Poland's Jewish glory remains buried firmly in the past 

Photos: Eli Itkin; CER

Eight decades after the Nazis obliterated the Warsaw Ghetto to crush the despairing Jewish uprising, Poland is torn over its own part in the Holocaust. Even as many local Jews rediscover their own history, the country remains primarily the graveyard of a lost world    

Step behind the high brick walls of Warsaw’s Okopowa Street cemetery, and you’ll find a vanished world. In a space the size of 80 football fields, a quarter-million graves lie side by side. A fable-like quality hangs over the vast necropolis: it’s not so much a cemetery as a jumble of graves overrun by lichen and climbing ivy, swallowed up by the giant forest that has sprung up since World War II.

Entering this still, green kingdom is like walking into a history book. Forgotten geonim and gvirim are buried alongside household names like Warsaw’s first rav, the Chemdas Shlomo, the Netziv of Volozhin, and Rav Chaim Soloveitchik. Here there’s a cluster of markers for the Kotzk dynasty, there is Amshinov, and further along the white ohel of a chassidic dynasty whose memory has faded.

Polish-language inscriptions mark the graves of prewar secular Jews. There’s I.L. Peretz, the Yiddish playwright; Ludwig Zamenhof, creator of Esperanto; a sister of Andre Citroen, founder of the French automotive company.

Resting under the verdant canopy are Agudists, Bundists, Zionists  — bitter opponents in their lifetimes, now sharing the same patch of earth.

Eight decades after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was savagely put down — filling this hallowed ground with the remains of Jewish victims and underground fighters — Okopowa is a reminder that in this country, the Nazis butchered an entire Jewish civilization. Poland is the vast graveyard of that lost world.

While the government is supportive of the Jewish community, and has moved on from efforts to ban shechitah, the country remains conflicted about its recent Jewish history. A controversy over what Israel sees as Poland’s revisionism about its Holocaust record seems to be subsiding, with a new agreement clearing the way for the resumption of high school trips to the country’s death camps.

“We’ll do everything so that Jews can live in Poland according to their faith and in security for another thousand years,” Tomasz Grodzki, marshal of Poland’s Senate told a visiting delegation of the Conference of European Rabbis (CER) last week, referencing both the country’s history and recent tensions.

But unlike many former Soviet countries that have experienced significant revivals in Jewish life, Poland’s glories are firmly in the past, in Okopowa cemetery.

Warsaw once teemed with Jews, but today’s small community hardly makes an impression in the city that was rebuilt by the Communists on the wartime rubble.