
Holocaust

Pain in Poland – why roots trips are worth it
Released in local cinemas just days before the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz this week, A Real Pain tells the story of cousins who visit Poland to honour their grandmother. But it’s not just the stuff of Hollywood screenplays, South Africans have many stories of journeying to Poland to connect to their roots. They share some of them.
“The SS [Schutzstaffel] pushed 80 people into the cattle trucks, closed the doors, and the nightmare journey to Auschwitz began. We had no facilities for anything. We couldn’t move, and people were sitting on top of each other. There was no air, and we couldn’t breathe properly.” These are the words of late Holocaust survivor Ervin Schlesinger. While reluctant to discuss his traumatic Holocaust experiences for much of his life, Schlesinger documented his story in later years.
“Like most Holocaust survivors, my grandfather couldn’t speak about his experiences,” says his grandson, Liran Assness. While Schlesinger revealed only snippets of his story to his family, when he read an article by a Holocaust denier, he decided to speak up to counter such gross misinformation. He wrote about what happened to him, was interviewed by the Schindler Foundation, and gave a handful of talks in closed forums, says Assness.
Born in Petrovac, Yugoslavia, in 1927, Schlesinger was taken to Auschwitz at the age of 16. Here his entire family, aside from his sister with whom he later reunited, was killed. After surviving the war, he ultimately became a diamond dealer in South Africa.
His bravery and resilience have always inspired Assness, who today is a successful businessman. When he travelled with his wife to Poland on a JRoots journey in 2024, Assness read his grandfather’s words while he and his tour group stood in Auschwitz. “It was very moving for me, a special moment,” he says.
When the idea of visiting Poland came up, Assness was initially disinterested in it. “I always thought we grew up with a Holocaust survivor, we know what happened, we don’t have to go. There’s also some generational trauma that’s passed down, so you almost want to avoid it in a sense.”
Assness says it was the relaxed attitude of Rabbi Eitan Ash, who co-runs the JRoots journeys from South Africa, which made the idea of going to Poland more palatable. Nevertheless, he says, he was disengaged before the tour. His first few days in the country were difficult as he battled feelings of anger and irritation. “I settled into it though, and it was then a different experience,” he says.
Assness says the trip left him feeling a deeper connection to his grandfather, and was ultimately life-changing. “Just the mere fact that you are alive and able to practice your Judaism gives you a lot of appreciation and perspective. There’s so much gratitude that you were born in a different era, otherwise, just by default, you probably would have been killed.”
Ash, who has taken eight JRoots trips to Poland to date, says that for him, every one of these journeys has changed him in some way. While he has no direct family links to Poland, he has felt a deep connection to the Holocaust since childhood.
“I always had the desire to go to Poland,” he says. Initially going as a participant, Ash now helps conduct annual JRoots trips. “For me, it’s not a tour, I call it a journey, and I come back a different person every single time.”
“It’s not a tour about the Holocaust, it’s a tour about the Jewish people,” he says, “tracing the country’s rich Jewish heritage from Warsaw to Auschwitz to Lublin and more.” In Judaism, he says, we believe in yizchor or zachor [memory] rather than history. “Memory means that it’s mine. So all of this is really about our connection, upliftment, and transformation,” he says. Regardless of your direct connection to Poland or the Holocaust, it’s a personal journey for every Jew.
Monica Solomon planned a unique trip to Poland in 2007 to trace her father’s early life in Breslau. Originally in Germany, the city was annexed by Poland after World War II, and is now called Wroclaw.
“My husband and I went with the intention of finding as much as we could about his life there from 1910 when he was born, to 1933 when he moved to the Netherlands,” she says. Understanding the looming danger for Jews, Solomon’s father then fled to South Africa in 1935. His mother, brother, and sister later went to South America, while his father died in 1939 in a hospital in Berlin.
Before everything changed, his life in Breslau was happy. His family lived in a magnificent apartment which housed a music room where visiting musicians would play for their guests. Solomon had the address of the apartment, and was delighted to be allowed into the building.
“We saw what is now one third of the apartment that my father lived in. Each original apartment in this building has now been turned into three large apartments. We could still see what he had described to us about the communal garden and the homes across the road.”
Solomon also visited her father’s school, where a mock classroom was still on display to give visitors a taste of its history. While the shul where her father studied with the chief rabbi of Breslau was undergoing renovations, she saw the pool where her father, a swimmer, had trained, and visited the beautiful university he studied at.
“It’s just something special. You somehow feel part of their lives by tracing your parents’ roots,” she says. Wroclaw is today a university town and its huge student population adds to the bustling energy of the city. The fact that her father’s time there was happy meant that the trip lacked the traumatic undertones of those with a different fate.
Being joined by her sister, Michelle Bako, made the journey that much more impactful, Solomon says. “It was overwhelming to be there together. Of our siblings, we are the most like our father and followed in his footsteps by going into the commercial world. Just being at his apartment was incredible. It’s a feeling that can’t really be explained – the connection to the past and a bygone era. It’s something everyone should do if they can. It’s all very well your parents telling you stories about their lives and how they grew up, but it isn’t real until you’ve seen it.”
