Lodz

The story of Lodz may seem familiar, but for every ghetto in every Polish city and town, there are many many individuals and many many stories: heartache, separation, hunger, destruction, depravity, forced removal, and death. Every story is as unique as you and me. Every single story is significant. Every person had a name. Being here makes that clear. Not six million divided by the individual story....The individual story. Times six million.

We are not entitled to fatigue.

I remember that Prof. Yehuda Bauer told us at Yad Vashem that study of the Holocaust takes us to a greater awareness of issues of human rights. He said study of the greatest cruelty awakens us to the greatest empathy.

Look. It's the least we can do.

We are not entitled to fatigue.

Open our hearts and open our minds and simply look.

Today we looked around Lodz, Poland, a city that contained the second largest Jewish community in pre-war Poland. After the Germans conquered Poland in September, 1939, they established a Jewish ghetto for Lodz. Around a third of the city's population was Jewish, and they were forced into the ghetto starting in February of 1940. Of that Jewish population of around 160,000, less than 900 remained alive after the war. About 20 per cent died in the ghetto, from sickness and starvation and torture and random acts of violence. The Lodz ghetto had no running water and no sewers. In addition to the natives, the Germans shipped Jews into the Lodz ghetto, from Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, and the Protecctorate of Bohemia and Monravia.

When we toss around numbers like six million and one-and-a-half-million, 160 thousand may seem small, but a city of 160 thousand would be near in size to South Bend and Mishawaka combined. When we visit the destruction of the Jewish community in Lodz we visit that kind of devastation. Nine hundred left out of 160,ooo.

Today in Lodz we looked at the old ghetto area, the old Jewish cemetery and the railroad station from which Jews were deported. What I noticed most were children playing across the street from these sites, in parks, in backyards, and in fountains. Today was a hot day.

Tomorrow we ride the bus to Treblinka and then Warsaw, from where we began our trip back to the United States on Saturday.