SSSS

Over the past 10 years, my love to Poland has been channeled through Fredrik Chopin airport in Warsaw. My first visit to Poland, back in 2008, included only the RC workshop that brought me to Poland on the first place. I did not get to experience much of Poland. I landed Krakow's airport, it was still called "Balist" back then, and I flew home from Warsaw's. Upon reaching the departure gates, I immediately noticed that the gate for my flight to Israel resides among the gates in the airport. That moved me. Let me tell you why.

In my pervious travels abroad, I learned that in Berlin and in Munich, the flights to Israel were leaving from an isolated section of the airport, a distant terminal building, that had a very limited passenger services and increased security measures. It looked and felt like a jail. In Berlin, an armored vehicle parked outside of it. I could say to myself that this was so in order to protect us Israelis from guerilla attacks – the 1970s saw lots of guerilla attacks on air traffic, and of course there was the attack on the USA air traffic on September 11th 2001. But, no special measures were taken with regards to flights to the USA. So, what I actually said to myself was, that the Europeans want to make sure, that if someone wishes to blow up some Jews, no European citizens get hit by accident. It moved me to notice, that in Warsaw, there is a different attitude.

On the years that followed, whenever I was traveling to Europe, I kept on weighing airports based on their attitude towards the passengers that were flying to Israel. Rome's airport treated us worse than Berlin's. So did Charles De Gaule airport in Paris. In Zagreb, Vienna and Athens, we were treated well. That is, we were treated like everyone else was. In Barcelona and Budapest, it was something in between. However, since my first encounter with the departures ward of Fredrik Chopin airport in 2008 came right after my flights from Berlin and from Munich, so I felt the change drastically. I could go to any duty-free shop that I wanted to. I could have a choice of beverages while I was waiting for my flight, not just one automatic vending machine that soon ran out of service. I was not ostracized here. Israeli Jews are not ostracized here.

Then, I began to attend the RC workshop in Poland every year, arriving and departing through Fredrik Chopin airport. I noticed its growth, its improvements. I learned about bus numbers 175 and 188 that led to the city and from it, and then, when the train lines were extended to the airport in 2012, I became an expert on the types of trains and tickets that are available. As I started to teach myself Polish, each orange sign became a language exercise. Landing in Chopin airport felt like coming to a secondary home, arriving there for departures felt like the conclusion of a great stay and the first step in returning to the first home.

But last year, things changed for worse. After having waited at the gate for my LOT flight home, the stewardess looked at my boarding pass and told me that I need to go through a further security examination. I freaked out. The airplane was out there behind the glass wall, some passengers were already seated in it, I got afraid of losing my flight. I left the desk and rushed to find out where this extended examination took place. Luckily, I met some airport workers who gave me good directions. A stern looking policeman spilled out the inside of my backpack (it has been X-rayed before), sprayed some powder on my fingers and pressed them against a plastic stripe. He then stamped my boarding pass and told me I was free to go. I collected my stuff and ran back to the gate. I did not miss the flight. But seated in the aircraft, I still felt uneasy. Why did they pick me up? Are they suspicious about RC, an international community with a liberal agenda? Was there something about me? Maybe my traveling with a backpack rather than a suitcase made me look like a drug trafficker? Whose policy was it anyway? There was no one to ask.

This year, things changed again, in part for the better and in part for the worse. For the better, LOT airlines had added a flight to Israel on Saturday night, which allowed me to fly home right at the end of my RC workshop, which ended on Saturday this year. I arrived at the check-in desk, after having checked in online. The stewardess produced my boarding pass, and drew my attention to the "SSSS" at the bottom of the pass. She kindly explained, that it meant that I needed to go through an extended security check at the gate, after having passed the X-ray check and the passport control. I knew better than to ask that nice young woman WHY ME. I thought that it had been better to know this in advance, and not at the last moment, like on the previous year. I went through the X-ray, and then rushed to the passport control, skipping the duty free parlor. Who knows how much time this extra security is going to take this year? I passed the passport control, I got to the gates area, and then realized that I forgot the directions that the stewardess gave me. So stressed I was. A man in uniforms that had passed by, I asked him where to go, and he pointed to a deserted desk, that was right there at the corner. He said, that the desk will only be staffed an hour and a half before the flight. I noticed orange signs in Polish and in English, that told everyone for whom the extra security check was intended: for passengers going to Israel. Is Israel the only country in the world, which is threatened with guerilla warfare? No, it is not. But it was the only country that gets to have such a sign with its name on it. For me, this was the worse part. It reminded me of other signs, other times.

