XI. Postscript

This Chapter and You...

The "March of the Living" was a name carefully chosen. As you think about it, you will be reminded of the infamous "March of Death" which led some 60,000 starving and emaciated prisoners out of Auschwitz/Birkenau, away from the advancing Russian troops. There were numerous other "Marches," and you will read a little about them now.

The significance of the March of the Living will become even more vivid as we "march" off the airplane in Ben Gurion Airport.

DEATH MARCHES

The Death Marches were of many different varieties. Initially they occurred when large numbers of Jews were marched to the ghettos. They were then marched to the "Umschlagplatz" (gathering point), from which they were boarded on transports to take them to the concentration camps. The Death March continued when the Jews were emptied out of the trucks and railway cars, and marched to their death. During the war, there were many Death Marches conducted when, periodically, prisoners were moved on foot, hundreds of miles, from one camp to another.

The final marches began in the summer of 1944 and their pace escalated as more camps were closed in the face of advancing allied armies. These evacuations and Death Marches were kept up until the very end of the war. Approximately a quarter of a million prisoners, who had somehow managed to survive the daily misery and brutality of the concentration camps, nevertheless died on these marches.

THE MARCH OF THE LIVING

The March of the Living will take you from the Auschwitz Concentration Camp to the Birkenau Death Camp. You will walk beneath the sign that says, "Arbeit Macht Frei" and then walk through the gate that took millions of Jews to their death inside the Birkenau Death Camp. At this point you will be marching on the same path that millions of Jews marched before you, on the way to their death. However, you will immediately recognize the difference - you are alive! Indeed, the March of the Living is your testimony to the survival of the Jewish people.

SURVIVAL AGAINST ALL ODDS

"However remarkable the circumstances under which some survived the concentration camps, it was not as one might initially assume, because certain individuals were younger, older, skillful, clever, more or less intelligent. In a situation where only one out of 600 survived, to link survival to some special characteristics would be unreasonable. The one overriding element that determined survival was luck. In addition to luck, extraordinary individual conditions had to prevail. Hence, it took rather extraordinary persons to survive such generally lethal experiences as typhoid epidemics, beatings, starvation, back-breaking work, witnessing the deaths of loved ones and other torments." (The Holocaust - Can it happen to me? Florida International University, Publ.)

From Ghetto, to Camp - to Death - to Survival - to Displaced Persons Camp - to Israel

THE MARCH OF THE LIVING AND ISRAEL

1945 - What happened to survivors? After the war, many Jews traveled back to their home towns only to find that they had been either destroyed or appropriated. They were not welcome; in fact many were beat and killed by Poles who had moved into their homes and did not want them back in town. Most stayed in Displaced Persons (DP) Camps until they regained their health, were reunited with surviving families, or received immigration visas and transportation to America.

Many of the Jews, when possible, fled to Israel. Some were able to enter the country illegally. Others waited until the establishment of the State of Israel and then fled to their new homeland. These same Jews, who survived the tyranny of Nazi oppression and slaughter, stepped off the boats and were given guns to defend the newly established State of Israel. From Latrun to Lochamei HaGhettaot (kibbutz founded by surviving members of the ghetto resistance movements), from Beersheva to Metulla, survivors and refugees fought side by side with sabras and other newly arrived immigrants.

You will read their story next, in the unit on Israel. You will read about survival. You will read about courage. You will read about resistance. You will read about the joy and excitement of the survivors on taking part in building the State of Israel and being free to defend their new home.

The March of the Living will thus take you from the destruction of eastern European Jewry to the rebuilding of the State of Israel; from the murder of six million Jews to the ingathering of exiles, refugees and survivors from all over the world; from Jews who died as victims to those who died as free people in their own land.

Holocaust and Israel: two opposite words. The first which cannot be explained in even a thousand words. The second which can be explained in only one - "home!"

Reading #1

Jews in Poland today? After the war, they were not welcome. Are they now? You must read this reading, then decide for yourself.

The Post - War Period (excerpted from A Chosen Few, by Mark Kurlansky)

At the end of the War, 3.1 million Polish Jews had been murdered. About 40,000 had survived the camps, and another 55,000 turned up from hiding in Poland or other countries. And then another 180,000 came back from the Soviet Union. By June 1945, there were already more than 10,000 Jews in Cracow, almost 8,000 in Wroclaw, 135,000 in Warsaw, and 41,000 in the Lodz area.

The Central Committee of Polish Jews established an office in Lublin to disseminate information about who was living and who was dead. The Committee started to establish orphanages, and by the end of 1945, they already housed 700 orphans. By the middle of 1946, they had established 44 secondary schools for 3,400 children and 36 primary schools for another 3,300 children. Miraculously, Polish Jewry was back.

