But how can I in a world so empty for me now? How sound with these miserable hands? Where are my dead ones? I look for them, in dung-heaps, in every pile of ashes. O, tell me where you are. - from The Song of the Massacred Jewish People by Yitzhak Katzenelson (translated from the Yiddish by Jack Hirschman)
It took us an extraordinarily long time to find the Memorial to the Victims of the Lublin Ghetto because the city of Lublin removed it from the Ghetto Square (which is now basically a parking lot) and put it some distance away in a rather forlorn location. The black obelisk memorial has a line from Katzenelson’s long poem inscribed on it, translated slightly differently. It reads: “I see my relatives in every handful of dust I find.” I am in the midst of going down a rabbit hole on this poem…
Lublin is extraordinarily different from Krakow. What is just as profound here as everywhere else we’ve been is absence, the vacuum. It is not a city that is able to have a service on Shavuot because there is not a minyan of Jews. It does not have the feeling that Carolyn and I had in Krakow of exploiting the once vibrant community of Jews, but neither the ghetto nor the old Jewish quarter are as preserved as Kazimeierz is. The enormous synagogue here was razed to the ground, along with most of the stones in the two Jewish cemeteries (some of which were used to build parts of a road in Majdanek). What remains is the quite striking yellow building that housed the famous Hakhmei Lublin Yeshiva from 1930-1939. It is now the Ilan hotel with a Jewish-style, possibly kosher restaurant (closed today for the holiday so this may be true, but I am not sure because of translation difficulties with Polish personnel), and a synagogue that has a moving exhibit to the Yeshiva and to the legacy of various Hasidic rebbes. The focus is on Rabbi Meir Shapiro (who in 1923 started the tradition of daf yomi - the studying a page of Talmud a day, finishing a cycle in 7.5 years). There is a larger than life size black and white photo of him at the entrance to the synagogue and I could not stop staring at his face that I find extraordinarily beautiful. I think it is his eyes that look wise and make me wonder if he knew exactly what was coming down the road. He died from typhus just three years after opening the yeshiva. He was spared watching his students and community being pushed into the ghetto and then carried off to Belzec or Majdanek.
There is a mystery surrounding the library of the yeshiva. I learned about this very shortly before I left on my trip and had reached out to Piotr Nazaruk, who has been researching what happened to the approximately 22,000 manuscripts it once contained. Piotr works at the Grodzka Gate-Theatre NN Centre, and gave us a quite remarkable tour of the research center, housed in the oldest building of Lublin at the Grodzka Gate, the old entry way to the Jewish quarter. Like Ewa at the Belzec Memorial, Piotr is not Jewish, but he has devoted his life to documenting the Jewish history of Lublin pre-World War II. He has been immersed in the project of locating books from the Yeshiva’s library. He does not believe it to have been destroyed in a fire (as some argue). There are, however, no witnesses to what would have been a massive blaze. He thinks it more likely that it was packed up by the Germans and shipped somewhere. To date, through his research in Poland, at YIVO, and the Yiddish Books Center in Amherst, Piotr has found about 850 books with library stamps of the yeshiva. I cannot say enough how impressed we were by Piotr — in terms of both his research and the heart he is putting into it. Perhaps the saddest part of our time with him was hearing him express how hard it was to find people still interested in hearing about the Holocaust, that they are “exhausted” by it. His center does get tours passing through (we saw a couple come in during our time there, including some students), but he said interest has dropped a great deal since the 80s and 90s. More importantly, so has knowledge and education (as is true also in the US).
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The rest of the day we followed a self-guided walking tour through a city that had 42,000 Jews pre-war, approximately one-third of the population. Today, per the Jewish Virtual Library, “there are only 20 individuals associated with the Jewish community of Lublin and all of them over the age of 55. There may be as many as 40 others unaffiliated with the community.” We met none of them. Carolyn and I got a key from the hotel staff in the Yeshiva building (it sounds so strange writing that) and were able to visit the New Cemetery (1829). There are a few remaining graves (most were razed), some toppled headstones. Mostly, there are plaques to those killed in death camps, or massacred by the Germans in the city, like all the staff and patients at the Jewish Hospital, and all the children and staff at the orphanage (now reinterred). There are also some more contemporary graves, some with lit candles on them. We did not get to visit the Old Cemetery where the famous rebbe Jacob Isaac ha Hozen (the Seer of Lublin) is buried. Rabbi Meir Shapiro was reinterred in Israel in 1958 and I hope to visit his grave at Har HaMenuchot in Jerusalem when I am there in July.
It was a day of walking and learning and the discovery of future rabbit holes to explore. It was not lacking in a torah of sorts, but certainly not a traditional Shavuot. It is the cementing of a life-long friendship with Carolyn. We have been witnesses to each other and to this immense hole in Poland.