Max crash lands Max arrived back to the USA -- four days after his European Adventure was supposed to end. Somewhere along the way dad's wallet with mom's green card was lost or stolen. Thus, it took extra days in London to sort the whole thing out.
Tip for you traverlers: Don't listen to advice given by airline officials or operators on immigration hot lines. Just make an appointment with the Embassy and get your problem dealt with.
With the extra days, Max's trip ended up being a total of three full weeks! And what an adventure it was. The trip was first envisioned as a Babymoon for Max's sibling to be (September 2008). Mom and dad wanted to take one last big trip before the baby comes in September. For Max's babymoon, they went to London and Spain. London to see Billy Elliot the musical. Spain partly because it is Max's Mexican mother's motherland. After debating whether this babymoon should be a tirp to the Greek Islands or Peruvian coffee fields, the decision was made to go to dad's homelands: Poland (maternal) and Budapest (paternal).
The trip was made even bigger when "gamma" accepted an offer to go along. She had long talked about seeing the homeland of her father, the grandmother she was named after and further and further back generations.
Max's great great-grandmother escaped the pogroms in Poland with her son (Max's great grandfather) hiding under her dress. The family story is that Max's great great grandmother heard that soldiers were on their way to kill the Jews. She ran downstairs, found a priest who happened to be there giving last rights to someone living in another apartment. He agreed to help and told her to hide with her children under the straw in his horse-drawn carriage. Somehow she eventually got on a boat and sailed to America. Children weren't allowed on these ocean voyages. Children were thought to spread disease and cause other problems. Many children were thrown overboard. Max's great great grandmother hid Max's great grandfather under her dress.
Even in America they found prejudice against the Jews. For business and other reasons, Max's great grandfather changed the family name from Polonske to Powell.
The trip to Poland was intended to get a feeling for where the family came from more than to search for family or conclusive proof of what happened. There are so few Jews left in Poland that there was no expectation of finding family. And there was little research done ahead of time to expect to find any answers.
What was found instead was more questions. Were the Poles guilty of helping the Nazi's or were they too persecuted by the Nazi as many we met claim? Did their parents and grandparents help the Nazis? If so, did they do it out of fear or out of hate? And if we were faced with the proposition of helping at the risk of a death sentence to our whole family if we got caught -- what would we do?
We had lots of questions and lots of moments of wishing we knew more history. We questioned not only people's motives back then but many of their current motives.
There was some feeling -- especially around Krakow, Poland -- that the effort to save historically significant Holocaust and Jewish sites is being done as much for tourism dollars as for any historical or moral sense. Krakow boasts a Jewish Section: Kazimierz. There is a nice central square where you can see restaurants and shops with Jewish names and Hebrew letters. This is where the Rubinstein's of the cosmetic fame started business and the shop with their name is still there.
However, none of the businesses are owned by Jews: not the Jewish book store where an unknowing us booked our tour; not the Delikatesan; and not Rubinstein's.
There is also an annual Jewish celebration, which we were told attracts a few Jewish tourists.
The place was like a weird tribute to the Jews.
"It's a Jewish Disneyland," our guide said graphically describing our feeling.
"Although it is referred to as a historic centre for Jewish culture, spotting actual Jews, aside from American-Jewish and Isreali tourists, has been up to this point a rare event," states the Krakow Post (May 2008)
Even Auschwitz, the concentration camp, felt more like a sightseeing place than the factory of death it really was. It was tough to feel when surrounded by fine manicured lawns and a barrack marked WC.
Perhaps this helps explain why the realities of the Holocaust surfaced not at obvious places like Auschwitz but in surprising moments. For instance, when we took the train from London airport to our hotel. Max didn't like it when the train went underground.
Jewish boy on a train.
In Europe.
Heading to Auschwitz.
Screaming.
When the image came into dad's mind, he froze.
Another example, the day we visited the Krakow ghetto where Jews were forced to live in over-crowded conditions, Max was wearing a red jacket. Mom brought the jacket purposely so that if he got lost in a crowd he'd be easy to spot.
