For years, Poles have bristled at terms like “Polish death camps” or “Polish concentration camps.” Rightly so. Places like Auschwitz-Birkenau were Nazi German camps on Polish soil. Calling them Polish camps was misleading and imputed the murder of millions of Polish Jews (and many other Poles) to Poles themselves. This is a linguistic formulation that should be avoided.
But it should not be illegal. There are few, if any, words that should be illegal, in our judgment. But the Polish government thinks otherwise and has passed a law that penalizes any suggestion that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust. So, anyone who uses such terminology as “Polish death camps” could face fines or up to three years’ jail time.
However, while the camps were German, there has never been any question about the willing complicity of plenty of Poles in the extermination of most of their Jewish compatriots. Many Poles were conscripted into the Nazi killing program, but others willingly advanced the mission. Notably, the murder of Jews in Poland did not end with the Nazis’ defeat. There were many instances of Holocaust survivors returning to their homes after the war only to be murdered by their former neighbours, the most notorious example being the Kielce pogrom of July 1946, in which about 40 Jews were killed and as many injured. To utter these facts in Poland now is presumably illegal. On the other hand, it is presumably not illegal to state the fact that many Poles risked their lives to save the lives of Jewish Poles.
The dreadful and confusing new law has been condemned by the American and Israeli governments, among others. Israel’s criticism hit a particular nerve with Andrzej Zybertowicz, an advisor to the Polish president and a sociology professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University. He suggested that Israel’s response to the law resulted from a “feeling of shame at the passivity of the Jews during the Holocaust” and he accused Israel of “clearly fighting to keep the monopoly on the Holocaust.” He went on to say: “Many Jews engaged in denunciation, collaboration during the war. I think Israel has still not worked it through.”
The irony is as stark as it is distressing, that Zybertowicz could accuse Israel of failing to work through its Holocaust history when his own country has just codified its own refusal to do just that.
Conversely, Germany has just announced that it will acknowledge as Holocaust survivors Jews who lived in Algeria under the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy French regime. This means about 25,000 people will be eligible for some compensation under the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. This is a positive development, no matter how late it has come.
These two very different present-day actions, 73 years after the liberation of the camps, are but two examples of how we are still navigating the facts of the Holocaust. We are still determining, among much else, who are to be included among the perpetrators and who among the victims. And these are not even the much more difficult, perhaps impenetrable, moral questions and issues raised by the Holocaust. We have not come close to understanding the patterns of antecedents, the human and historical prerequisites that allowed the Holocaust to happen – and which permit genocides to continue happening.
A photo from Lublin: Faces of a Nonexistent City, likely taken by taken by Abram Zylberberg. (photo from Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre Centre)
From July 3-7, the Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre Centre in Lublin (Osrodek Brama Grodzka – Teatr NN), Poland, will host the Lubliner Reunion – the first international meeting of Jewish inhabitants of the city and their descendants in 70 years.
Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre Centre is an organization run by non-Jews dedicated to preserving Jewish memory. It has been actively pursuing this mission for 25 years, and its program includes meetings, discussions, sightseeing tours, commemorations and artistic events. The reunion will constitute an important element of the celebrations, which mark 700 years since the founding of the city of Lublin, and is designed to emphasize the significance of the Jewish community for the history of the city.
The history of Jews has been intertwined with that of Lublin for several hundred years, and has helped shape its identity. The story of Lublin has been enriched with, among other things, the presence of a well-known yeshivah (Yeshivat Chachmei Lublin), the meetings of the Council of Four Lands (Vaad Arba Aratzot), the activities of local rabbis and social organizations and the work of writer and Nobel-laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Just before the Second World War broke out, the 43,000 Jewish citizens of Lublin constituted one-third of the city’s population. The majority of Lublin’s Jewish inhabitants were murdered during the Holocaust and one of the German death camps, Majdanek, was located on the outskirts of Lublin. The story of Lublin cannot be told without the stories of its Jewish inhabitants, which is why, during the festivities organized to celebrate the 700-year-long history of the city in 2017, the presence of their descendants is vital and symbolic.
