Today, the once thriving town of Ushpizin – where the Jews represented forty-five percent of the community – is no more. There are no Jews in Oswiecim. Like virtually all the other towns and villages across Poland, it is Judenrein, free of Jews.
There were three and a half million Jews living in Poland before the war. Today there are a few thousand at best, and many of them have little knowledge of their heritage.
Our trip placed the history of the times in focus. It gave us a broad and poignant understanding of the Holocaust and Polish Jewry. It gave us the opportunity to reflect on how lucky we are to have the freedoms we enjoy in the United States.
As we prepared to leave Poland, I wanted nothing more than to leave that God-forsaken place. I prayed I would not return again.
There was one more lesson I took with me from our visit. If a once-flourishing center of Jewish life and learning could suffer such absolute and irrevocable devastation in little more than the blink of an eye, how secure and safe are Jews anywhere?
Even we Jews who live so comfortably in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and similar communities in the U.S. and other countries throughout the world should realize that the only real haven for the Jewish people is the land of Israel.
If we would have had our Israel in the 1930’s and 40’s, millions of Jews would have been saved. Now we have a Jewish army that, with the help of God, can protect our brothers and sisters wherever they are. No Jewish life is expendable any more.
My father puts it so beautifully in his book:
With the destruction of Polish Jewry, a great part of the Jewish soul has been lost. If one thousand years of Jewish life could be so brutally and swiftly annihilated, how could Jews feel utterly safe anywhere? Yet in our day we have Israel, and despite everything, the Jewish people live. “My vengeance is life,” wrote the survivor Susan Felix, in a poem once given to me by Dorothy Jacobs of Millbrae, California:
My vengeance is to live
Take heed makers of death and sorrow,
Brutalizers of life –
I will pour sunshine into the world
Bring air and light to stifling places
Open windows and doors,
Sing in the streets and dance in the fields,
My vengeance is life.