I went on to one of the cafeterias and got myself some coffee and snacks, feeling thankful that this is still possible in this terminal, that they have not yet sent us away to a distant booth with only a vending machine. The coffee was good, and the vendor was nice. When I returned to the gate, I noticed that the extra security desk was open. Some ten to twenty people were already queuing there. I joined the queue, and engaged in conversations with the others. Some were persons of color, others looked white. Some looked rich and dressed fancily, some looked and dressed like me. All except me were women. The one thing we all had in common was, that we were all Israeli-Jews. I saw non-Israeli passengers waiting for the flight to Israel, but I saw none of them in line for extra security. I also saw Israeli passengers who were not summoned, but all those who were summoned were my people. The examination was less penetrative this year then it was last year. I was relieved to find out that it is not only me that is considered a threat to security. However, I kept on wondering what the profiling policy was, and who was responsible to it. Is it the airport, is it the airline company, is it the government?

After having returned home, I wrote the story in a social media group that I am in, where I help Hebrew learners from other countries in practicing my first language. I uploaded the pictures too. A few hours later, a British guy from that group wrote, that he had asked a Polish friend about it, and the Polish friend has told him that it is actually the government of Israel who asked the Poles to conduct these extra security checks. I find that hard to believe. Why would the government of Israel want to extra-check its own citizens in such big numbers? Would it not be easier to extra-check them upon arrival to Ben-Gurion airport? Could it not send its own people to perform these checks? It did not make sense. I'd be glad to hear from people who flew to Israel from other airports in Poland, if there are extra security checks in these airports as well, and how discrete they are. One way or the other, for me Fredrik Chopin airport will no longer feel like a friendly place that it used to be. I will keep on flying to Poland every year, but things will not be the same. And I can only hope, that things will not get worse.

                                           

Ludzie i zwierzęta, the diary of Antonina Żabińska

I learned about the story of the the Żabińsky family through the public relations of the US film "The zookeeper's wife". The reviews of the film were not good. It was suggested that the original diary of Antonina Żabińska is much more moving. Hence, when I noticed the Hebrew translation of that diary in our public borrowing library, I took it home with me. Among other things, it was an opportunity for me to visit my beloved Warsaw again without checking through Ben Gurion airport.

The book can be roughly divided to three sections. The first one describes the era from the time when the zoo was founded in 1931 until the German invasion in 1939. The second one describes the war era, and the third one describes the rebuilding of the the zoo and the rebuilding of Warsaw after the war. The first part and the third part contain a lot of anecdotes about animals and caring for them, which did not interest me very much. Such anecdotes were present in the middle part as well, but that part also included the story about how the Żabińskis hid Jews in the premises of the zoo during the war, and that interested me very much. I have never thought of myself as capable of such heroism, and thus, I am fascinated with the stories of those who were. According to Wikipedia, 300 people were saved with the help of the Żabińskis. They were honoured as Righteous Amongst the Nations by Israel in 1965.

As with other Righteous Amongst the Nations whose stories I have read, the Żabińskis have not decided one day to do something heroic, nor did they have a sense of commitment to the Jewish people. They have had friends who were in trouble, and they decided to help them. Some of those friends were Jews. And then came the friends of the friends, and theŻabińskis helped them as well. They helped Catholics too. That also came at a cost, although not as horrible cost as was for helping Jews. The Żabińskis were connected with the Home Army, the nationalist Polish underground, which was instrumental in transfering the survivors to a relatively safer places and in providing essential inteligence. When Warsaw's uprising had started in August 1944, Jan Żabiński joined the fighters, and his wife remained to run the life saving operation.