“The Lubliner Reunion is a way to build a bridge across time,” said Tomasz Pietrasiewicz, founder and director of Grodzka Gate. “It’s meant as a meeting in which both the people and their stories are important. Grodzka Gate is engaged in protecting the ‘memory of the place.’ We want to preserve what is left of Lublin’s Jewish community. The Lubliner Reunion will allow us to share knowledge and fill the blank spaces in the stories about Lublin and its inhabitants.”
Grodzka Gate in Lublin, Poland. (photo from Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre Centre )
The program of the reunion covers meetings devoted to the history and culture of Jewish Lublin, workshops in genealogy, walks along tourist trails, commemorations and a variety of artistic events. One of the central features of the reunion will be presentations of Lubliner family stories. Guests will have a chance to get to know both historical and contemporary Lublin, visit the former Jewish district and meet non-Jews working to preserve the memory of the Jews of Lublin for generations to come.
Apart from sightseeing within Lublin, Grodzka Gate is also planning tours of the region – Zamosc, Kazimierz Dolny, Belzec and Wlodawa, among other places. Apart from these excursions, all events are free of charge for participants. The inauguration of the reunion will take place on July 3 in the Museum at the Lublin Castle.
“We want to get in touch with and invite all those whose families come from Lublin,” underlined reunion coordinator Monika Tarajko. “We already have participants coming from Israel, the United States, France, Belgium and Great Britain. However, we are still striving to reach as many prospective participants as possible and inform them about the reunion. We are expecting more than 100 people to visit Lublin as part of this special event. Feel welcome to join us!”
Grodzka Gate’s other projects include Lublin: Memory of the Holocaust, a trail commemorating the Jewish inhabitants of Lublin who perished in the Holocaust; The Mysteries of Memory, an artistic happening involving a piece of the city with its specific topography, history and technical infrastructure; and Henio Zytomirski: The “Letters to Henio” Project, where, on April 19 (Holocaust Remembrance Day in Poland) every year, citizens of Lublin send letters to Henio Zytomirski, a Jewish boy who was born in 1933 in Lublin and was murdered by the Nazis in a gas chamber, probably in November 1942.
Grodzka Gate’s Lublin: Memory of the Place Exhibition is dedicated to Lublin before the war. A considerable part of the former Jewish district today has been covered with concrete, under which the foundations of Jewish buildings and the memory of those who once lived there are buried. Over the years, Grodzka Gate has become a place where old photographs, documents and testimonies can be preserved for posterity.
As well, there is Lublin: Faces of a Nonexistent City. In May 2012, Grodzka Gate received a collection of 2,700 glass plate negatives found in the attic of the house at Rynek 4 by workmen doing repairs. The photographs were taken between 1914 and 1939 and were, based on Grodzka Gate’s research and recent findings, taken by Abram Zylberberg.
The first “character” we meet in Marcin Wrona’s coolly fascinating Demon is a yellow bulldozer, rolling menacingly through the empty streets of a Polish village. It’s a harbinger, as well as a metaphor, but of what?
Bulldozers dig, and they bury. Both tasks are central to the plot of Demon, which seizes on the disturbing idea of the dybbuk – a ghost who takes possession of a bridegroom on his wedding day – and reimagines it in the contemporary world. A world, that is, in which the Holocaust is part of our experience – even for those who have buried it in hopes of forgetting.
A Polish-Israeli co-production that is by turns deeply unsettling and absurdly funny, Demon follows the arrival of handsome architect Python (Israeli actor Itay Tiran of Lebanon) from England for the unambiguously happy occasion of his wedding. The groom is Polish, like his lovely bride Zaneta (Agnieszka Zulewska) and her family, but we have the disquieting feeling from the get-go that he is apart, on his own, an innocent outsider who has (in horror-film tradition) unknowingly ventured into a situation of unimaginable dangers.
Setting to work on the yard behind the decrepit farmhouse that Zaneta’s family owns and has bequeathed to the couple, Python hops on the ominous, aforementioned bulldozer. A noise makes him stop almost immediately, whence he discovers that he has unearthed bones.
So begins Python’s descent from a rational, regular guy to a tormented figure of unreachable despair. Unfortunately, but also comically, his transformation mostly takes place during the marathon rain- and vodka-soaked reception following the wedding ceremony.
