Enjoying New York City

I've just returned from three weeks in Poland and am in NYC with my dear friend and fellow poet, Mary Ann Mayer. We have walked from Midtown to Lower Manhattan over the past two days--despite my jet lag from Krakow to Munich to New York. The summer city is hot, vibrant, alive with energy and people, a beautiful and gritty melange of humanity's relationships and creation. We visited Aperture Photography Gallery today and cruised around Manhattan on a boat. Cool and fun on the water!

I am working on a post on my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, but am letting that experience stew and ripen a bit before I share it.

My dreams upon return to the United States are filled with images and the traumas of history as I experienced them vicariously in Poland. Probably it will be a lifetime of integration and thinking about the travels there and those travels will influence and direct my critical and creative writing in many ways.

I return home as a post-doctoral student of life. A new phase after graduate school begins and I anticipate new poems, new essays, and continued conversations with others that enrich and deepen life and thinking. I hope you will all follow my blog as I continue to post short essays, poems, and ideas and photos here.

On the boat around Manhattan.

Brooklyn Bridge and Freedom Tower in the background.

Lower Manhattan. Trade Towers gone, the new Freedom Tower in their place.

Walking the High Line--an old railroad that delivered milk, meat, and other  goods in Manhattan.
Now a beautiful park and elevated garden over the city from 30th Street to 14th Street.

Synagogues in Poland

There are many synagogues in Poland, their states ranging from beautiful restoration to symbolic and literal states of disrepair, a reminder of the destruction of Jewish culture and community between 1939-1945. Our fellows group has visited synagogues in bigger cities like Krakow, Warsaw, and Lodz, and in small towns such as Szydlow, Dzialosycze, Chmielnik, and Oswiecim. At the time of the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 there were 3.5 million Jewish people in Poland. By war's end there were approximately 350,000. Ninety percent of Poland's Jewish population had been murdered. Synagogues in contemporary Poland, both post-war and post-Communist era, remind visitors of both the gradual resurgence and resilience of Jewish culture and of the destruction that virtually erased Jewish communities, towns, and urban centers that had, for the most part, thrived prior to the war.

Remuh Synagogue. Orthodox. Krakow, Poland. First built in 16th century,
destroyed in WWII and restored.

Issac Synagogue. Krakow, Poland, 1664.

Reform synagogue with neo-Moorish deisgn elements.
Krakow, Poland. 

Szydlow, Poland. A restored synagogue. Now also a museum and art center.

 Nożyk Synagogue, Warsaw. 1898.

Beautiful molding.

Women's section.

Lodz, Poland. Synagogue at Jewish cemetery.

Restored synagogue at Auschwitz Jewish Center, Oswiecim, Poland.

Flowers blossom and butterflies pollinate in the garden at Auschwitz Jewish Center.
Flowers thrive in Poland's humid weather and afternoon thundershowers nourish.

Partial Liberation: Thoughts and Lives of Meaning

Emanuel Ringelblum, organizer Oyneg Shabes, a secret documentation and archival project of the Warsaw Ghetto. Ringelblum was caught by the Germans in April 1943 and sent to the Trawniki labor camp. Escaping in August 1943, he hid in an underground bunker in Warsaw with his wife Yehudis, son Uri, and 34 others. Ringelblum worked nonstop in the bunker, writing a history of Polish–Jewish relations during World War II and essays on key members of the Jewish intelligentsia. These writings survived. On 7 March 1944, the Germans discovered the bunker and a few days later murdered all its inhabitants. Searchers found one cache of the Oyneg Shabes archive in 1946; a second was discovered in 1950. A third cache is still missing. Three members of the Oyneg Shabes survived the war: Hersh and Bluma Wasser and Rokhl Oyerbakh (Rachel Auerbach). YIVO

Janusz Korczak(1879-1942); born Henryk Goldszmit

Writer of critical essays and children's books, pediatrician, educator, philosopher, activist, director of orphanages and schools. He has been a controversial and beloved figure in history. His educational philosophy--that children are small adults, that they want to learn how to function in the world, that they have incredible wisdom--reminds me of Maria Montessori's educational philosophy. Korczak wrote that life never gives more than partial liberation and achievement can never be more than fragmentary. He would have understood the difficulties and joys of liberation and achievement given the tumultuous period during which he lived and died.

