Jewish presence in Poland

"Gone now are those little towns"

By David Dastych

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Many years ago a famous Polish poet of Jewish origin – Antoni Slonimski – wrote the following lines:

"Gone now are those little towns where the shoemaker was a poet,
The watchmaker a philosopher, the barber a troubadour.

Gone now are those little towns where the wind joined
Biblical songs with Polish tunes and Slavic rue,
Where old Jews in orchards in the shade of cherry trees
Lamented for the holly walls of Jerusalem.

Gone now are those little towns, though the poetic mists,
The moons, winds, ponds, and stars above them
Have recorded in the blood of centuries the tragic tales,
The histories of the two saddest nations on earth."

This lovely poem by Antoni Slonimski revokes the past. A history of more than 800 years of the Jewish presence in Poland. Until the year 1939 - the beginning of the most tragic of the wars, there lived in Poland some 3 million Jews, our neighbors, our co-citizens. And then came the Holocaust and these millions of people – men, women, children – disappeared from the cities, towns and villages. The methodic German "Final Solution" , an invention of the Nazis right from Hell, rolled over the Jewish population in all of Europe and singled out Poland as the extermination grounds for the Jews.

No wonder, to many Jews that survived the Holocaust, Poland still seems to be the Land of the Shoah, the country of Treblinka, of Auschwitz, of the ghettos, of the crematoria and the burning barns. Its very difficult to overcome the haunting remembrances of the past. Its painful to visit the places, where only ashes and bones of the dead remained in the soil, and no Matzevas commemorate the people who once had lived there. Yet, this attitude of Jews to their former Polish homeland is changing as the time goes by. More and more come over to visit the shtetls, the former hometowns of their parents, grandparents, ancestors. When the older generation pays a visit to Poland, they still feel the pain and fear of the past horror. When the young come over, they also weep for the dead, but also take a look at our country and find it a normal, free, lively, beautiful land with some friendly people.

More and more often, the Polish Jews establish friendly contacts with the present population of these towns and cities, and villages, where their ancestors lived for centuries, and where their parents and grandparents died or had been saved from the Holocaust. Far from moralizing and judging the feelings of Poles and of Jews, I would like to invite our Readers to visit the Home Pages of some of the descendants of the Polish Jews. There are many of them – in Israel, in Europe, in both Americas, in Australia and even in Asia.

Here are just a few specimens of these Home Pages, worth visiting and reading:

Ms. Ada Holtzman, Ms.Devi Tushinski in France and Israel

Mr Pawe? D. Dorman from Vienna – who contributed the poem by Antoni Slonimski.

They and many other Jews, dispersed all over the World, cherish the remembrance of "those little towns", which are located not on the Moon but in our country – Poland. In the common Home Land of the Poles and the Jews.

"Gone now…" - come back again! In peace and friendship. We are not "the two saddest nations on earth". No more!

David Dastych, 2007

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