DINA DIAMOND
Pictured: Rabbi Ramon Widmonte
Considering that this year marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, there were many tours to Poland, but this one in particular focused not just on the death and destruction that has become part of the history of the country from the Second World War, but also on the life, culture and traditions that emanated from a place where a thriving community of over three million Jews once lived.
Rabbi Ramon Widmonte conceptualised and co-ordinated the tour and managed to condense everything into four fully-packed and emotive days with his knowledgeable colleague Tzvi Sperber, a director of J-Roots, a group who organise tours to places of Jewish heritage.
We laughed, we cried, we drank, we sang and we danced – an emotional rollercoaster of experiences that has changed our views and ideas for life.
From the pristine but somehow soulless city of Warsaw, with only a tiny remnant of the ghetto walls remaining, through Lublin, once the jewel of Torah learning, to the bustling city of Krakow, where Oscar Schindler’s factory was situated, the entire country serves as a memorial to the Jewish pulse that once beat so strongly but is felt no more.
The number of six million Jews believed to have perished in the Holocaust, is often debated, especially by Holocaust deniers. However, after visiting death camps such as Auschwitz, Majdanek and Belzec, witnessing the remnants of the devastation and listening to the evidence, the number six million seems like an underestimation.
Despite the meticulous record-keeping of the Nazis, with ghettos and death camps numbering over 14 000, it would have been impossible to count all those who perished from starvation, cold, illness, beatings, gas chambers and the mere whim of a Nazi with a gun. The mass graves in the forests, particularly those of children, attest to this.
The day we arrived at Auschwitz II, this all-too-painful site of unspeakable horrors, the skies clouded over, the wind howled and the rain pelted down. A slight reprieve in the weather, just in time, allowed an entire group of officers from the Israeli Defence Forces, headed by two Holocaust survivors (one who was with our tour), and an IDF officer carrying a Torah, to march through the gates, almost in total defiance of what we all knew had taken place there.
It was a moving moment, reassurance that this would never happen again and a validation of why the State of Israel exists and needs to exist. To paraphrase famous human rights activist Irwin Cotler: “Israel did not happen because of the Holocaust, the Holocaust happened because there was no Israel.”
We were privileged to have with us Dov Landau, a cheerful and energetic 87-year-old, a survivor of Auschwitz and the Holocaust. He took us to the town where he once lived and showed us where his house was, where the bakery was and even the mikveh.
Today he is greeted by the local residents and treated like a celebrity. Inside Auschwitz, he showed us the very bunk to which he had been confined; he relayed the hardships and losses of life inside the camp.
Dov now lives in Tel Aviv and harbours no anger or bitterness; he defies what he went through by living and raising a caring Jewish family.
When learning about all the propaganda and baseless lies created by the Nazis pre- and during the Second World War, to vilify the Jew, to pave way for the Aryan race, one cannot help but compare it to modern-day anti-Semitism now camouflaged as anti-Zionism.
To compare the actions of the Jewish State to that of the Nazis’ treatment of Jews in the Holocaust, is an insult and shows utter disrespect for the memories of the six million Jews and others who had to endure cruelty, brutality and were ultimately sent to their death because of who they were.
People who do this and those who entertain it, need merely to go and view part of what is now a museum in Auschwitz with mounds and rooms full of shoes, locks of hair, spectacles, suitcases, shaving brushes, prosthetics and the list goes on…
“Never again” a phrase repeated time and time again, must never stop being said so that Jews are never again slaughtered for being Jews.
The most important lesson from the past is that history does repeat itself – if you let it. It is up to every Jew and every decent human being to ensure that Jews are not labelled and turned into “the villain” through varying excuses and propaganda.
No matter how many cemeteries and shuls have been restored, how many plaques have been erected, the lives of six million precious souls can never be regained and the once bustling centres of Jewish life in Eastern Europe are no more and will most likely, never be again.