Antonina Żabiński was apparently blessed with mental abilities that enabled her to deal with the Germans (and then with the Soviet soldiers too: she stopped some of them from raping women who lived in her house). She also had the looks that the Germans favored: she was blond and thin. That explains how she was able to do all that she did. It does not explain how come she was not frozen with fear the whole time, as I suspect I would be. The diary has provided me with a possible answer. During the German occupation, life were not safe for the Poles. Even if you were a Catholic, arbitrary brutal death could come at every moment, just because some German soldier did not like your face. That was even more so when the Soviets got near. Here is what I learned: If your life and the life of your dear ones are at skate the whole time, and there is so little you could do to gurrentee safety, you might have as well done what you believed was the right thing to do.  

Articles that I might want to come back to

Articles that I might want to come back to:

2017.05.21      Polish Peasant Food for Beginners

Ida, a film by Pawel Pawlikowski

Several weeks ago, I took my partner to watch "Ida", a prize winning  Polish film, right when its screening in Israel has begun. Among other  things, it was an opportunity for me to visit Poland again, without checking through Ben-Gurion airport.

 

 

 Initially, I was puzzled with regards to when the plot is happening.  It is a black and white film, which usually hints that the story took place many years ago. On the other hand, it is about a young nun who lives in a convent, and the convent had running water. So, this could not be an ancient history. But really, I should not have had these doubts. There is hardly a chance that a Polish film would be distributed in Israel commercially unless it is about WW2 and the holocaust (although it did happen with Kieslowski's "Decalog"). At about half time into the film, a Jazz band is playing John Coltrane's "Naima". Hence, this cannot be earlier than the early 1960's.

The season could be early autumn or early spring. The sky is cloudy and the ground is muddy, but it is not covered with snow, and it is not frozen. Anna, the protagonist, is that young nun, who is preparing for the ceremony of taking the vows. I am not familiar with the ceremonies of Catholicism, but I understood that this is that one ceremony when a novitiate becomes a nun. However, the mother superior summons Anna to her office, and sends her on a mission: she is to travel to her aunt, her only living relative, and stay there until she sorts out some unsorted matters. That aunt has not come to reclaim Anna from the orphanage of the convent, although many letters were sent bidding her to do so. Anna travels to that aunt, and finds out what the Israeli Jewish spectator has figured out already: Anna is a Jew, she was admitted to the convent at infancy, during the war. Her birth name was Ida.

 The aunt, Wanda Gruz, lives alone in the city. When Ida knocks on her door, a man dresses up and leaves the flat. Is the aunt a prostitute? Is that why she has declined to connect to her niece? No. She is a woman of career. She works in the court of law. She is a communist, a servant of the communist regime, although possibly no longer as enthusiastic about it. She used to be a chief prosecutor, but she no longer is. Perhaps it is due to her Jewishness, perhaps it is due to her drinking problem, and perhaps it is the result of the political change that Poland has gone through in 1956. The Polish thaw, the de-Stalinization. Nevertheless, Wanda has still got a status and connections, as one can deduce from the fact that she has a modern flat and her own car. She accepts her niece, and to her niece's request, goes with her on a travel to the village where her parents used to live. Ida hopes to find the spot where her parents are buried. Wanda does not believe that it can be found, and yet, she goes out with Ida on a journey to rural Poland. On the course of the journey, the story of what happened to Ida's parents is revealed, as does a possible reason for Wanda's reluctance to contact Ida all those years. Further into the film, it will turn out that perhaps Wanda would be better off if Ida would not have entered her life.
 

The film is amazingly beautiful, it is skillfully written, directed and performed. It reminded me of "The white ribbon" by the Austrian  Michael Haneke, of the classical "The passion of Joan of Arc" by the Danish Carl Theodor Dreyer, and of the early classics by the Swedish Ingmar Bergman. On the other hand, it reminded me of the Israeli film "Fill the Void" by Rama Burshtein, in that its portrays a young woman who is very religious and very naïve, who has lived all her life in a protecting closed social system, and then a crack is revealed in that system. But unlike Burshtein's film, and much like Haneke's film, this film is anything but naïve, and it can easily be understood why it is controversial in the country it comes from.

