At 10 a.m. on April 14—Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day—a shrill blast penetrates the atmosphere. All traffic, all the people of the State of Israel, grind to a halt. At this moment, the entire country stops to pay tribute to the memory of the Holocaust.
My husband and I traveled to the memorial for victims of the Holocaust in Zaglembie, Poland. This area of rich and vibrant Polish Jewry sits on the German border, now devoid of Jewish life.
At this site, about 100,000 of the 3.3 million Polish Jews lived and flourished before World War II and the Holocaust. Jews had resided there for more than 800 years, making it 10% of the population throughout Europe. How many American Jews can say that we have had our roots in this country for 800 years?
Jewish life in Poland was complex and rich, a real mosaic. Before the Holocaust, people had hopes and dreams of the future. There were secularists and traditionalists, Bundists and Zionists, romanticists, idealists and pragmatists.
On Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. The Nazis relished the idea of obliterating the entire Jewish population of Poland—millions of men, women and children. The Nazi Party had years of a steady diet of antisemitic indoctrination in Germany, where an estimated 500,000 Jews were living. They savored the idea of slaughtering the Jews of Poland.
Their first action was to gather all the Jews of the area into their synagogue. A maid working in a castle wrote a letter that she heard all the Jews talking. Then a few blasts. And then complete and total silence.
Jews who remained alive were taken into the Lodz Ghetto. Several thousand Jews were incarcerated in Radogoszcz prison on the outskirts of town. On Nov. 9, 1939, the cattle cars began arriving, and the Jews were rounded up and taken to concentration camps in Germany.
The enormous suffering these people underwent could not be overstated. Women, aware of their fate on route to places such as Auschwitz, tried to throw their babies off the train, thinking someone with a heart might adopt them.
There were a few tiny lights in this overwhelming darkness. One such light was Sister Gertruda Stanisława Marciniak, a nun who had been arrested at the beginning of the German occupation. She had a heightened moral compass and refused to let the Nazis murder Jewish children. She established an orphanage and forged birth certificates for the Jewish children she was sheltering, knowing that this was punishable by death. She also used this home to hide Jewish resistance fighters.
Dan Landsberg, who was hidden in this home as a child, described how the Nazis invaded the orphanage in search of Jewish children; how Sister Gertruda hid him under her habit. She stated that “once a child had come to me, their fate is my fate, too.”
But the numbers were very few. Only 1% of Polish Jewry survived the years of the Shoah.
Four who kept the hope (the tikvah) alive dreamt of going to Israel. They were Ana Gertner of Zaglembie; Estusia Wajcblum of Warsaw; Regina Safirsztajn of Zaglembie; and Roza Robota of Ciechacow. All were part of the Jewish underground.
They were executed on Jan. 6, 1945, just four months before the Nazis surrendered. Just before she was hanged, Roza Roberta clearly uttered Chazak vi amatz (“Be strong and of good courage”).
There were brilliant mathematicians, physicists and Talmudists. Orthodox rabbis, secular poets and playwrights. Families and single people hoping to wed. Children learning their very first letters.
Each one of these lives—and the entire 6 million who perished—was a universe.
