during her life to the likes of Eleonora Dusa and Sarah Bernhardt, was of special moment
for me. Her daughter was the fabled actress Ida Kaminska whose performances on the Varshe
stage as well throughout the world materially advanced I.L.Peretzs goal in
establishing Yiddish as the centerpiece of modern Jewish life. Although my parents often
saw her perform, I was never privileged to meet her. However, I did get to know her niece,
Dina Halperin, who carried forward their family tradition and became a renowned
international star of the Yiddish stage. Dina Halperin was a close personal friend of our
family. She would often call on my father to discuss the deeper meaning of a given
playwrights writing or in her quest for an unfamiliar Yiddish word. More to
the point, I had the good fortune of performing in Chicago Yiddish theater productions
under the direction of Dina Halperin.
My career in Yiddish theater was strictly as an amateur. Still, I
did get recognition from a large segment of the Jewish population both in Chicago and New
York, as a Yiddish actor. My parents were responsible for launching my acting career. Upon
arrival to Chicago, they arranged my appearances at many of the Jewish cultural events
with which they became associated, where, to the delight of the audience, I would recite
poetry in an infallible Yiddish. Under my parents tutelage, I spent countless hours
preparing poems and learning to properly emote the poets words and meaning. These
public undertakings brought me a measure of fame. It also led me to participate as
an actor on the legitimate Jewish stage in Chicago, as well as to partake in soap operas
on Jewish radio programs. Subsequently, when the Chicago Yiddish Theater Organization was
organized under the direction of Dina Halperin, I became a proud member of its permanent
troupe.
These distant connections to the life of Esther Kaminska flashed
though my mind as I stood in reverence in front of her grave.
If the visit to Warsaw left me unexpectedly shaken, the one to
Bialystok did little to grant relief. The two-hour trip northeast from Warsaw was across
flat and monotonous farmland that seemed frozen in a time warp. It offered no clue to the
cataclysmic events that, half-a-century before, had occurred here and had altered the
course of history forever. The countryside is peaceful now; the farmers plow and till
their land, and their family members dutifully sell mushrooms to motorists passing along
the highway. Life is nowas it always was before 1939as it should be. But
nearby is Treblinka; to the southwest is Gross-Rosen; to the southeast is Majdanek; and
further south, behind Warsaw, is Auschwitz. The black storks that, for generations, have
made their homes here still return to their former nests. If they could speak, I wondered,
would they remember to inform their offspring that in this region of the world, where once
lived three million Jews who spoke in Yiddish, their ancestors witnessed the darkest days
in human history?
Elie Wiesel remembered. He wrote: The beginning, the end: all
the worlds roads, all the outcries of mankind, lead to this accursed place. Here is
the kingdom of night, where Gods face is hidden and a flaming sky becomes a
graveyard for a vanished people.13
Although it is the city where I was born, I found myself less
connected to Bialystok than to Warsaw. Upon reflection, this is understandable. My
memories of Bialystok are those of a seven-year-old. They remained frozen in that
time-space construct. My subsequent strong connections to Jewish lifethose that
molded my identitywere formed by actions and events that occurred thereafter, either
with a historical Varshe reference, or as a consequence of an educational format directed
mainly by my parents, or based on world events that took place as I grew up. The images I
retained of Bialystok were only momentary memory snatches: my immediate family, the house
I lived in, the street I played on, some familiar city sights, and a few critical flashes
after the onset of the war and during our escape from the Nazis. Some of these snapshots I
was able to get close to during our visit, but most of them were gone forever.
When I was a child, the Bialystok stotzeiger, or town
clock, seemed of landmark proportions. My recollection was not far from the truth.
Renovated now as a museum piece, its structure still stands proudly in the middle of
the city and offers a warm welcome. Constructed circa 1900, the clocks four faces
look down on the citizens of Bialystok and provide a reassuring image of a small but
ambitious Polish town. Bialystok, the largest city in northeastern Poland, now has a
population of 280,000 and acts as the seat of a land region that encompasses over 10,000
square kilometers. Deriving its name from the Biala River (biala is the word for
"white" in Slavic languages), which runs through the city, it was founded in
1320 by Prince Gedimin of Lithuania. The first Jews came there in 1558, but, for some two
hundred years, until the rule of Count Jan Branicki, whose heirs governed the Bialystok
province from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Jews were denied full
citizenship. In 1939, Just before the Germans invaded Poland, there were 110,000 Jews
living in Bialystok, representing over 60 percent of the citys population. It meant
that Bialystok had the highest percentage of Jews among the worlds cities with more
than 100,000 inhabitants. Bialystok also had the greatest number of synagogues per capita,
with 33 rabbis in attendance.14
Upon our arrival, the Mayor of Bialystok, Richard Tur sadly
advised us through an interpreter (an appointment had been arranged, courtesy of the
Polish Consulate in Chicago) that we had come too late. The last Bialystoker Jew had died
three weeks before. "Just think," my wife whispered, "had you come back to
Bialystok a little sooner, there would have been two of you." The tragic reality that
had haunted me throughout our time in Varshe had followed me here. The great Jewish center
of Bialystok was Judenrein, just as Hitler had intended. Alas, the black swastika
painted on the adjacent wall of the Archival building reminded us that you dont need
the presence of Jews to have anti-Semitism.