Wrona and writer Pawel Maslona freely adapted the latter’s 2008 play, whose title translates as “Adherence” or “Clinging.” The director’s decision to shift the setting to a wedding was clearly inspired by the 1937 Polish-Yiddish film Der Dibek (The Dybbuk), itself adapted from a play by Shimon Ansky.
In the press notes, Demon producer Olga Szymanska says, “We wound up doing a lot of research into the history of the [dybbuk] story, not to mention Jewish-Polish history in general. If you read the studies on the dybbuk, those who became possessed by the spirit find themselves unable to speak. It originated in a very orthodox society of Jews, so it was the idea of this voice that could never have been heard which was longing to be heard.”
Given the clue or two I planted above, and this review’s appearance in a Jewish publication, you will have an idea of the general nature of the long-suppressed secret that the spirit who inhabits Python desperately wants uttered. The specific details are melancholy and enigmatic, and Wrona conveys them with chilling effectiveness. (The viewer is haunted also by the knowledge that Wrona died – reportedly of suicide – at 42, shortly after the film’s world première a year ago.)
It’s always of interest when Polish filmmakers choose to address their country’s past and the spectre of antisemitism, in part because they (and their fellow citizens) have historically been more reluctant to do so than their German and French counterparts. So, Demon provokes memories of Aftermath, the excellent Polish thriller from 2012 that likewise involved the physical excavation of the Jewish past (gravestones, in this case) and also invoked an otherworldly presence.
The kind of movie that lingers in the mind for days afterward, Demon contains any number of images that don’t just stick but demand to be puzzled over further. The more literal-minded viewer, meanwhile, will find plenty to mull in the movie’s slicing comments on present-day Poland.
Demon screens at Vancity Theatre Oct. 28-Nov. 1. In Polish, English and Yiddish with English subtitles, it is rated R for language and some sexuality/nudity.
Michael Foxis a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.
In August, Poland’s right-wing cabinet approved a bill that would criminalize using the phrase “Polish death camp” or “Polish concentration camp,” with punishments including fines or imprisonment.
The bill raises questions about Poland’s role in the Holocaust. It echoes the country’s communist-era stance on the Second World War – that Poland was a victim and heroically saved Jews.
Growing up, I was told the opposite by my family, my Jewish day school and the broader community – that Poland was antisemitic and complicit in the Holocaust.
But recently, I’ve come to believe that both narratives are true. As we approach the High Holy Days and Yizkor, I think it’s worth reflecting on whether we as a community can see Poland’s role in the Holocaust differently.
This summer, I visited Poland for the first time with my sister, and the trip was full of contradictions. For example, we learned that Christian Poles – including our local guide’s grandparents – were sent to concentration camps, too. The Nazis killed two to three million Christian Poles and three million Jewish Poles. In total, Poland lost one-fifth of its prewar population – more than any other European country. But, those numbers represent roughly 10% of the Christian Polish population and 90% of the Jewish Polish population.
At the POLIN Museum in Warsaw, I learned about Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews. The Polish government-in-exile created it to support and fund Jewish resistance in Poland, including the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; it was the only such organization created by a European government.
At Yad Vashem, Poland has the most Righteous Among the Nations of any country. Yet, it also lost one of the highest percentages of Jews of all European countries.
We found that Holocaust memorials were also inconsistent, dependent on local policies rather than a unified national one. In our baba’s hometown of Wlodawa, the Jewish cemetery is now a park, without a Holocaust memorial, unlike the many memorials around Warsaw, Krakow and the preserved camps. This inconsistency seems to reflect the divisions within Polish society about whether, and how much, Poland took part in the Holocaust.
In our zeyda’s (z”l) hometown of Bilgoraj, we spoke with three people (through our guide) who live near his former house, which was recently torn down to build a shopping mall. One of them, who had the same build and attire as our zeyda, recognized our family name and said that our zeyda’s next-door neighbors were rumored to have hidden Jews (including, possibly, one of our zeyda’s younger sisters). Another neighbor said her mother hid a Jewish man for three days before he fled town, and that Jews and Christians lived in peace before the war. (Our grandparents never expressed that.)