On one hand, the passage of Wanda and Ida leads them to a Polish farmer, who confesses to Ida that he had killed her parents with an axe. As I understand it, by depicting such a farmer, the author is taking a side in a bitter argument between conservatives and liberals in Poland. The conservatives claim that only Germans were killing Jews in Poland during WW2, that no Pole has done such a thing, perhaps other than a few marginal people, who by no means represent the noble Polish nation. That is a kind of argumentation that we in Israel know well from the discourse about Prime Minister Rabbin's murder. To that say the liberals, that there were indeed noble Poles who hid Jews and saved their lives, as there were Poles who chose not to be involved, but there were also quite several Poles who murdered Jews out of their own initiative. The way in which the author depicts the encounter with the farmer leaves no place for a doubt: this man is not some marginal character in the Polish society, a lost sheep that went outside the herd. There are many like him, and many did what he has done. Hence, conservative circles in Poland blame the author that his film is
"anti-Polish".

As I am writing this, I try to imagine what conservative circles in Israel would say about an Israeli Jew who would make a film about the court that sentenced Jesus to death. 'It was not us!', they would probably cry out, 'the Romans are the ones who crucified him!'.

And on the other hand, Wanda is stating on screen that she used to be a prosecutor under the communist regime, and that she had demanded prison and death penalties to those who were considered "the enemies of the people" by that regime. From the social networks I have learned, that this character is based on a real historical figure, Helena Wolińska-Brus, a Jew who was a military prosecutor under the Stalinist regime. Those who are not familiar with the contemporary Polish culture would not know how intense are the feelings in it towards those who serviced the communist regime, especially during the Stalinist period, the early 1950's. I think that the closest thing we Israelis are familiar with is the sentiment that had been towards Jewish women who befriended with British soldiers while the Jewish struggle for independence was at its peak, in the mid 1940's. The fact that there were Jews who serviced the Communist regime in Poland is sometimes brought up as a counter argument to the assertion that there were Poles who murdered Jews on their own initiative. It is as if to say, yeah, we were not so good back then, but then again, you were not so great either.  It is due to such rhetoric that the only two officials in the Polish Communist regime whose names I now know are Salomon Morel and Helena Wolińska-Brus, both Jews. Hence, I could see why liberal circles in Poland blame the author, that his choice to depict such a negative Jewish character serves the anti-Semitic case.

It might be that this is what the author had intended, to infuriate conservatives and liberals alike, Poles and Jews alike. If everyone protests, then there is a balance. And surely, the public relations of the film could well benefit from a controversy.

 

 But I had left the cinema with a third argument in mind, one that was not very prevalent in the reviews of the film and of the controversy that I have read. The film's ending could leave a bitter taste in the mouth of whomever believe that there is a future to Jewish life in Poland, perhaps in all of Europe. I would not want to elaborate, so as not to spoil it to whomever of my readers who has not yet seen the film. Let me just say, that the final scenes could imply that there is no life for Jews in Poland other than in the loving arms of the Catholic church, and whomever chooses a different path is heading for a bad fall. Personally, I agree that there is no future for Jews in Europe, so I was not all that upset with these final scenes. But I know people who vow to the opposite opinion, and I am surprised that they have not added their voices to the controversy.

As a footnote I would like to add, that for years, my sisters and I had believed that our mother had survived the war in a Catholic convent. But for a year now, ever since a meeting we had in the Getto Fighters House museum, we no longer think that. We think that our mother had probably survived the war behind the Soviet lines, only one from her family. But in our passage to discover our mother's past, we have met women whose lives were saved that way. They are living in Israel now.

Wroclaw 2014

 

 

Upon planning to attend my RC workshop in Poland for the sixth time, I decided to travel to Wroclaw for a few days afterwards. Some of my Polish friends online have recommended on it, as did Anna, a woman whom I met two years ago in Lublin, and remained connected to her online since. Anna said, that she has a brother in Wroclaw, and that if I visit Wroclaw, I should absolutely meet him. And then was Mark Krajevski's novel "Death in Breslau" that I had read some years ago, and left me curious about that city. I like to tour cities where novels that I read had occurred, as I like to read novels that occur in cities that I had toured.