I had clear memories of our home and the neighborhood where I
grew up. Our house, a simple wooden bungalow, sometimes referred to as a chaate in
Yiddish, was inherited by my mother from her father, who died before I was born. It stood
in the heart of the Jewish section and had a dining room, a kitchen, and one bedroom. The
kitchen was dominated by a black potbellied stove that sat in the middle like a headless
dark Buddha. The dining room boasted a white-brick wall oven that allowed my babba
(my maternal grandmother) to prepare cholnt over the weekend. Cholnt was East
European manna: a thick stew made of pieces of beef, potatoes, onions, carrots, beans, and
a host of spices mixed together in a thick pot and cooked overnight. The house also had an
attic where babba slept, and a cellar where she stored the bottles of pickles and
preserves that she prepared during summer months. We also enjoyed indoor plumbing, a
luxury seldom found in Jewish homes. My father, who, along with my mother, was a teacher
by professionand who, in my childish mind could do almost anythinghad built
the washroom, complete with a pull-chain for the overhead water box. That room lifted our
family well above the station of our neighbors.
To my surprise, although most were abandoned, we found a number
of such chaates still standing in what once was the Jewish quarter. I was now faced with
the moment of truth I had often contemplatedmy reaction to an encounter with a close
and personal object of my childhood. Sighting the Bialystok stotzeiger was exciting
but had brought on no deep emotional response. However, seeing the row of old dilapidated
wooden houses, any one of which could have doubled for the house I was born in, suddenly
brought forward unexpected waves of nostalgia that were as frightening as they were
welcome. I experienced an immediate rush of disparate childhood memoriesthe youthful
faces of my parents; my mothers white satin blouse that she sometimes wore to work;
my babbas black woolen shawl, and how she placed it over her shoulders on the
Sabbath; the outline of our kitchen cabinet; the voices of my friendssome of whom I
didnt know that I remembered shouting out my name in Yiddish and calling me to
come outside to playall these came at me at once, causing gooseflesh along my spine
andfor the first time in many, many yearsbringing tears to my eyes. A similar
effect, perhaps in combination with the wooden relics from the past, came from seeing the
cobblestones beneath my feet precisely as I had remembered them on Fastowska Street, where
we lived. If I had any remaining doubts that I was again standing in the neighborhood of
my childhood, they were completely dispelled by a nearby structure that was amazingly
similar to the little Beth Midrash synagogue that had been at the foot of our block. The
plaque on its wall confirmed that it was indeed the former Piaskower Synagogue.
Built in 1890, it had survived the decades almost intact. Its renovated structure
now serves as offices for a construction firm and for the Zamenhof Esperanto Society. The
entire episode was for me an emotional watershed.
In our search for the area where the Great Synagogue of Bialystok
once stood, we were directed to the wall of a small building, where a plaque memorialized
the victims who died when this illustrious house of worship was burned. Designed in 1908
by a renowned architect, Shlome Jakow Rabinowicz, the Great Synagogues dome
exhibited a Byzantine-Muslim influence and was famous throughout Europe. In this
synagogue, open only on Saturdays and holidays, women prayed together with men, although
in separate halls. Between World Wars I and II, national holidays were celebrated there
and the services were attended by such authorities as the mayor and the governor of the
region.15 I was suddenly confronted by a flashback of tragic proportions. The
Nazis recaptured Bialystok on June 27, 1941. Six days later, to celebrate their victory,
German soldiers, at gun point, forced 800 Jews, mostly women and children from the
neighborhood, into the Great Synagogue. They locked the doors and then set the structure
on fire. Both of my grandmothers and my only aunt, Bobble, were among those who burned to
death. How was it determined, I wondered, that I should escape their fate?
There is another visible commemoration of the Great Synagogue of
Bialystok. On the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, a monument was erected
in its honor in a small square near its original location. The monument corrects some of
the errors contained in the original plaque and exhibits the only remaining part of the
structure: the iron beams that once supported its magnificent dome. In another flashback,
my fathers determined face appeared as he lectured me about the importance of
holding true to ones principles. That incident happened just after the outbreak of
the war. The mayor of Bialystok asked the synagogues Rabbi, Dr. Gedali Rozenman, for
permission to hold a City Council meeting there because the City Hall had been destroyed
by bombs. The Rabbi agreed, but requested that all City Council members wear a yarmulke.