Nearby, a new development claims to recreate the town shtetl, including Isaac Bashevis Singer’s house, a Belarusian-style (not a local-style) synagogue and luxury apartments. We called it “shtetl Disney.” We didn’t see any information on display about why the real shtetl disappeared, and I only hope that no one will want to live in a place that seeks to profit from nostalgia for a lost community. But that, too, depends on how people see their country’s role in that loss.
At the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival, we took a synagogue walking tour with a guide who, like a growing number of Poles, has discovered her own Jewish ancestry since communism ended. (She’s now a Yiddish lecturer at Columbia.) We learned that Polish-Jewish history dates back 1,000 years, since Jews fled the Crusades and got special protection, including freedom of religion, from a series of Polish kings. We also saw “Jewish-style” restaurants run by and for non-Jews, and “shtetl rabbi” statuettes being sold in the Old Town – we felt uncomfortable seeing people exoticize and capitalize on our culture.
We also saw a play, based on a true story, about a Jewish Torontonian with Polish roots who visits Poland for the first time, confronts the history and legacy of the Holocaust and witnesses the country’s “Jewish revival,” led by Jews and Christians. Seeing some of our experience reflected back at us emphasized, for me, that Polishness and Ashkenazi Jewishness are partly intertwined, whether or not we acknowledge it.
Realizing that our family is more Polish than we’d thought was both heartwarming and heartbreaking. On our way to Wlodawa, we bought fresh forest blueberries along a highway, and realized our grandparents would have grown up eating them, rather than discovering them in Vancouver as adults, as we’d assumed. In Wlodawa, the restaurant where we ate lunch could have been our baba’s dining room: the walls were peach, the curtains were lace and doilies covered the tables. In Lublin, flea-market stalls sold porcelain figurines just like the ones in her glass-doored cabinets. Were we in Poland, or at home?
Several times, I’ve wondered what to make of these contradictions.
The Jewish community, coming from collective trauma, can insist that Poland was a perpetrator; the Polish government, wanting to avoid collective reflection or partial responsibility, can insist it was a victim or martyr.
The truth is, some Christian Poles collaborated and killed Jews; some joined the partisans or hid Jews; most did nothing. The country was occupied and partitioned, and no one (Jewish or Christian) knew what was going to happen. There was a death penalty for resisting or hiding Jews. The truth is, societies are messy and heterogeneous, and we can’t make universal statements about them.
My question is, do Jews and Polish society want to perpetuate narratives that deny the differences within Polish society during the Second World War? Or do we want to heal?
If we want healing, I believe both communities need to accept that Poland was both perpetrator and victim, complicit and righteous – much as we may not want to, and much as that may feel difficult or even impossible. If we can accept this paradox, maybe then we can move from our respective pain to some kind of healing.
Tamara Micneris a playwright and journalist from Vancouver who lives in London, England. Her work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, Wall Street Journal and London Review of Books.
If you were rolling in money, what would you do with it? Would you build a town for yourself? That’s what Jan Zamoyski did.
As you approach the town’s main square, you might be inclined to think that someone has fooled with your itinerary. On first glance, it might well appear that somehow you have been detoured from Poland to Italy. Before you stands Zamosc, which can only be described as a stunning example of a planned, late-16th century Renaissance town. Designed by Italian architect Bernardo Morando, it follows the model of the citta ideale, or ideal town.
More than 400 brutal years have passed since the town’s inception. Yet, Zamosc has remarkably withstood the enormous devastation of the Second World War and the utilitarian, unesthetic architecture of the communist era. It largely retains its original layout, a large number of original buildings and fortifications.
Zamosc stands in southeast Poland, 142 miles (228 kilometres) from Warsaw. Zamoyski founded Zamosc on his own property in 1589. He was an intriguing character, an extremely wealthy and educated man who juggled a variety of careers, including in the military and politics. He was a hetman (head of the army) and a chancellor. His taste in things Italian probably began during his student days at the University of Padua.
A statute of Jan Zamoyski, founder of Zamosc. (photo by Tomasz Zugaj)
While he was an army man, Zamoyski’s focus in establishing Zamosc was seemingly more economic than military. It should be noted, however, that he did not forget to commission an imposing fortress and city ramparts.
