A Week in Northeastern Poland: Memory, Mourning, and Admiration

 

A few months ago my father, Michael Nevins, was invited to participate in a commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Białystok Ghetto uprising on August 16, 1943. This would be his fourth trip to Poland, and for the occasion, he invited his seven grandchildren to come. In the end five were able to go—Andrea and Alan’s two and Lynn and my three, and so my sister and I also signed up to make it an even eight. 

 

Dad’s connection to this region traces back to his grandparents, originally known as Haskel Neviadomsky and Celia Zaban. They were born in a small town in the Polish northeast called Dabrowa (pronounced Dombrova, דומברובה or in Yiddish spelling, דובראווע), which means oak forest. It is situated between the cities of Białystok and Grodno (now in Belarus). Haskel left for America in 1896; Celia followed in 1899. They married and took the American-sounding name Nevins (Haskel became Hyman), perhaps from Nevins Street in Brooklyn, and raised four children in New York City, including my Papa Sam, born in 1905.

 

Dad knew very little about the old country, but in the late 1970s when Alex Haley’s book and television series Roots prompted broad interest in genealogy, he decided to look into his grandparents’ town in Poland. He found some people to interview, acquired old photos and maps, as well as a list of Holocaust victims from Yad Vashem, and in 1982 published a “Yizkor/memory book,” Dabrowa: Memorial to a Shtetl. In 1995 my parents traveled to Poland for the first time, visiting Dabrowa, and starting to make some local connections. They helped support the repair of the old Jewish cemetery gate and grounds, but other projects called their attention, including supporting the translation of a Yiddish Yizkor book for Felshtin, the Ukrainian village in which my mother’s father Irving Brower survived a pogrom in 1919. 

 

Twenty years passed, during which my mother died too young at 66, and Dad was drawn back to Dabrowa. This time the impetus came from the town itself—a school teacher there was investigating the Jewish roots of the town, which had been half Jewish before the war, and she discovered my father’s book. Might he be willing to visit and speak to the local population? In 2016 he made that journey, taking my brother Ted and my son Sam along, as well as his friend and fellow physician, the artist Mark Podwal. Mark’s mother had left Dabrowa in 1929, and his uncle had been murdered in Treblinka, along with most of the remaining Jews in town. After that trip, Mark painted a series of 18 pictures, collecting them in a book called Kaddish for Dabrowa. He invited Dad to return with him in 2018 for a dedication of the volume and a mural featuring one of his paintings on the side of a local school. 

 

By now my father had developed a network of local Polish educators and activists who were committed to honoring the Jewish past of Poland. These included:

 

After the 2018 trip Dad met Elzbieta in London, where she gave him a gift. It was the diary of David Spiro, a Białystok man who fought and died in the uprising there in 1943. My father reprinted some of the Spiro diary, together with excerpts from the diaries of other Białystok Jews, into a 2020 volume called “Voices from the Białystok Ghetto.”

Separately, Dad became interested in the poetry of a Polish writer named Jerzy Ficowski, a non-Jew who actively resisted the Nazis but still felt survivor’s guilt after the war. His collection of poems, A Reading of Ashes, included a “Letter to Marc Chagall,” the famous painter who survived the war in America. Ficowski sent a copy to Chagall, and several years later Chagall created five etchings to illustrate the poem. My father found the story of this collaboration between two artists who never met to be fascinating, and with the help of Elzbieta Smolenska, created a short film to tell this story (it can be accessed on Vimeo here. Password: Chagall). 

OK, so much for the background. Here is my brief trip account and then a final thought. 

 

Monday, August 14            

We landed in Warsaw, dropped our bags at the hotel, and traveled to Polin, a ten year old museum and memorial on the site of the old Warsaw ghetto. There we met Elzbieta, and toured the immersive exhibits that cover the rich history and violent end of Polish Jewish history. Because the borders of “Poland” have been so unstable over the past 500 years, the focus was expansive, encompassing the entire Pale of settlement from Vilna/Vilnius to the north, east to Ukraine and south towards Austria. It is an incredibly rich heritage, but the museum also narrated the shocking realities of the Shoah. We visited a special exhibit to mark the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising which began in April 1943. Dark galleries resembled narrow passages in the ghetto and sewers below—it is extraordinary that these Jews were able to resist with just a few weapons and hold off the Nazis for even a brief time. 

It was a bit rushed since we were expected at the Forum for Dialogue at 2 PM—there we met Andrzej and the program director Hanna Gospodarczyk to learn about programs they maintain across Poland, and for me to think of ways to connect GOA students to people their age in Poland during our Neshama trip in February. 

