After the War

Marker representing western boundary of Lublin's Ghetto, 1944

I was excited about the first day of the Lubliner Reunion and left the hotel in a hurry. On my way to the Royal Palace, I didn’t notice the tiles on the sidewalk along Lubartowska Street designating the boundary of the Jewish ghetto. When crossing the busy transit station, I didn’t know the area was once the heart of the Jewish quarter crowded with people, buildings, markets and synagogues. In short, I didn’t know how much Jewish history and culture in Lublin had been erased.

By 1944, when the Russian army liberated Lublin and Majdanek extermination camp, most of Lublin’s 42,000 Jewish residents had been murdered and the city’s vibrant Jewish quarter destroyed. Of those who fled to the Soviet Union during the war, some returned only to find they had no family and no home.

Transit station once the heart of Lublin's Jewish quarter

Holocaust survivors attempted to create a new community in Lublin. Chewra Nosim, the only pre-war synagogue remaining after the war, was reorganized. A Yiddish newspaper began, and an elementary school for Jewish children operated for a few years. Several organizations were also created to help resettle Jewish survivors. But violence against Jews continued, including the Kielce pogrom in 1946, where 42 Jewish men, women and children were slaughtered by their neighbors.

poet Jacob Glatstein was born and raised in Lublin

By 1950, the majority of Poland’s Jews emigrated to Israel, the United States, Western Europe, Mexico, South America and Australia. A few hundred continued to live in the Lublin District until 1968, when many left after a series of anti-semitic events. What started as a student protest against the communist government in Warsaw, escalated and led to the expulsion of thousands of Jewish citizens of Poland.

Under Russian occupation from 1944 to 1989, discussion of Jewish genocide was mostly taboo in Poland. Young people were taught that those who died in the camps were Poles or came from “many different countries,” and were not identified as Jews. Extermination camp memorials and museums, established after the war, at Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were to “commemorate Polish and international martyrdom.” Their displays showed atrocities committed by Nazi Germany in Poland, with little mention of the devastation to the Jewish population. Finally, in 2013, the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel prepared a permanent exhibition entitled Shoah, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, to clearly define the Holocaust and the murder of the Jewish people. 

In the meantime, signs of interest in Jewish life began in the 1980s as the communist government weakened. Some young Poles discovered their Jewish roots and gathered in a small network of synagogues, schools and summer camps. Academic Jewish studies programs were established at Warsaw University and the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Also, the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow began in 1988, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. In addition, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, the Polin Museum, opened on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto in 2013. 

From the wall at Grodzka Gate Theater NN, Lublin

In the 1990s Grodzka Gate Theater NN in Lublin established The Memory Gate program dedicated to recovering the memory of Polish-Jewish Lublin. As part of that program, researchers have gathered photos, articles, documents and testimonies about the individual lives of Jewish residents and created programs to share with students and visitors. Their outreach to Holocaust survivors and descendants of Jewish Lubliners led to the organization of the first reunion in 2017, which I attended.

I am grateful to the folks at Grodzka Gate for the opportunity to experience this journey into the past. While in Poland, I visited a forest where 30,000 people were shot and buried. I saw the mass graves of 500,000 Jewish victims and the death camps where they were murdered. I visited museums, memorials and cultural centers dedicated to the memory of those who perished. I climbed the stairs to the apartment where my family could not return. And, I observed the city of Lublin that grew without us. 

The Polish people are the keepers of this history. We can only hope to continue to learn from the truth.