Located on the trade route linking western and northern Europe with the Black Sea, Zamoyski envisioned Zamosc as a thriving trade centre. He invited Italian, Turkish and Dutch Jewish merchants to work and live in his new town. His liberal policy toward outsiders was likewise extended to Armenian, Greek and Scottish merchants, and to Ruthenes (Slavs of the Orthodox Church). His outreach to foreigners did not spring as much from liberality, as from a strong desire to see Zamosc succeed. At the time, all of the mentioned ethnic groups had reputations for jump-starting floundering economies.
Zamoyski’s concerns went beyond the economic, though. As an intellectual ruler who was likewise a devout Roman Catholic, he had an academy – located today at Academy and Perec Streets – a high court and a large church, which was originally dedicated to Saint Thomas the Apostle and the resurrection, but was elevated in 1992 to cathedral status, and an imposing palace centrally constructed. Altogether, Zamosc’s buildings reflect the idea that institutions should be in physical harmony with the residents of a town. Just as the organs of the body support the human being, so Zamosc’s institutions were designed to organically mesh with the populace.
As mentioned, when Zamoyski decided to build his town, he imported a skilled Italian architect. It seems clear, however, that the chancellor also considered Morando because of his sensitivity to Polish culture. Morando had already worked in Poland and had gained an appreciation of Polish life.
The 16th-century Great Market Square features colorful arcaded houses characteristic of Morando’s native Padua. These houses, located at the northern end of the square, were designated for the Armenian merchants, hence the street’s name, Ormianski.
The town’s 17th-century synagogue. (photo by Tomasz Zugaj)
In length and width, the square measures exactly 100 metres. It is here that the two main axes of the old town cross. The 600-metre longitudinal axis runs east to west: from Bastion No. 7 to the Zamoyski Palace. The 400-metre crosswise axis runs north to south, joining the Great Market Square to the two smaller market squares: Solny (this area, translated as the Salt Market, was assigned to Jewish merchants) and Wodny (translated as the Water Market). The original buildings in these smaller markets complemented those of the Great Market.
The town hall in particular was an enormous enterprise, taking nine years to complete (1591-1600). It was meant to draw attention. And, with its fan-shaped double staircase and imposing tower, it certainly achieved this purpose. During the early part of the construction work (1591-1593), Morando also served as the town mayor. His appointment ended before he was able to hang his name on the door of town hall’s mayoral offices.
In 1992, the town of Zamosc became a UNESCO World Heritage site. Hopefully, this award will help to preserve the beauty of this Renaissance town for years to come.
More on Zamosc
From July 11 to July 18, Zamosc is hosting the international folklore festival Eurofolk. About seven international carriers fly regularly between Vancouver and Warsaw.
Famous people who lived in Zamosc include L.L. Zamenhof, founder of Esperanto. He had the revolutionary idea that hatred would disappear if people spoke the same language. A revolutionary who was born in Zamosc was Rosa Luxemburg.
The old town of Zamosc stands largely intact. Humans fared far worse. For instance, the Jewish population, which had comprised almost half the city’s pre-Holocaust population (12,531), has vanished. Those who could, fled from the Nazis. Others were forced into a ghetto. In a series of four deportations, many Jews were sent to Belzec. Others were shot in marches and in roundups. As a reminder of the once-thriving Jewish community, visit the synagogue (9-11 Zamenhofa St.), which has been undergoing an extensive renovation project.
Deborah Rubin Fieldsis an Israel-based features writer. She is also the author of Take a Peek Inside: A Child’s Guide to Radiology Exams, published in English, Hebrew and Arabic.
March of the Living International (MOLI) has published a study examining the effects that the program has had on its participants. The educational program takes, on average, 10,000-20,000 students annually to Poland and Israel with the goal of educating and inspiring future generations to learn from the destruction of the European continent during the Second World War. MOLI accepts applicants from all walks of life and religions, hoping to ensure that not only is the Holocaust not forgotten, but also that it is never repeated.
The report studies the impacts that the program has on its Jewish participants, and highlights the educational and religious changes that the program has inspired since its creation in 1988. Of the population surveyed, most initially signed on to the program in order to better understand their Jewish culture. Many of the participants in the study said that the program has directly impacted them, leading many to visit, study in or move to Israel. Fifty percent of the respondents said that the program caused them to consider moving to Israel later in life.
