UNITING TO LEARN THE TRUTH ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST

 

A VISIT TO POLAND

The following words were spoken in Arabic by a young Israeli Arab at a ceremony marking the end of an emotional week’s tour of the Polish death camps and the Warsaw Ghetto in which 700 young Israelis participated. “As part of a group representing a larger circle of Arab youth groups within the movement which took part in last week’s trip, we want to say a few words on behalf of the participants. We feel that we have absorbed the images of discrimination, displacement, destruction, pain, hunger, violence, the orphaning of children, corpses and genocide that have accompanied us for a whole week and will remain with us for the rest of our lives. It is like a scream within us and we all pray that this scream and its message will reach the ears of all people who live and breathe on this earth. This scream beseeches all the nations of the world to come and see what we have seen and to share that to which our souls have been exposed. At the end of this trip, we understand that Jews and Arabs are obligated to unite in saving the values of humanity and in transforming what we have experienced into deeds. We must sanctify the values of equality and the worth of mans’ life so that we may live in peace, harmony, hope and love. Here and now we vow to begin and continue a revolution in pursuit of this cause.”

ISRAELI ARAB PARTICIPANTS

This was the third such trip for our granddaughter, Tamar, but the first one in which a group of Israeli Arabs, seven young men and seven young women, aged from 26 to 31, all youth leaders in their respective villages, have participated. Tamar has been working towards this trip for several years and there were many applicants from which this small group was selected. It was part of one of the much larger groups of Israeli youth who make this visit yearly. Altogether, three El Al planeloads which included youth leaders, guides, doctors and psychologists, flew from Israel to Poland recently to make this very emotional trip. Tamar accompanied the Arab group which she had been preparing for the trip several months in advance, at all times. She had previously held seminars with them and showed them films on the Holocaust such as, ‘Schindler’s List’ and, during the trip, spent the evenings with them, enabling them to work through each day’s traumatic experiences.

THE CAMPS AND THE WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING

The object of this trip was not only to visit the death camps of Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka as well as Plashow, near Krakow, the site of Oscar Schindler’s famous factory, but also the site of The Warsaw Ghetto, whose young fighters became the inspiration of the youth movement, Noar Ha’Oved L’Omed of which Tamar has been a faithful participant since childhood and within which she now heads the “Co-existence Section.” At the site of the Ghetto they followed the story of the Ghetto Uprising and learnt more about its heroes, namely Yitzhak Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetilin who survived the horrors of the Ghetto, married and came to Israel where they were founder members of Kibbutz Lohamey Ha-Geta’ot, ( Kibbutz of The Ghetto Fighters) in northern Israel. They had been members of the Youth movement, Dror, which had been strong in Poland, Russia and parts of Europe prior to World War 2, inspiring young Jews with a love of Palestine, as it then was, and preparing them for Aliyah. It was they and other Dror members in the Ghetto, who instigated and led the uprising and through whose inspiration the movement, Noar Ha’oved ve L’Omed was founded in Israel. We are ashamed to admit that it is only now, after interviewing our granddaughter, that we understand why one of the main roads in Gilo is named Zivia ve Yitzhak. At the Ghetto site they visited the renowned Mila 18, and the Umschlag Platz where countless thousands of Jews were loaded onto cattle trucks and transported to their deaths. They ended their visit at the mouth of the sewer through which Zivia and Yitzhak and other survivors of the Ghetto made their escapes.

At the end of our interview with Tamar we felt we had learnt a lot that we were embarrassed not to have already known and that our admiration for the interfaith and educational work that she does so devotedly, knows no bounds.