BLOG 11

11. Blog: 23^rd  Oct 09

The Surrealism of Warsaw

-          Laibl Wolf, Dean, Spiritgrow - The Josef Kryss Wholistic Centre, Australia

I had vowed never to set foot in Poland. The extermination of my family there had indelibly marked that country with a glaring DO NOT ENTER stamp embossed in my heart and mind. Poland was the ’killing-fields’ that took my family, my people – the seat of systematic destruction of Jewish Europe. But the call of a Chabad emissary crosses boundaries of reasoned decisions and emotional bias. It touches the soul. So I went.

 

 As Divine providence would have it, my flight schedule required me to spend a full day and a half in Warsaw. So I allowed myself to venture out to the government sponsored Jewish memorials. First stop – the station where cattle trucks took my people from the Warsaw ghetto to their gaseous liquidation. A somber grey stoned square suitably inscribed with a few fitting quotations. This token gesture adjacent to a school of psychology – a surrealistic contrast: murder alongside an institute dedicated to human insight.

 

Next stop – a memorial to the Warsaw ghetto uprising. An imposing slab with the grotesque sculpture of tortured fighters hewed three dimensionally out of raw stone. On this particular afternoon a huge crane hung limply on the large adjacent site.  The foundations for another Jewish museum to rise from the ashes of the six million. Another ‘virtual’ attempt to jog future memories, to record history.

 

Memories and history. There is no Hebrew word for history. A cannibalized word, ‘historia’, doesn’t cut it. ‘Historia’ is the stuff of academic debate - cold, detached narrative. Scientific, methodological, meticulous. A bit like the records room of the crematoria

 

The authentic Hebrew, the holy tongue, has only one word which approximates consciousness of the passage of time  -‘zecher’ – to remember. ‘Historia’ is not ‘zecher’ .  One is passive, and the other active.  One is an ‘add-on’ to a brain-centred storage house – the other an active prod to bodily emotions.

 

The crane; another museum - ‘historia’.  But how do we transform cold detachment into the motivational heat of human motivation? ‘Zecher’ –  by allowing the memory of my murdered forebears to express through my hands, feet, heart and mind. By creating a truly experiential memory which only comes through a bodily involvement with a living tradition, a recollection of our first encounter at Sinai, a consciousness of life itself through the prism of Jewish eyes. I must live Jewish. Not just a cerebral Jew; not even merely a cardiac Jew, and certainly not a culinary Jew.  A Jewish life that is practiced with the hands and feet – Mitzvot.

 

I flew out of Warsaw, still vowing not to return. But I was not the same person. It was no longer a matter of ‘historia’.  

 

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