The Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw

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It's September, school is up and running. The travels of the summer are now pleasant memories. A gentle smile on my face on a rainy monsoon morning as I sip my chai. Or, in the case of the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw, those memories are powerful. Memories that rocked my basic understandings of humankind.

I've been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. It is powerful. Perhaps even mind numbing in its power.

I've been to Dachau. That horrific work camp where so many victims of Hitler's warped vision were murdered. I've seen row after row of empty bunks in row after row of empty dormitories. And a short distance away, gently nestled in the lush, green, German forest I've seen the gas chamber, disguised as a shower. And the vent in that chamber where the canister of poisonous gas slowly killed so very many. And the incinerators which couldn't keep up with the production line style machinery of murder.

And I've been to the incredible memorial in the courtyard behind the synagogue in Budapest. Where a sculpted tree offers its metallic shade. Each of its shimmering metal leaves has a name engraved upon it. A victim's name. I've watched as a father, a man of Jewish faith and heritage, brought his son there and they searched the seemingly endless leaves - each one a voice and dream that the world never would come to truly know.

But as my friend Sara and I approached the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw, Poland I had no idea how powerful an experience awaited me.

At first, as I gazed upon the cemetery, I was taken by the incredible trees and ferns and vines that covered it. I'd never seen a cemetery that seemed so at ease with nature. I struggled through the thick undergrowth and saw the cracked and broken gravestones at the head of sinkholes that seemed to beg to leave a coffin exposed. And I noted that almost all of the death dates on almost all of the gravestones were before World War II. And suddenly I realized that though this cemetery maybe at ease with nature, it is not at all at ease in history.

As Hitler's Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, he took control of a country that had a large and well respected Jewish population. In World War II 6,000,000 Poles lost their lives. Half of those were of Jewish heritage and faith.

But of course this cemetery, the largest Jewish cemetery in all of Europe, doesn't contain their graves. For there was no one left to bury them. And of course no one was left take care of this old cemetery either. The graves of those who had died in a peaceful and prosperous Warsaw long before World War II, became overgrown. For all the care givers, all the next generation was dead. All.

We treasure and honor our dead. We set aside vast expanses of land for our dead. And tend to that land and those memories tenderly. We visit those graves and give our deepest respect to those who went before us.

But at the Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw, this land, these graves, could not be given that honor, that respect. World War II took the lives off all those who would have given the care and respect.

I was dumbfounded.

I gave my respect.

And I left.

Changed.

Powerfully.

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Comments

[Cheri Thurston]

Eloquent
Mike: Your piece brought tears to my eyes. How powerful, and beautifully stated.... Cheri