As a Jewish studies scholar who has been educated in Greece, Germany, Denmark, Israel, and Sweden, I consider Poland (and in particular the city of Warsaw) to be the perfect study trip destination. On the other hand, as a humanitarian and person with a strong consensus about (collective) memory and empathy about the Holocaust (Shoa) in Europe, my sense of enthusiasm about “Jewish Warsaw” has gradually disappeared and been lost. There are only historical question marks and food for thought. Speaking in semiotic terms, question marks are extremely commonplace in the history of the Shoah. It seems as if they were always there to remind us of the dark and sorrowful past of World War II. Additionally, I also have question marks about the Shoah in Thessaloniki (Greece), the city of my origin. As a scholar, I used to make comparisons in order to better understand the framework in both cities, and predominately in both countries.
Commemoration site in the former Nazi death camp, Treblinka
Nevertheless, when I visited Treblinka, as an HIA fellow, I was very silent and full of sorrow; my “scholarly” question marks were long gone once the tour guide told me that the commemoration stones bear the names of the cities or towns from which the victims were deported to the death camp. The sense of sorrow along with a mixture of haunting unanswered “WHYs’’ reminded me of my visit to the Valley of the Communities in Yad Vashem. There, over 5000 names of communities are engraved on the stone walls, and each name recalls a Jewish community which existed for hundreds of years. For the inhabitants, each community constituted an entire world. In most cases, in post-Holocaust Europe almost nothing remains apart from the names. Names are linked to souls. Every soul has a unique story to tell about itself. So, in Treblinka I shut my eyes tightly and tried to hear the whispers of those souls. I enormously wanted to hear their stories--but no voice, no echo, nothing. Only silence. Silence for thinking and wondering about the notion of ‘’silence’’ in the context of the Holocaust. Was it that “silence” that allowed the atrocities of the Nazis? Or, was it the lack of a mass and organized reaction from the civil societies of European countries? The questions are haunting and are extremely difficult to answer.
Treblinka
What I have found interesting and deeply personal are pieces of crumpled papers on the stones with Hebrew handwriting. I asked my tour guide Tomasz Cebulski about those papers. He told me that they might be prayers written in Hebrew or Yiddish. But still I wondered: Why in those languages, and why on the stones that symbolize the lost communities? Again many questions marks came to my mind, with only one answer. The prayers were written in Hebrew or Yiddish, and not in Polish, because Polish Jews, when they wanted to say something personal to their God, spoke with the language of the soul. It used to always be like this, when we wanted to say something extremely personal: to whisper with our breath our feelings, our thoughts or our agony. In my point of view, those crumpled pieces of paper I found on the stones in Treblinka might be the words of those Jews who could not tell their stories, but whose relatives did it on their behalf.
Synagogue in Warsaw (inside)
When I returned from Treblinka to the city of Warsaw, where the Ghetto used to be, I walked to the Synagogue of the city in order to see what was saved. The Synagogue, in my point of view, is the symbol of the Jewish community, the place where the sacred souls of the Jews who died in Treblinka spiritually meet the culture of contemporary Jews and non-Jews alike. And they compel them to speak up and speak out: Never Again!
Synagogue in Warsaw
We are morally indebted to uphold the pledge of Never Again. But the most important is to ‘Love your neighbor (fellow) as yourself.’ If we follow that Biblical rule as a compass to our life path, we have a chance to prevent future atrocities like the Holocaust.
Ioannis Styliandis was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. He holds two Master degrees in the fields of 1) Theology and Culture (Aristotle University) and 2) Jewish Civilization (Heidelberg University). He has originally trained and educated as a teacher of religion and historian mainly in the area of cross-cultural education. Ioannis has studied and worked in Greece, Germany, Denmark, Israel, Finland and Sweden by acquiring academic and working experience in Education, Middle East studies, Interreligious dialogue and Holocaust education. He was a Bruno Schulz Fellow at Paideia-the European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden. Moreover, Ioannis has received scholarships, among others, from the State Scholarship Foundation (IKY), State of Israel and the Danish Agency for Universities and Internationalisation. He also worked as a volunteer at Diakonische Werk Heidelberg and Heinrich Böll Stiftung Thessaloniki.
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