But it was not welcomed. In Cracow on May 3, 1945, a youthful mob smashed windows in Jewish homes and shouted anti-Semitic slogans. In August "blood libel" re-emerged in Cracow. Between February and September 1945, 400 Jews had been murdered. In 1946, it got worse. Jewish leaders were turned down in their attempts to meet with Catholic cardinals. On July 4, 1946, the Kielce massacre took place in which 42 Jews were murdered. A similar pogrom was averted in Czestochowa because the local bishop, Teodor Kubin, denounced the accusations of blood libel.

By 1947, 1,500 Jews were murdered, and there were only 90,000 Jews remaining in Poland. Many of the Jews who stayed had become Communists, because the Red Army had served as their "protectors." Many Poles hated the Communists as much as the fascists.

After the political upheaval of 1956, another 45,000 Jews departed Poland, so that by 1967 there were maybe 25,000 to 30,000 Jews. With the startling Israeli victory in the Six-Day War, and even with an increased appreciation of the Israeli as a fighter, the Polish government fermented increased anti-Semitic feelings among the population. The government gave the remaining Jews the option of leaving Poland and emigrating to Israel. Large numbers took this option.

How many Jews remain today in Poland remains unknown. Some estimate between 5,000 and 7,000. There is one operating synagogue in Warsaw, a small Jewish community in Wroclaw, another in Lodz, two synagogues in Cracow (only one "works" at a time), a "Hidden Children" society with 500 members, a Jewish Day School in Warsaw with 18 students in first grade, 30 Bris's in Warsaw in 1994, and Jewish youth clubs in Warsaw and Cracow.

Questions:

1. On a chart, place the number of Jews in Poland in the years mentioned above. Why was 1967 a critical year?

2. Why do you think many Polish people did not welcome back the Jewish refugees in 1945-1946?

3. Should Jews in Poland move to Israel, or do they have a right to stay in Poland?

Reading # 2

What about the "liberators"? The U.S. Army liberated many camps. What was their reaction? How could they live with the horrors they witnessed? We will be witnesses too, but not to the horrors, just to what is left.

Liberating The Camps (excerpts from "1995: Fifty Years After Liberation" - The Holocaust Remembrance Project)

During the final months of World War II, as American and British troops and their Soviet allies converged on Germany and Poland from opposite directions, they liberated hundreds of concentration camps and tens of thousands of prisoners. In some cases the camps had been evacuated. In other cases, however, the liberating armies walked into camps that seemed to be abandoned in the midst of "business as usual."

For many of the survivors - the starved, the sick and the emotionally shattered - their long-awaited day of freedom arrived too late. At Bergen-Belsen, for example, the words of historian Martin Gilbert:

"...the 'cruel reality' came swiftly, as those first British tanks moved on, in pursuit of the German forces. For the next forty-eight hours the camps remained only nominally under British control, with the Hungarian SS guards in partial command. During that brief interval, seventy-two Jews and eleven non-Jews were shot by the Hungarians for such offenses as taking potato peels from the kitchen.

When, finally, British troops did enter Belsen in force, the evidence of mass murder on a vast scale became immediately apparent to them. Of ten thousand unburied bodies, most were victims of starvation. Even after liberation three hundred inmates died each day during the ensuing week from typhus and starvation. Even after the arrival of massive British medical aid, personnel and food, the death rate was still sixty a day after two weeks and more." (And that was just at Bergen-Belsen!)

ONE DOCTOR'S REPORT

"At first I couldn't believe what I saw. We were sort of horrified...The enormity of the fact that millions of Jews had been exterminated could not really sink in their thinking."

Dr. Philip Lief, Captain, US First Army

FROM A WAR CORRESPONDENT

"I shall try to tell the story calmly, but it isn't easy. What I saw was the reality of the hideous stories of Nazi torture. The horror films from the Polish Death Camps - which despite evidence are rejected by the human mind because they're beyond imagination - they were terrible. This was not beyond imagination. This was happening here.

A Polish boy, twenty-two, leaned against the post and cried like a child, "They're all burned, all burned to death by the Germans. I have no home to return to. Why did you leave us to rot in these concentration camps all these years? Why didn't you British and Americans help us sooner? I am a man with nothing to lose; all I have left is my hate..."

Evelyn Irons, War Correspondent, First French Army, 2nd Armored Division

FROM AN AFRICAN-AMERICAN SOLDIER

"We saw the whole works. The crematorium...Why did nobody scream and yell stop? We saw the dead bodies, stacked up like cord wood, and inside the ovens were the rib cages and the skulls. And it was so hard to believe."