The mayor readily agreed; council members would surely respect the nature of such a
request. Well, not everyone. My father, one of the few Jewish representatives to the
Bialystok City Council, was an ardent Bundist. Although steeped in the Talmud, my father
and the legions of his fellow Bundistn had found religion too restrictive in their battle
for equality and social justice for Jews. Their god was the Jewish worker. My father
refused the Rabbis request because the wearing of a yarmulka might compromise his
oath to the Bund. It was a matter of principle.
We visited the memorial to the leaders and fighters of the
Bialystok Ghetto Uprising. It was led by Mordechai Tenenbaum, one of the organizers of the
Warsaw Ghetto Fighters. Upon his arrival in Bialystok in November 1942, Tenenbaum,
convinced that the Germans meant to murder them all, advanced this credo: "Let us
fall as heroes, and though we die, yet we shall live." As a youngster, I first heard
those words in conversations around our kitchen table. The motto unified the various
underground factions, who then formed The Bialystok Organization of Jewish Self-Defense.
The new organization issued the following manifesto: Dont be lambs for slaughter!
Fight for your life to the last breath.... Remember the example and tradition of numerous
generations of Jewish fighters, martyrs, thinkers and builders, pioneers, and creators.
Come out to the streets and fight.
On Sunday night, August 15, 1943, the call was answered. It is a
story I know well. The ghetto fighters attacked three rings of German soldiers and police
surrounding the ghetto. Two days later, Bialystok was a city under siege. The Bialystoker
Self-Defense Organization, with more than 200 armed Jewish fighters, were holding the
ghetto hostage. The fighting lasted six days; the Germans used tanks, artillery, and
airplanes to quell the uprising. Unofficial data and eyewitness accounts put the Nazi
losses at 100 soldiers killed or wounded. The name of one of the heroes of the uprising
was strangely similar to my fathers, Icchok Malmed. After throwing acid in the faces
of some particularly savage Nazi soldiers, Malmed gave himself up when the Germans
threatened to retaliate by shooting 1,000 Jews. He was executed by hanging. A plaque in
his memory was placed on Malmeda Street, named for him.16
The memorial to the Bialystok Ghetto Uprising stands on the site
of the old Jewish cemetery on Zabia Street. A telling story is connected with this site.
After the war, when about 1,100 Jews returned to Bialystok, the damage to the old Zabia
Street cemetery at the hands of the Nazis was repaired. Then, the remains of some 3,500
ghetto victims were buried, a wall was built around the cemetery, and several obelisks
were erected. Two decades later, in 1971, an anti-Semitic wave, allegedly incited by
communist authorities, caused the Bialystok ghetto cemetery to be destroyed once again.
Its monuments and obelisks were blown up. This incident provoked former Israeli Prime
Minister Icchok Shamir, who, as a youth had attended the Bialystok Hebrew Gymnasium
(high school) to remark: "The young Polacks destroyed everything the Nazis did
noteven the Jewish cemeteries."
Little wonder that there are no Jews remaining in Bialystok. And
without Jews, Bialystok has lost its meaning, its raison dêtreor so it
seems to me. And something else is missing. Bialystok was the Polish center for textile
production and finished goods. It was also a bustling city filled with Jews from every
walk of life. Some of them became quite distinguished. Icchok Shamir, who served as Prime
Minister of Israel in 1983-1984 and again in 1986-1992, was a Bialystoker; so was Dr.
Ludwik L. Zamenhof, an ophthalmologist by profession, who, in 1887, became world-famous as
the inventor of the international language Esperanto. Dr. Albert B. Sabin was also a
Bialystoker. As a microbiologist in the U.S., Sabin improved on the Salk polio vaccine and
developed an oral equivalent. A renowned Parisian, international lawyer Samual Pisar, who
spent his adolescence in Auschwitz, was a Bialystoker. His autobiography, Of Blood and
Hope, published in 1979, has been translated into twenty languages. And it should not
be forgotten that, beginning in the 1880s, Bialystok thrived as a center of the Jewish
labor movement, a revolutionary arena that produced many prominent personalities and
writers.
However, more than the weavers of Bialystok or its citizens who
distinguished themselves in medicine or in politics, was the bakers of Bialystok who
exported the fame of the city to the world. Over the years, Bialystok would leave its
gastronomical mark, especially on the United States, where bakeries, delicatessens, and
food stores would sell the "bialy," a breakfast rollthe creation of
Bialystok bakers.
