Walking Tour of the Warsaw Ghetto Led by the Taube Center

Submitted by Daniel Braunfeld

 Teach your children well

This afternoon we were joined by guides from the Taube Center for the Renewal of Jewish Life in Poland Foundation.   They broke us into four groups in order to tour the sites and history of the Warsaw Ghetto.  The guides who led the group I was in called this the “memorial tour.”  While it is reasonable to assume that this title referred to the physical memorials we passed (Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Memorial, Mila 18 Memorial, Umschlagplatz Memorial), I found myself focused on the world that has risen up around these memorials – sites of traumatic history situated amidst the “normalcy” of modern Warsaw life.  What role do memorials play in the narrative of a community and the lives of its members?

I greatly appreciated that our tour guides were from Warsaw.  One guide, Alexandra, isn’t Jewish – she was drawn to the history of Jewish Warsaw because of curiosities raised by the tangible absence of diversity during her childhood.  Our other guide, Marta, self described herself as a “renaissance Jew” – someone who only discovered her Jewish roots later in life; a familiar identity story among Polish Jews.  These women shared the role these sites and memorials played during their childhoods. 

During communist post-war Poland, these sites were not memorials.  The Umschlagplatz, for example – the holding place for Warsaw Jews destined for Nazi deportation to the Treblinka death camp – was a gas station where Marta’s family filled their car.  There was no memorial.  There was no national statement.  The history was there, but there was no presence. 

Alexandra, whose family moved to Warsaw after the war, remembers playing on the rolling hills near her red-brick apartment.  Only later in life did she learn that the architect of her post-war Warsaw neighborhood choose red brick to pay tribute to the Jewish community that was killed and the rolling hills were built atop the rubble of destroyed Warsaw.  The rubble was left intentionally to indicate a destroyed history.  These women lived among the remnants and address of the Holocaust, yet both, children of Warsaw, grew up with an incomplete understanding of the horrors that happened here.  Is this gap a tragedy?  Or is it understandable? 

I imagine we all pass memorials everyday – on our way to work or on our walks about town.  And I imagine we pass these memorials without giving them much thought.  I know I do.  Over time, these monuments, street names, and even spontaneous memorials become part of the landscape.   But what happens when our towns are the stages for genocide? How would we interact with the monuments to that local history?  Is it fair to assume that these memorials can, or should, maintain a longer impact than the sculptures in our own towns?  How would I even begin to explain to my own small children that the memorials they passed or even played near were the sites of mass murder and a destroyed community?  What would that conversation look like?  Should that conversation even happen? For me, the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial Tour was more about the memory of a town and less about brick and mortar.   How does your community remember its history?