For dinner we went out with Elzbieta’s family as well as Bieta Ficowski, widow of the poet. It was a pleasure to see the 5 young adults from our family get to know Elzbieta and Ian’s two children, also young adults, and to think that this trip was going to be about more than memory. After dinner we strolled together across Warsaw, which is an impressive city that feels prosperous despite the horrific Russian invasion and missile strikes just across the border in Ukraine. The Polish people have been extraordinary in welcoming refugees and maintaining moral clarity in the face of yet another Russian invasion. 

 

We rose early and left Warsaw, heading out in two vehicles with Elzbieta and Ian in one car, and another remarkable Polish man named Marek Chmielewski driving the young adults in his van. Marek has an extraordinary story—he was a “juvenile anti-Semite” by his own telling, but when a friend revealed that he was Jewish, Marek went in a new direction, dedicating himself to studying Jewish culture and preserving a synagogue in the town of Orla, which he serves as mayor. He also loves Hasidic music and drove the kids a bit crazy playing two CDs on loop, but was very kind to us. 

Our first stop was in Treblinka, the death camp where an estimated 800,000 Polish Jews were murdered. Nothing is left of the camp buildings. Unlike other concentration camps that I have visited there were no barracks, gas chambers or crematoria to see. Instead there were tall pine trees and then a massive field of jagged stones inscribed with the names of Jewish communities destroyed in the Shoah. Only one individual is honored with a stone—Janusz Korczak, the pediatrician who did so much to protect Jewish children, and ultimately chose to die with them in Treblinka. My father, who wrote an essay about Korczak in one of his medical history volumes, gave a lecture at the gravestone and then we all explored the area silently under the beating sun. 

Our next stop was a small town called Tykocin which has a large synagogue museum, but it was closed due to a double holiday in Poland—the feast of the ascension, and Army Day. In any event, we were hot and emotionally drained, and content to have ice cream and move on to Białystok (about 75 miles from Treblinka). 

Again we dropped bags and then rushed to the small museum, “The Place” where Dad has been invited to give a lecture about his engagement with Polish Jewish history. It turned out to be surprisingly crowded since many people were coming to town for the memorial. We met a large group of volunteers who work in Poland every summer restoring Jewish cemeteries. Nearly 50 people packed into the tiny space downstairs, and Dad regaled the crowd with his story and insights. It was a precious moment for our family to see him sharing this with so many knowledgeable and dedicated people. 

After dinner we walked across Białystok—it’s much smaller than Warsaw but still has its charms. Beneath the veneer of the sparkling city there are also reminders of Jewish absence such as placards reminding pedestrians of the rich Jewish life in the interwar period, and others chronicling the horrible end from 1941-43. 

 

Białystok in the Shoah: The destruction of this Jewish community began in earnest in 1941 when the Nazis crammed 800 Jews into the Great Synagogue and burned it down. The remaining Jews were forced into a ghetto, which also received shipments of Jews from smaller towns like Dabrowa. The first major deportations to Treblinka occurred from February 5-12, 1943. By that summer it became clear the Germans were ready to liquidate the entire ghetto. This is when acts of Jewish resistance became more overt. Yitzhok Malmed threw acid in the face of a Nazi officer and shot another. He was tortured to death and hanged at the gate of the Judenrat. Jews overcame their internal left/right differences and mounted a unified rebellion, led by Daniel Moszkowitz and Mordechaj Tenenbaum. At 10 AM on August 16, 1943, as a triple ring of Germans closed in on the ghetto, the Jewish fighters gave a signal and started their counterattack. The fighting was severe, and the Germans retreated briefly, but then returned with a tank. As the Jews ran out of ammunition, some died by suicide, and many more by Nazi murder. 1,200 Jewish children were separated–apparently to be used by the Nazis for some sort of trade, but ended up killed in Auschwitz. By August 20 the ghetto was depopulated, and the vibrant Jewish presence in Białystok was over. 

The hotel was crowded with visitors there to honor the martyrs of the ghetto uprising. We made our way to Mordechaj Tenebaum Square, which had been set up for a major event. Dignitaries included the ambassadors from America, Israel, and Germany, the mayor and other Polish officials, Chief Rabbi Michael Shudrick (a JTS alumnus) and leaders of many organizations. A military band and honor guard marched in and stood still for the lengthy ceremony. We managed to get our group in among the VIPs with dad, and to listen to translations of the Polish speeches. 

The ambassadors each spoke well, but their agendas were not subtle. The American ambassador praised Poland as a humanitarian superpower, bringing the Ukraine war into the conversation. The Israeli ambassador reflected on how even today there are those who remain intent on destroying the Jews, bringing Iran into the conversation. The German ambassador simply acknowledged that it was Germany that invaded Poland and murdered so many of its citizens, especially the Jews. No agenda other than remorse.