Jewish child in a red jacket. Landscape in dull colors
Quick flash of girl in red jacket in black and white Schindler's List.
Mom and dad experienced the imagery separately and each froze.
Before the war, Krakow was home to about 60,000 Jews. Today there are about 300 registered Jews in the city.
"Many of the few who survived the war moved abroad to the West, mainly to the United state and Israel," states the Krakow Post (May 2008). "Some left due to outbreaks of antisemitism in the aftermath of the war. Surviving Jewish children were often raised as Catholics in order to fit in with the greater populace, leading to the strange phenomenon today of Poles discovering their Jewish heritage for the first time in their senior years."
Our Krakow guide is working on a documentary about a Jewish man who survived the Holocaust at Shindler's factory (made famous in Steven Spielberg's movie Schindler's List). No one besides his wife knows he his Jewish. He was afraid then of telling people he was Jewish and he is afraid now of telling his children. He will be disguised when filmed for the documentary.
Schindler's List seemed to be the catalyst for the revival of interest in the Holocaust in Krakow. Suddenly the closed and dilapidated Schindler factory got attention from local officials. Plans now call for this building in a run-down part of town to become a modern art gallery and for upscale condos to be built across the street. Other neglected buildings around the Jewish Quarter are also getting preservation attention.
One place that seemed to have missed the memo is the Warsaw Zoo. We went there mainly because Max's dad was reading the book The Zookeeper's Wife, the story of how the Warsaw Zoo was used as a place to hide Jews during the war. The zookeeper was a member of the underground resistance and his wife was left in charge of hiding the Jews in the cages and tunnels that formerly housed animals. Noone there knew anything of the story or if anything remained from that period. (The author said during an NPR interview that she was going to Warsaw in the Fall to help tell the story and that the zoo would eventually have memorials telling the story.)
Of course, preservation despite the motivation is worthwhile. And not all the motivation should be suspect. In addition, there are efforts to rebuild Krakow's Jewish community. The city received it's first full-time rabbi in 2005 and very recently Prince Charles attended the unveiling ceremony of a new Jewish Community Center (JCC) that was launched largely due to his patronage and bears his name. "As about 70 percent of the world's Jews can trace their roots back to Polish soil, it would be no surprise if some of them decided to return in the near future, making the presence of a gathering point essential," the paper states.
We found our reality in another unreal place: Treblinka. During the war, Treblinka was an extermination camp; Unlike concentration camps were some Jews survived, Jews were taken to Treblinka solely to be killed -- there were no barracks.
The Nazis destroyed Treblinka before the end of the war in an attempt to destroy evidence.
The Treblinka memorial is a powerful artist representation of the extermination camp. We visited after hours. Thus the intense imagery was even more powerful because we were alone.
For us, the artist interpretation of Treblinka is somehow more moving than the reality of Auschwitz.
The Treblinka memorial includes gravestones marked not with people's names but with the names of the towns whose residents were taken there to be killed. When you see gravestone after gravestone with the names of towns you understand how not only were people killed but whole communities and ways of life were destroyed. There is a gravestone marked Bialystok -- the city Max's great grandfather fled from about 100 years ago.
Max's great great grandmother was born not far from Bialystok in Techtin, a small shtetl that was about 50% Jewish. There are no Jews left in Techtin. They only things left in Techtin marking the former thriving Jewish life are a well-preserved synagogue and a Star of David built into a window frame of a dilapidated yet inhabited house behind the synagogue. The synagogue survived because the Nazis used it as a place to repair their tanks. It now serves as sort of a museum where children's tour groups go to get an education of the Holocaust and the Jews. Many Jewish prayers are painted on the wall because there was never enough books to go around.
It was at this synagogue where Max led dad to even more questions. When the Nazis came to Techtin the forced the Jews to line up and march into the forest. We retraced their path driving in an air conditioned SUV.
