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Posted on 08/29/2004 9:37:54 AM PDT by HeidiHi
LODZ, Poland - Sam Weinreich remembers the last time he came to Radegast train station in Poland's second-largest city - the day in 1944 he was forced into a cattle car and sent to Nazi Germany's Auschwitz death camp.
"They promised us bread, so we came here ... when you're hungry, you'll eat grass. People in the ghetto became like animals," said Weinreich, one of some 400 survivors who on Sunday commemorated the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto 60 years ago.
Before World War Two, Lodz's 223,000 Jews, accounting for a third of the city's population, formed the second-largest Jewish community in Europe. The city was home to noted cultural figures, including pianist Arthur Rubinstein.
Over 200,000 people from Lodz and other cities were imprisoned in the ghetto. Only 5,000-7,000 survived the war. The rest - like Weinreich's parents and nine brothers and sisters - died there or in the death camps.
Weinreich, now 85, lives in Memphis, Tennessee with his wife Frieda - also a former Lodz resident.
In the 19th century Lodz was known as "The Promised Land", drawing Jews from around the Russian Empire and Western Europe to work in its thriving textile industry.
"Today Lodz renders honor to its Jewish residents, who during the Holocaust were murdered simply because of who they were," Polish Prime Minister Marek Belka, a Lodz native, told a ceremony at the Radegast train station, renovated as a memorial.
Belka called his participation in the ceremony "the crowning of my upbringing," referring to his grandparents' stories of pre-war Lodz, and to hiking trips as a boy scout during which he discovered abandoned historical sites.
"Today we can build a bridge of memory and dialogue, after decades of tragic forgetting. We owe memory, and honor, to the Jews of Lodz, who for a century and a half built Poland's Promised Land," Belka said.
Thousands of city residents gathered to hear speakers including Ilan Shalgi, Israel's Science and Technology Minister, and U.S. ambassador Victor Ashe, at the main event in a weekend that includes prayer services and memorial concerts.
Poland's pre-war Jewish community of 3.5 million was reduced to 300,000 by the time the war ended. Many survivors fled post-war pogroms, and others were expelled in 1968 during a bout of anti-Semitism encouraged by the communist government.
Today, Poland's Jewish community has some 5,000 to 6,000 active members.
Relations have improved in recent years thanks to gestures of conciliation from mainstream politicians of both right and left, but anti-Semitic statements from fringe political and Roman Catholic leaders still occasionally open old wounds.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/lodz.html
Excerpt from The Song of the Murdered Jewish People by Itzhak Katzenelson:
The first to perish were the children, abandoned orphans,
The world's best, the bleak earth's brightest.
These children from the orphanages might have been our comfort.
From these sad, mute, bleak faces our new dawn might have risen.
At the end of the winter of forty-two I was in such a place.
I saw children just brought in from the street. I hid in a corner
And saw a two-year-old girl in the lap of a teacher Thin, deathly pale and with such grave eyes.
I watched the two-year-old grandmother,
The tiny Jewish girl, a hundred years old in her seriousness and grief.
What her grandmother could not dream she had seen in reality.
I wept and said to myself: Don't cry, grief disappears, seriousness remains.
Seriousness remains, seeps into the world, into life and affects it deeply.
Jewish seriousness sobers, awakens and opens blind eyes.
It is like a Torah, a prophecy, a holy writ for the world.
Don't cry, don't... Eighty million criminals for one Jewish child's seriousness.
Don't cry I saw a five-year-old girl in that "home".
She fed her younger, crying brother...
She dipped hard bread crumbs in watery marmalade
And got them cleverly into his mouth... I was lucky
To see it, to see the five-year-old mother feeding him,
And to hear her words. My mother, exceptional though she was, was not that imaginative.
She wiped his tear with her laughter and talked him into joy.
0 little Jewish girl, Sholem Aleichem could not have done any better. I saw it.
I saw the misery in that children's home.
I entered another room there, too, it was fearfully cold.
From afar a tin stove cast a glow on a group of children.
Half-naked children gathered around the glowing coal.
The coal glowed. One stretched out a little foot, another a frozen hand,
A naked back. A pale young boy with dark eyes
Told a story. No, not a story! He was stirred and excited Isaiah! you were not as fervent, not as eloquent a Jew.
He spoke a mixture of Yiddish and the holy tongue. No, it was all the holy tongue.
Listen! Listen! See his Jewish eyes, his forehead.