The most powerful speeches were made by the Pisar family—Samuel’s widow Judith, and her son, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, by video statement. Samuel’s father David had been one of the Białystok ghetto fighters, and was captured and murdered together with other members of his family in different concentration camps. It is hard to say just how remarkable it feels to be in Poland remembering our most powerless moment when the ghetto fighters knew that there was no chance of survival, that their rebellion was only to determine the manner of their death—and then to hear from a descendant who occupies one of the most powerful offices in the world. It did not erase the horror and the loss, but it reminded us that powerlessness is not our permanent lot in life—and neither is power. We navigate the vicissitudes of history, never knowing the challenges and opportunities which will be ours to confront. 

The ceremony was powerful—and protracted. It got hot, but it kept going on—the one moment that shocked and upset our family was when the honor guard shot blanks into the sky to recall the fallen fighters. Their rifles had bayonets, and the first thing they did was lower them—at the crowd—before raising them and shooting. We then went a few blocks down to witness the laying of stumbling stones by the Pisar family near their last home in Białystok.

That evening we managed to talk our way into the reserved seats of a Polish production of Fiddler on the Roof in the town square. It was interesting to consider the valence of this story in Poland—the Russian antagonists who terrorize and then attack the Jews were recognized by this audience as the same people who invaded Poland in Czarist times, and then again in in 1919, and then in 1939 to launch WWII, followed by 45 years of Soviet hegemony. Russia threatens Poland once again today, with Wagner mercenaries just across the border in Belarus. The production was a bit much for us, but there were perhaps 5,000 people watching in the central square of Białystok—a remarkable experience at the end of a day of commemoration.

 

This day was the most private one for us, and perhaps most meaningful. We drove northeast to Dabrowa, arriving in town to a reception by Dorota and the other teachers and a group of students who volunteer in the cemetery. They had questions for Dad, and also for the rest of our family. Our kids each spoke thoughtfully and made it clear that their sense of Jewish identity and broader ethical responsibilities run very deep. 



After Dad’s talk we headed to the cemetery where I chanted El Malei Rahamim (we didn’t quite have a minyan for kaddish), and then quietly explored the gravestones that were jumbled about under the tall trees.

Back in the car, we continued northeast to Krasnograda to visit the Borderland Foundation. This beautiful estate includes outdoor art installations, galleries, studios and a café. This group of artists was inspired by the Nobel prize winner Czeslaw Miłosz to rebuild broken bridges between European cultures. Miłosz eventually gave them access to his family estate in Krasnograd as a center for Borderland. Part of their work relates to Jewish art—they sponsor klezmer concerts in an old synagogue in Sejny. But they have a broader mission to use the arts to connect people of distinct and sometimes hostile cultures. They have been especially active with Ukrainian refugees, creating spaces for them to use  visual arts, music and literature to explore the ongoing horror of the Russian attack and they fight to preserve Ukrainian identity. We met Krzysztof and I bought his new collection of poems and photographs, “Firewords: Tiny Poems.” Then back in the car toward Białystok, passing by beautiful forests, lakes, small towns and churches, until we reached Elzbieta and Ian’s home, where they treated us to a vegetarian dinner.

On Friday morning we rose early and drove 3 hours back to Warsaw’s Chopin Airport for a noon flight to NY, arriving at 3 PM, with not much extra time to get home for Shabbat. But we did make it by 6 PM, had a lovely Shabbat dinner with friends, and then conked out. 

 

Visiting Poland as a Jew is always going to be intense. The most common approach is to visit some of the death camps, perhaps also the Polin museum, pledge never again, and then return to the land of the living, to Jewish communities in America, Israel and other places where we have a present and future. Some visitors are able to stay longer and dig deeper, looking for traces of a near millennium of rich Jewish life, honoring that life even while dwelling on the horrors of destruction. Polish Jewry created an extraordinarily diverse culture--merchants and musicians, classical rabbinic scholars like Rabbi Isserles and the Vilna Gaon, kabbalists, Hasids and heretics, and then socialists, Zionists, fighters and martyrs. There is a lot to absorb, and a lot to challenge contemporary Jews to go deeper with our Jewish identity. 

Our family trip did both of these things, but then added a third layer—extended conversations with contemporary Poles who are preserving Jewish memory and building a better society that honors all of its cultures, past and present. My father dedicated his book, Voices of the Białystok Ghetto to them, and I am likewise impressed by the work done by these Polish intellectuals and activists. Yes, there is also some odd cultural appropriation—the Fiddler production with fake Jews was a bit cringy. 

And yet, what we witnessed was a more honest and constructive engagement with a shameful past than we seem able to perform in America when our country is asked to consider its own crimes. At least, it is a model of tikkun/repair which I am grateful to have witnessed.