Julia (Diament) Pirotte, self portrait, 1942

Julia (Diament) Pirotte. Documentary photographer, born in Końskowola, Poland 1907 or 1908, Jewish, died in Warsaw in 2000. Emigrated to Belgium in 1934. Later lived in France and became involved in the French Resistance, using her camera as a kind of documentary weapon for truth. 

Photographed the aftermath of the Kielce pogrom, July 4, 1946, which resulted in the death of 42 Jewish refugees, returning to Poland from the Soviet Union, and who were planning to emigrate to Palestine and the United States. 

Her work is not widely known, at least in the United States. I first discovered her photos in Fear, an interpretative essay by Jan Gross on the Kielce events. I felt moved by a woman photographer during the war and wanted to know more about her. Her self portrait reveals her seriousness, introspection, and grief all at once.

In the years 1949–1950, the Jewish Historical Institute Archives accepted records of the dissolved post-war Jewish organizations, especially of the Central Committee of the Jews in Poland, but also of the Organization for the Development of Creativity, the Society for the Protection of Health, various parties and Zionist organizations (Ichud, Hanoar Ha-tziyoni, Poalei Zion, Hitachdut, Keren Ha-Yesod) and of the Bund. Documentation also reached the Archives from foreign organizations that had branches in post-war Poland: the American Joint Distribution Committee and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

The archival units are very large in volume and show in detail post-war Jewish life in Poland, together with the problems of emigration. Unique on a worldwide scale is the card catalogue — numbering nearly 300,000 records — of the Jews registered in Poland after the war. (JHI)

Dr. Elonora Bergman, Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw.

Dr. Bergman met with our AJC fellows group and explained her work with all matters related to editing and publishing of the materials of Ringelblum Archive. She grew up in Poland to Jewish parents who were active in the Communist Party and had survived imprisonment in Soviet Union. Prior to joining the Institute she conducted case studies related to the following fields: history — urban planning, history-architecture and history-conservation. She also conducted inventories of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries. Her training is as an architect-urban planner.

Treblinka

Two hours northeast of Warsaw, in the direction of Belarus. The light was difficult today. The cloud cover was dark and heavy. The camera went dark at eye level and seemed to light up brightly as I moved closer to the ground.

I walked to the memorial alone, through forest of pine, birch, grass, wildflowers, on a dirt road cobbled with stones. Eight hundred thousand Jews from all over Europe died here. Ten thousand Poles died in forced labor here. There were sounds of birds, invisible in the trees, a mower or electric saw in the distance. The wind blew gently. The ground seemed alive to me, vibrational. I sat, chanted a mantra quietly, and spent time in meditation close to the many stones in remembrance of those who died.

Janusz Korczak and children

writer, poet, pediatrician, and director of children's orphanages

deported to Treblinka in 1942

Stone for remembering
solidity against time
worn by sun, rain, wind, snow
stalwart silence

waiting against violence

Krakow art, books, people, and learning

Jagiellonian University: two lectures. One with Dr. AnnaMaria Orla-Bukowska with the Institute of Sociology on Christian-Jewish Relations in Poland; a second with Dr. Edyta Gawron of the Institute for Jewish Studies on Jews in Contemporary Poland. 

Massolit Books, where on a rainy afternoon we heard testimony of a Righteous Gentile, Miroslawa Przebindowska, who with her mother and sister hid a young Jewish girl in their apartment, after liquidation of Krakow ghetto, in March 1943 through the end of the war in January 1945. How has the experience changed her consciousness over her lifetime, I asked. She is more responsible, empathic, and tells her children about the experience and advises to always help one another.

One of our guides through Poland is Maciek. He is a graduate of Polish History from Jagiellonian University, and knows a thing or two about contemporary political issues and economics in Poland. His qualities: kindness, a sense of humor, keen intelligence, openness, patience, and a good heart. Demands on time arrival and walks fast! We are trailing him around Krakow and he never fails to answer a question or translate—whether I want a mint chip ice cream or I want to ask the speaker of testimony about meta-cognition! The fellows are lucky to experience his knowledge and presence as we travel here. 

Playful Krakow.

Krakow’s beautiful architecture and plentiful, sweet cafes.