How he raises his head... Isaiah! you were not as small, not as great,
Not as good, not as true, not as faithful as he.
And not only the little boy who spoke in that children's home,
But his little sisters and brothers who listened to him with open mouths
0 no, you countries, you old and rebuilt European cities,
The world never saw such children before; they never existed on earth.
They, the Jewish children, were the first to perish, all of them,
Almost all without father or mother, eaten by cold, hunger and vermin,
Saintly messiahs, sanctified by pain ... 0 why such punishment?
Why were they first to pay so high a price to evil in the days of slaughter?
They were the first taken to die, the first in the wagon.
They were flung into the big wagons like heaps of dung
And were carried off, killed, exterminated,
Not a trace remained of my precious ones! Woe unto me, woe.
http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/exhibits/dignitydefiance/15.html
sad but proud ping - I am so proud of America for helping (finally) to liberate European Jews and save an important culture from destruction. Stay safe, good people. And please continue sharing your cultural wisdom, gentleness, and intelligence with us in the free world.
I found myself holding my breath while reading the lyrics to that song. So sad, but so exquisite.
I'm just thinking of how ironic it was Oscar winner Adrien Brody decided to equate President Bush with the Holocaust when he accepted his award.
Holy God, that makes me sick. I would not have given up my children, I would have gone.
God protect the Jews. Don't let this happen again.
...despite his later work with Spike Lee and Barry Levinson, he never became the star many expected he would become...
Turns out he was in such fine feature films as The Last Time I Committed Suicide and The Boy Who Cried Bitch. I think I'll avoid this guy and all his moral spouting.
"Holy God, that makes me sick. I would not have given up my children, I would have gone."
There is a story I heard not so long ago about a Jewish woman and her three young children who had been rounded up by the SS. She begged and pleaded with them to have mercy on the children. A smiling SS officer told her that he would let one go, but she had to choose which one it would be. Unable to choose, they died in the gas chamber together.
What ugliness and cruelty - to ask any mother to choose which of her children should live and which should die.
Where was G-d in all this mess? More pertinently, where was man? As Katzenelson writes elsewhere in this tremendously long tribute to the murdered Jews of the Holocaust, the worst of men helped the Germans, and the best kept one eye closed.
Who cannot weep for these 1.5 million Jewish children and all the other children murdered in such places as Rwanda and the Sudan while the world sat back and did nothing?
"Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski"
May he burn in the hottest fires of hell.
"I found myself holding my breath while reading the lyrics to that song. So sad, but so exquisite"
Itzhak Katzenelson, the author of the piece, was a most saintly man - a really remarkable human being. Some photographs of Itzhak Katzenelson with his beautiful children:
http://english.gfh.org.il/photographs.htm
My family gave up their children and thus saved their lives.
In 1939, my grandfather put my 7-year-old father and his 12-year-old brother on a train leaving the country (Germany) for who-knows-where (foster homes in England) and after doing so, went to his father-in-law's home to celebrate the old man's birthday. When my grandfather told him what he had done with the precious grandchildren, my great-grandfather said "This was the best gift you could have ever given me."
I am not jewish but study the holocaust at an amateur level to try to fathom how and why human beings on such a great scale could have done what transpired in nazi Europe. The crimes perpetrated by the nazis, their enablers, and minions were so horrific and of such magnitude that they have forever perturbed the moral and ethical trajectory of humankind much as a black hole is able to bend the path of light. It can never be forgotten, trivialized, or selfishly used as a rhetorical tool so common by today's political malcontents. Any Hollywood lefty, unkempt protestor, or disenfranchised muslim who screams the word "nazi" simply illustrates their ignorance regarding historical facts.
That was brilliantly expressed. Thank you very much indeed for your most eloquent insights.
"This was the best gift you could have ever given me."
A gift which was, for reasons well known to both of us, withheld from most Jewish parents and grandparents.
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I don't think you read the link. The children were not sent away to survive, the man said to give the children to die so the adults could live and work. All children under ten.
What your Great-Grandfather did was wonderful. To send them away to save them, I would do. To send them to die to save the adults, I would die with them.
>>There is a story I heard not so long ago about a Jewish woman and her three young children who had been rounded up by the SS. She begged and pleaded with them to have mercy on the children. A smiling SS officer told her that he would let one go, but she had to choose which one it would be. Unable to choose, they died in the gas chamber together<<
That would be me as well.
"Vengence is Mine" bump
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