Friday, July 16, 2010

Jewish Life in Poland Before the War

A major emphasis of the trip is that of considering the lives the victims left behind, the societies that were lost in the Holocaust. Today we visited a small rural Polish town called Kazimierz Dolny, a town that had been a shtetl, a thriving center of life for Jews before the war. The town remains, but the Jews are gone. We visited a nearby momument to Kazimierz Dolny Jews at the location of a former Jewish cemetery. From that cemetery, the German army and area Poles stole headstones to use as construction material. The bodies remained, but the headstones were stolen. Recently some area residents constructed a walled memorial from some damaged headstones that were returned to the site.

Then we drove to Lublin, where the buildings of the ghetto where Jews were held for deportation remain much like they were before the war. Only around 25 Jews live in Lublin today. Before the war there were around 35,000 which was a third of Lublin's population. Walking informally around the city this afternoon, we saw and heard that antisemitism remains today in Lublin.

In the evening after dinner in the hotel, we gathered to reflect on our experiences so far and some tears fell.

Tomorrow we visit the nearby concentration camp at Majdanek and then drive on to Zamosc.

No comments:

Post a Comment