We drove in our air conditioned SUV down the path these people must have walked at gun point. Our guide didn’t tell us where we were going. We wonder whether those people knew where they were going. Eventually we – and they some 65 years before us – came to a beautiful spot in the middle of the forest. What they saw, we’ll never know. What we saw were three blue and white Isreal flags draped over three separate metal fences that each marked an area. One was straight in front of us. One to the gravel road to the right. And the last was on our left.
The Nazis marched the Jews of Tichtin into the forest, ordered them to separate themselves into three areas and then killed them all.
The fenced areas now marked mass graves.
Techtin was half Jewish. What were their neighbors doing during this time? Did anyone help? And perhaps most importantly, is anything different today?
Sometimes it takes a child to make things more clear.
Max toured the Techtin synagogue at full speed. He ran around the inside ramps, climbed on the pews and jumped off the steps. Eventually he ran into the office -- where dad went to retrieve him.
As dad and Max left the office, dad looked up and saw a cross above the door.
The question that quickly came to mind was "Will these people ever give a damn about the Jews?"
Similarly, we toured the cemetery in Bialystok where members of Max's grandmother's family may have been buried. Of course, it's hard to know for sure because the cemetery is completely unkept, overgrown and many of the headstones have fallen down or been broken. This is in complete contrast to the Christian cemeteries in the area that are all perfectly kept. Our guide, Tomas, has made it his mission to cataloge every grave. His web site enables peo
ple to type in a name and find graves that match. The one he found for Max's grandma was broken so we don't know if it was Polonske, or Golonske or Wolonske or ???.
Of course there were lighter moments as well. For instance, we were first offended by the grafitti with the Star of David in Krakow. We were sure this was anti-semetic banter. We found out later that the Jews in this sense refered to a futbol team. Turns out they refer to the older team as the Jews. We weren't sure whether to be honored or offended. Either way, we laughed at our assumption of anti-semiticism.
There were other unrelated political discussions along the way. We asked several people what they thought of the USA. Many thought our country
had changed for the worse , were happy Bush was almost gone (as are we!) and excited about Barack Obama (as are we!). Paul, who worked at our Warsaw hotel had the most interesting comments. He thought America today was shaped by its founders. They, he believed, came to America to take the land away from the Native Americans. Today Americans are no different in that they want to take over the world. "It's in your DNA," he said. After all they had seen in the 10 days in Poland, Dad wondered what was in Paul's DNA.
Of course the trip was filled with incredible, happy times as well.
There were the unexpected things like seeing the storks in Techtin who came annually to hatch their eggs, seeing the International Bear exhibit in Budapest and our getting to see Billy Elliot twice! There was the joy of seeing gamma put Max to sleep watching Cricket and witnessing Max's happy surprise when Tia Vanessa joined us in Budapest..
There was the making of baseball bats out of everything: newspapers, Vanessa's pillow and sticks. There was the sense of mystery of why none of the Krakow restaurants that advertised falafel actually had falafel and similarly why there was no calamari in Warsaw.
And there were all of Max's new expressions: "No Way." "My turn." "That way."
And perhaps mostly there was Sammy. On our one-day stop-over in London at the beginning of the tirp, Max loved seeing the soldiers marching around Buckingham Palace. During our unexpected four-day lay-over at the end of the trip, Gamma bought Max a toy soldier and named him Sammy. Mom and dad then took Max to see the Changing of the Guard. At first Max enjoyed his front row seat. When the Marching Band of Sammys got close, Max repeated "No Way" and burried his head in dad's chest. But now all those scared thoughts are gone as Max loves to watch the Sammy video. (Sorry, the Sammy video was too big to upload)
Max and Uncle Kenny
The
week of course also featured Halloween. Max went as a firefi
ghter to a Friday night party and for Halloween. Alex went as a skeleton (or bones, as Max called him) on Friday and a mariachi on Saturday. Mama did vampire both nights. Papa changed from Vampire on Friday to a Guatemalan baseball player on Halloween.