The study was conducted by Prof. William Helmreich of CUNY Graduate Centre and the Colin Powell School at City College, a sociologist and expert on ethnic identity. “What’s most remarkable about the March is how deeply it impacts participants over a period of many years,” he states. “These include life choices like selecting a mate, moving to Israel and career choices. In addition, it greatly impacts not only on Jewish identity but also on compassion toward other people as well.”
Indeed, 54% of respondents said that the March had made them more tolerant towards other groups. And the effect increases over the years, as 66% of those who attended the March 10 years ago, reported it had made them more tolerant.
The study also found that 86% of the participants asserted the importance in their spouse being Jewish, and 91% in raising their children with some sort of Jewish education; 65% felt the importance of raising their children in a Jewish neighborhood.
Of those surveyed, 90% felt the March instilled in them the importance of reacting to confrontations with antisemitism, and 95% stated the March had strengthened their sense of Jewish identity.
“To think that the March is such a successful program in terms of ensuring and enhancing Jewish identity and in making people realize the importance of engaging as a Jew within their communities and caring for those outside of them, truly illustrates the goals that we had when initially forming the first March so many years ago,” said Dr. Shmuel Rosenman, MOLI chair.
March of the Living brings individuals to Poland and Israel to study the history of the Holocaust and to examine the roots of prejudice, intolerance and hate. Since the first March in 1988, more than 220,000 participants from 52 countries have marched down the same three-kilometre path leading from Auschwitz to Birkenau on Yom Hashoah as a silent tribute to all victims of the Holocaust. March of the Living is a partnership between March of the Living International, local MOTL foundations, the Claims Conference, individual donors, private philanthropists and Jewish communities around the world. Visit motl.org.
Limmud Vancouver, a now-annual festival of Jewish learning, takes place Jan. 30 and 31. The “pan-denominational” event includes seminars, lectures, workshops and discussions on a diverse array of topics. This week and next, the Independent features a few of the presenters who will participate in the local version of the international phenomenon that has now reached more than 60 Jewish communities worldwide.
A national fish story
Eve Jochnowitz calls gefilte fish the national dish of the Ashkenazi Jewish people.
“Wherever you have Ashkenazic Jews, you have the Yiddish language and you have gefilte fish,” she said. “It’s like DNA. It’s in many different permutations and incarnations, but the gefilte fish pretty much goes wherever the Yiddish-speaking Jews go.”
A culinary ethnographer who hosts a Yiddish-language cooking show, Jochnowitz doesn’t want to tip her hand too much in advance of her presentation here this month.
“Let’s just say there are some very surprising variations on gefilte fish out there and let’s just say that the Ashkenazic Jews will come up with ingenious ways to have gefilte fish in the most unexpected situations,” she said in a phone interview from her New York home.
If there are so many variations, then what, at root, defines geflite fish?
“Usually it is made of freshwater fish; in Eastern Europe, most frequently carp, pike and whitefish,” she said. “The more carp there is, the more dark and the more fishy, more flavorful, it is. Some people like it to be more fishy, some people like it to be almost a tofu substitute with the fishiness very understated and the gefilte fish itself being more of a base for some horseradish or egg sauce or whatever it is you choose to put on your gefilte fish.”
It may or may not have matzah meal, it may or may not have sugar, she said.
“This is another very controversial issue with gefilte fish – should it be sweetened or salted or both?” she said. The term itself means “stuffed fish,” but stuffing a fish is very difficult and labor-intensive, so “most gefilte fish is not gefilte.”
Although she is a gefilte fish maven, Jochnowitz stressed that Ashkenazi food is not limited to the familiar.
“Yiddish food is a universe,” she said. “There is much more to Yiddish food and Yiddish cooking than just challah and kugel.”
Her other presentation at Limmud will focus on the little-known phenomenon of Jewish vegetarian cookbooks of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Two sides to the story
David Matas, a noted human rights lawyer who represents the organization Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, says the world needs to recognize that Palestinians are not the only refugee population that emerged from the war of 1948-49.