Mimi Sheraton, the respected food aficionado, recently wrote a
book, The Bialy Eaters, devoted to this subject. She talks of the success of
the bialya distant cousin of the bagel but without the hole in its centerand
describes her search for the original, "Bialystoker Kuchen," a baked roll about
nine inches in diameter (larger than a bialy). It had a perimeter of raised dough, and its
flat, crisp, disklike center was impressed with mohn (poppy seeds) and shreds of
roasted onions. Bialystoker Jews who loved the kuchen (that included nearly everyone) were
known as "Bialystoker Kuchen fressers" (immense eaters). Sheraton tells
how she traveled far and wide to record personal memories of those who had first-hand
experience with this fabled delight. She also reports that Nina Selin, of Washington, DC,
describes her family as descendants of three generations of bialy bakers. Ms. Selin claims
that her maternal great-great-grandfather, Moshe Nosovich, born in Bialystok in 1835, was
the inventor of the Bialystoker Kuchen.17 Perhaps. But what every Bialystoker,
including myself, can testify, is that the Bialystoker Kuchen was the original McCoy and
was far tastier than its current counterpart. Alas, there no longer are any Bialystoker
Kuchens nor, for that matter, any Jewish Bialystoker bakers. Sadly, my fathers
"There is nothing there left for me," echoes through my mind.
A strange and infectious silence overcame our group upon
departure. There was much to think about, and many emotions had to be sorted out. My
daughter, recognizing that, after all the anticipation, I might be experiencing a letdown,
quietly said, "Well, at least, it was closure." That it was! But I wasnt
so certain that closure was what I had been looking for. Much later, when we returned to
our hotel in Warsaw, news of an astounding nature hit us. The coincidence was strange and
ironic. Here we were, at the very heart of the Holocaustthe place where
Hitlers final solution for the Jewish people had begun. Six decades later, a
Jew had been chosen as the Democratic Partys candidate for the office of Vice
President of the United States.
___________________
(1) F. Richard Ciccone, Chicago and the American
Century: the 100 most significant Chicagoans of the twentieth century, Contemporary
Books, The Chicago Tribune Company, 1999.
(2) Decades later, the fascist movement in Germany also
used the name "bund," which means "league,"in creating a Nazi
organization with dramatically opposite objectives.
(3) Miriam Weiner; Jewish Roots In Poland, YIVO
Institute for Jewish Research, New York, 1997.
(4) Ruth R. Wisse, I. L. Peretz and the Making of
Modern Jewish Culture, University of Washington Press, 1991.
(5) Motl Zelmanowitcz, Memories of the Bund, In Love
and in Struggle, New York, 1998.
(6) On April 12, 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower,
then commanding the Allied military forces in Europe, visited the Ohrdruf concentration
camp. After viewing the evidence of atrocities, he wrote in a letter to General George C.
Marshall, dated April 15, 1945: "The things I saw beggar[ed[ description. . . .
The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were .
. . overpowering. . . . I made the visit deliberately in order to be in a position to give
first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to
charge these allegations merely to propaganda. Source: The U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum (hereinafter: USHMM).
(7) The ZOB was made up of 22 fighting groups, mostly
leaders and active members representing various points on the political spectrum. The
groups ranged from the orthodox religious organization (Agudas Israel) through the Zionist
parties (Hechalutz groups, Poale-Zion Left, Poale-Zion Right) to the socialist Bund and
the newly created ghetto branch of the Polish Workers Party (PPR).
(8) Source: "Resistance During the Holocaust,"
USHMM.
(9) The armed revolt in Vilna took place in September
1943, under the command of Itzak Witenberg, and, upon his death, under the command of 23
year-old Abba Kovner after the issuance of a manifesto by its Jewish Fighting
Organization, the FPO, imploring the remaining 14,000 Jews to resist deportation. The most
successful organized resistance was carried out by members of the underground in Minsk,
who helped between 6,000 and 10,000 persons flee to the nearby forests. The Jews in
Lachva, lacking guns, set fire to the ghetto and attacked Germans with axes, knives, iron
bars, pitchforks, and clubs. Source: USHMM.
(10) The Holocaust Chonicle, Publication
International, Ltd., Louis Weber, CEO; 2000.
(11) Vladka Meed, On Both Sides of the Wall, Beit
Lohamei Hagetaot and Hakibbutz, Hameuchad Publishing House, Israel, 1972.
(12) The concentration camps in Poland where Jews
perished were: Auschwitz/Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Gross-Rosen, Majdanek, Plaszow,
Sobibor, Stutthof, and Treblinka. Source: USHMM
(13) Elie Wiesel, Pilgrimage to the Kingdom of Night,
The New York Times, November 4, 1979.
(14) Tomasz Wisniewski, Jewish Bialystok, Ipswich
Press, 1998.
(15) Ibid.
(16) Ibid.
(17) Mimi Sheraton, The Bialy Eaters, Broadway
Books/Random House, 2000.
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