The Moth's Plight
I am not a devout Jew. As a child and pre-teenager, I went to Hebrew School for many years after my regular school day was over. My parents simply assumed that I would take these lessons, a tribal and religious tradition, especially for the firstborn male child in the family. At thirteen, I had a Bar Mitzvah. Despite my religious education, my attendance at synagogue is now an episodic event, generally limited to the “big” religious holidays. I have little interest in religious rites and teachings. Yet I am a Jew by tradition, history, and family.
I recognize the morbid fact that if I had lived in Europe in the1940s, I would have likely shared the same cattle car, shower room, or bunk with the other Jews on our way to death or wretched enslavement. I remember a passage from Schindler’s List in which the Jews of Krakow are required to register by the Germans. A man comes up to the registrar’s desk, overseen by a German officer, and explains that he is not like the other Jews waiting in line to register and should be exempted. He is educated, has lived and studied in Paris, and has traveled around Europe. He is not a common Jew. The German’s response to him: Register!
Warsaw was far better than I expected. My business colleagues were gracious and helpful. The hotel was lovely. I had two goals for the trip beyond my business assignment: visit the Warsaw Ghetto site and travel to Auschwitz. I had arrived on a Sunday morning and asked the hotel concierge for directions to the Warsaw ghetto. He drew a route, and I went to explore. During the German rule in Poland, more than 300,000 Jews were confined in the Ghetto and subsequently died from starvation, disease, or deportation to the Treblinka death camp. After a half-hour walk, I came to a monument that commemorated a ghetto uprising against the Germans in 1943. Its marble ironically came from stone that the Germans had imported from Sweden, for planned monuments honoring Hitler's victories.
The ghetto itself no longer existed. It was now a park surrounded by housing developments. Besides the monument, there was little to indicate the horror that had existed there years before. One shocking reminder, however, was the trolley tracks that had once run past the ghetto. The tracks were still there. I remember photos of people using a wooden bridge across the tracks to enter and leave the ghetto. The park was a mute testimony to the lives turned to ash. After my visit, I returned to the hotel, had some wonderful scotch whiskey, and relaxed in the lounge after dinner, listening to a bit of classical music. The next day was bank business, and I had work to do. Welcome back from the killing fields. No hard feelings. Life goes on.
My plan was to spend six days in Poland, with two of them devoted to a train ride to Krakow. From there, I would make the relatively short train trip to Oswiecim, the Polish city that housed Auschwitz. I had no interest in exploring Krakow. I wanted to spend the night there and, the next morning, visit Auschwitz and return to Warsaw. No lingering for me. My travel agent had booked me into a horrid Soviet-era hotel in Krakow. I think Lubyanka prison in Moscow would have been more appealing. It set the stage for my next morning’s trip.
In Krakow, Auschwitz is big business. There are a number of tour companies offering day trips out to the concentration camp, usually by bus. I wanted to be alone. I did not want to be part of a captive audience in a group tour. I wanted to take a train to Oswiecim over the same train tracks that had taken the doomed Jews to Auschwitz, in cattle cars leased to Nazi bureaucrats by the German railway system. Business is business. Lumber, cattle, coal, pots and pans, Jews. They were all goods that had to be moved. No moral qualms. Merely another shipment for a good price.
By eight o’clock in the morning, I was at the train station. After some struggle trying to understand the Polish railroad schedule, I boarded the train. It was an hour train ride to Auschwitz. I recalled the magisterial 1985 film by Claude Lanzmann, Shoah, in which the director interviewed Poles who had witnessed the trains taking the Jews to the concentration camps. One chilling scene had a child maliciously slashing his hand across his throat as he watched the passing trains of the doomed. Their fate signaled and mocked by a child. I was riding those same rails.