David Matas (photo from Limmud Vancouver)
“What we see is two refugee populations that were generated as a result of the Arab invasion to stop the creation of Israel,” he said. “The Jewish population is, in fact, more numerous than the Palestinian.”
The United Nations, with a few exceptions, has been concerned about the Arab refugees from that time, but not the Jewish ones who were forced from their native lands across North Africa and the Middle East, he said. Israel has also not taken a strong lead on the issue until recently, he added.
“Israel, on the whole, has not been a great advocate on this issue historically because there has been the Zionist mythos that people wanted to come to Israel rather than the fact that they came because they were refugees,” he said. “It’s only recently that Israel has itself adopted this position that these people are a refugee population and should be treated in any overall refugee settlement.”
There is also the fact that Jewish refugees have been given citizenship in Israel or other countries, while the Palestinian populations have largely remained stateless.
“The Arab population mostly has not been resettled and, in fact, they’ve grown because their descendants have been classified as refugees,” Matas said. “They’ve remained as a perpetual refugee population. There’s been an attempt to keep this population as a refugee population, as an argument for the destruction of the state of Israel.”
Matas and his organization believe both refugee groups should receive justice. Most likely, he said, a resolution might involve a compensation fund that wouldn’t necessarily come from Israel or the Arab states, but possibly from the United States or third parties willing to facilitate a larger peace settlement.
“That compensation fund would be available to people who were victimized from both refugee populations, as well as their descendants, or something like that,” he said. The idea of compensation for massive human rights violations is not new. “There’s been lots of experience with the Holocaust, amongst other [cases]. You’ve got a kind of jurisprudence and experience to draw on in order to make these programs work.”
While some commentators contend that the refugee issue can wait until later stages of any negotiated settlement, Matas disagrees.
“I think it’s important to bring it in at this stage of the negotiations,” he said. “This Palestinian notion that we are the refugees and the Jews aren’t plays into this false narrative there’s only one victim population when in fact there are two.”
A Polish journey
Jewish Canadians often travel to Poland in search of their family’s roots or as an exercise in history. Norman Ravvin travels there frequently, but he is as focused on the present as on the past.
Norman Ravvin (photo from Limmud Vancouver)
“You can visit Poland on different terms,” said the Montreal academic and author. He will lead a session on traveling Poland that focuses on the major cities of Warsaw, Kraków, Lodz and Poznan, as well as his maternal ancestors’ hometown of Radzanow.
“The overall depiction will be of Poland as a place that is alive and contemporary,” he said. “Aspects of that are related to Jewish memory and parts of it have to do with contemporary Polish life and then the way that one feels as you go back to the ancestral place.”
Things are changing fast in Poland, Ravvin said. The end of communism, the integration into the European Union and the general march of time means things have altered significantly since Ravvin first toured there in 1999. One area of progress relates to Jewish and war-era history.
“In the last 25 years, they’ve become very effective at commemorating Jewish prewar life,” he said. “If you had traveled to Poland in 2000, this wouldn’t necessarily have appeared to be true, but now certainly it is true and, when you walk in Warsaw, the sidewalks are marked with these remarkable inlays which say this was the ghetto wall, so that you step over it and you actually feel that you understand the prewar and the wartime city and now the postwar city.”
Some of the efforts, he speculates, are for the purposes of tourism, but he also acknowledges Polish efforts at education.
“They’re doing a reasonable job of confronting how to live with the shadows of the past,” he said.
Ravvin’s mother’s family fled Radzanow in 1935 and all those left behind were murdered. The family made their way to Canada, eventually to Vancouver, where Ravvin’s grandfather, Yehuda-Yosef Eisenstein, was a shochet (kosher slaughterer).
Ravvin welcomes people to bring their own family history to his presentation.
“If they’re carrying their own version of this story,” he said, “they might warm that up in their minds, their own families’ Polish past, what they know about it, what they wish they knew, if they’ve gone, whether they might go, so that the possibility is the thing they’re considering and then maybe my talk will change the way they think about that.”
Ian Penn’s exhibit at the Zack Gallery, Pole, “isn’t happy but it’s genuine.” (photo by Olga Livshin)
The poignant tale behind Pole, Ian Penn’s new multimedia exhibit at the Zack Gallery, is a bleak travelogue detailing his recent journey to Poland.