Leon Bass (African American), Sergeant, 183rd Combat Engineer Battalion

FROM A SURVIVOR

"I have never since heard sounds like those we uttered, sounds released from the very depths of our being. The sheer force of it must have scattered the ashes of Auschwitz to every corner of the universe, for our cries of joy suddenly turned into a bitter wail: "We are liberated! We are liberated! But where are they? They are all dead!""

From Isabella: From Auschwitz to Freedom by Isabella Leitner

LIBERATORS AND SURVIVORS - THEIR PAIN, THEIR MEMORIES, THEIR SCARS - CAN WE EVER UNDERSTAND THEM? NO...

Reading #3

Can you imagine writing to your parents or friends from a ghetto or camp? When you write in your journal, think about what you would say.

"Final Letters" (excerpts from the book Final Letters From Victims of the Holocaust, Yad VaShem)

On the way to their deaths, Jews - the inmates of camps, ghettos and prisons - tried to transmit some information about their fate to their relatives and friends. They wrote on whatever scraps of paper they could find and left their messages in hiding places or dropped them from deportation trains. Decades passed before many of these letters reached their destinations.

Below is one example: Sara and Yehiel Gerlitz of Bedzin, Poland, entrusted their only daughter, aged six, to a Polish friend by the name of Florczak. With the presentiment that they would never see their child again, they left her a letter which she was to open when she came of age.

"My dear, beloved, little child, 7 July, 1944

On giving birth to you, my darling, I did not imagine that six and a half years later I would be writing you such a letter. When I last saw you, on your sixth birthday, on 13 December 1943, I had the illusion that I would still be able to see you before my departure, but now I know that this cannot be. I do not want to endanger you. We are leaving on Monday, now it is Friday evening. We are going — Daddy, Pola, and I — with 51 other fellow nationals to an unknown destination. I do not know, my dear child, if I will ever see you again. I take with me from home your picture, which I love so much, I am taking along your lovely chatter, the smell of your innocent, little body, the rhythm of your innocent breathing, your smile, and your tears which my heart, the heart of a mother, could not allay. I take along your last image, as I saw you on 13 December 1943, your prematurely adult look, the sweet taste of your childish kisses, and the hug of your tiny arms. That is what will accompany me on my way. Could it be that Providence will allow me to survive this nightmare and to regain you, my treasure? Should this happen, I will explain to you many things you have not understood so far and which you will probably never be able to understand, since you will be in other surroundings, and brought up in an atmosphere of freedom. My sweetheart! I want you to read this, when, by G-d's will, you are grown up and mature and able to criticize our behavior toward you. I desire, my dear and beloved child, that you should not condemn us, that you should love our memory and our entire loathed people from which you originate. It is my desire that you should neither be ashamed of your provenance nor deny it. I want you to know that your father was a person of rare qualities — there are not many like him in the world — and that you can be proud of him. He dedicated his whole life to doing good to other people; may G-d bless every step of his, protect him, and allow him to regain you! My beloved treasure, you are your father's whole world, his only ambition, his only satisfaction for all his sufferings and pain. Therefore I wish you to keep a good memory of him, if fate should prove unfavorable to us ¼ I want you to remember your grandfathers and grandmothers, your aunts and uncles — people of great value — and the whole family. Remember us and do not blame us! As for me, your mother — forgive me¼ I wanted to bear you for our and your pride and joy, and it is not our fault that things took a different course. Thus, I implore you, my one and only darling, don't blame us. Try to be as good as your father and your ancestors. Love your foster parents and their family, who surely will tell you about us. I ask you to appreciate the self-sacrifice of your foster parents and to be their pride, so that they should never have any reason to regret the commitment which they have taken on voluntarily. There is one thing more I want you to know: that your mother was a proud person, despite our enemies' scorn and mistreatment, and, when she was going to die, she did so without moaning and crying, but with a smile of contempt for the enemy on her lips!

I hug and kiss you affectionately; receive all the blessings of my heart.

Your loving Mother

***

What can I say to my only child, truly the person dearest to me in the world? One should open one's heart and reveal its inside — no pen is able to describe what goes on in there just now. But I believe firmly that we will all survive and offer our hearts to one another.

Your Father

Fortunately, the parents survived; they were reunited with their daughter and together emigrated to Israel, where they now live.

Questions:

1. What does the mother mean when she says, "...that you should not condemn us, that you should love our memory and our entire loathed people from which you originate?"

2. Who was more courageous: the "foster" parents who agreed to care for the child, or the birth parents who gave up their child? Explain.

Reading #4

Children were hidden with non-Jews. Some were reunited after the war. Many never again saw their parents, and didn't even know they were Jewish. Some who recently discovered their "secret" Jewish identity believe that the Holocaust lasted another 50 years for them. How many of us "hide" our Jewish identity?