Although Penn’s family came from Poland – his parents were lucky to have escaped the Holocaust and settled in Australia – he never wanted to visit the country of his ancestors. “My mother said she would never set a toe in Poland,” he told the Independent.
Growing up in Australia, Penn moved to Vancouver, where he worked as a cardiologist for many years. He is mainly retired now but still teaches at the University of British Columbia and works as a medic with the emergency-response ski patrol in Whistler.
“When I retired, I enrolled in Emily Carr,” he said. “I graduated in 2010 with a bachelor’s in fine arts but I’ve always kept a visual diary, since university. I have hundreds of little albums at home. Wherever I am, wherever I go, I draw and write in them. It’s how I explore the world.”
He paints regularly, landscapes and figurative images. “For me, painting is a way of telling a story, one of many. There are other ways, too: words, sculpture, video, photography. I used the multimedia approach for this show because I wanted to bring all those ways together, see how they fit. The show is a story of Jewish soul.”
Penn found his subject in Poland. He had resisted making the trip for a long time, until a couple years ago. “My daughter said to me then, ‘It’s time to visit your history,’ so I made the decision to go,” Penn explained. “I have a friend in Australia. We have known each other for a long time. He is a Pole, he speaks Polish, and he wanted to take me. He said we should both read a few books first to prepare ourselves, books about the plight of Jews in Poland during the war, but written by Poles, not Jews. We didn’t want to go as tourists. We wanted to understand.”
Nonetheless, Poland shocked him. “There are almost no Jews left there, and the ones who remain don’t know anything about Jewish culture. I went to a synagogue and I had to say Kiddush because nobody there could speak Hebrew. But the Poles – they exploit Jewish history. They charge 23 euros for a trip to Auschwitz. They have those happy golf carts all around Krakow and they take you to the Schindler’s factory and to the ghetto. They sell Jewish souvenirs, but who made them? Not Jews. This is not how you engage in history. They made a commodity out of our tragedy, of the Jews killed by the millions. It’s like Horror Disneyland. I couldn’t stay there more than one week.”
Penn found most of the Jews of Poland in the cemetery. “There, every stone has a name written on the tombstones, remembered, while those who died in Auschwitz are just dust. I learned that Nazis burnt 1,000 people an hour in the ovens in Auschwitz. I tried to wrap my head about the number. That’s why I did this show. It’s about those thousands of souls.”
All of the works displayed in the show bear the same name, “1000 Marks.” By creating the paintings, Penn wanted to visualize his non-memories, remember something he had never witnessed. Five paintings are similar: dead trees, brown and dreary, wooden poles striving to reach the sky, one pole for every Jewish soul that didn’t have their name written somewhere. Together, they form a memorial.
A couple other paintings have a subtitle: “From the Village to the Ramp.” They are painful to view, powerfully evoking the horrors of the Holocaust. So does the entrance to the gallery, decorated with two real wooden poles, with bark still on in some places, unpolished and branchless. The “Welcome Back” mat underneath them doesn’t look particularly welcoming either. There was a sign at the entrance to Auschwitz, too, and the correlations reverberate in the air.
“This show isn’t happy but it’s genuine,” said Penn. “It’s my response to the entertainment industry they made of the catastrophe. Their tourist trips have nothing to do with our dead families.”
The show also includes a few short videos, two of them filmed at the Jewish cemetery. The screens are mounted to the walls like paintings, continually running loops of footage. “I shot them myself,” said Penn. “There is serenity at the cemetery. And lots of greenery, living trees. I saw a man restoring the text on one of the tombstones and filmed him. I didn’t talk to him, didn’t ask him anything. He was doing a holy job. That was enough.”
A few more wooden poles, also part of the exhibition, are placed outside of the Zack Gallery. They are suspended above the atrium, where the stairs lead down to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.
“They are uprooted, like all of us whose parents left Europe,” said Penn. “The poles come from the UBC Endowment Lands and from the Whistler area. They remind me of the trees in the Jewish cemetery but they are also my connection to this place, to Canada.”
The show Pole opened on Sept. 10 and continues until Oct. 11.
Olga Livshinis a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