This time, I hoped to accomplish an ambitious plan that I have drawn throughout the past year: to take two of my beloved nephews with me to Warsaw and go Couch Surfing with them. That is, stay with them at the homes of Warsovian hosts, and show them that city that I love so much. These nephews, at the end of their 20s, had expressed their interest in my couchsurfing experiences, one of them has even signed in to the couchsurfing site and hosted some girl in Jerusalem. I thought this might be a cool opportunity to get close to them. One of them said that he needed to think about it and then said no. The other one got enthusiastic about it. I planned to fly with him to Warsaw, spend a few days with him, then to accompany him to his flight home, attend my RC workshop, and finally, spend a few days visiting Wroclaw. That should have ended in twelve days.
 

In the beginning of the year, Wizzair has started offering low cost flights from Israel to Warsaw. I got thrilled at the idea of flying to Warsaw low cost. It is not that I cannot afford the price of a regular flight. It's just that I like the idea of a flight with no meal, no duty-free sales, no noisy entertainment program on the tiny little displays, just a nice quiet flight for people who only wish to be taken from one airport to another quietly and conveniently. I offered my nephew that we would meet and learn how to order tickets via Wizzair's site. I did not mind paying for his ticket, it is a low cost ticket after all, but I wanted him to be independent. He would need to do the flight back on his own, so I thought he needed to know what is going on. At that point, his enthusiasm started to fade. He started making excuses. So I decided to buy myself a ticket, and not wait for him. If he would pull himself together, that would be great. If not, I will always be able to find some fun things to do in Warsaw on my own. Warsaw is much like Tel-Aviv in that sense, there is always a fun thing to do.
 

Then the seasonal war in Gaza had begun, and I got an email from Wizzair telling me that my flight is cancelled, and I'm offered a seat in a previous flight. Sixteen days abroad is a bit too much for me, so I called Wizzair's contact center to find what other options I have. It turned out that I have none. They are terminating the route, and generally narrowing their operations in Israel. Either I take their offer, or I cancel my order and they would return me my money. I canceled the order, and they returned some of my money. I no longer had the energy to insist that they'd return all of it. I was so glad that it is only me in this story, rather than me and my nephew, who has not been acting too mature about the whole thing. I booked a regular flight with El-Al that departed from Ben-Gurion airport one day before my workshop. It was not all that much more expensive than that of Wizzair, only 1071 NIS instead of 868 NIS.
 

I am telling this in order to explain why I only toured Poland for three days after my RC workshop. There was a big plan, there was a major headache, changes and cancellations, until, eventually, I was too worn up to re-think the plan, add more days to the last part, after the workshop, instead of the ones that were taken off the first part. My plan to couchsurf in Wroclaw has not gone very well either. Three couch surfers that I had contacted agreed to host me, but cancelled some time afterwards. The questions I've put on Wroclaw's forum on CS site were answered quite shortly, not passionately and enthusiastically as they did in Warsaw's forum in previous years. So gave that up, and booked vacancies in the Boogie hostel on Ruska St., near the old town square. Looking back, it was for the better: the hostel was way better located than the homes of my would-be-hosts, and was probably better equipped.
 

Still, I have not been all alone in Wroclaw. The universe has provided me with two escorts: Dorotka and Tomasz. Dorotka is a friend of a friend of my partner, Dafna. Dafna used to work with a woman who is originally from Wroclaw, a doctor. That woman has fallen in love with an Israeli man and started a family with him in Israel. The story of how they met is a good story in itself: he was skiing in the French Alps, he broke his leg, she was doing an internship in France, she was in the hospital staff that treated him, la-di-da. That is how I got to hear about the wonders of Wroclaw from Dafna as well. When I decided to go there, Dafna has gotten me Dorotka's details. Dorotka had picked me up from the central bus station on Saturday afternoon, walked the old city with me, showed me to the caffees and restaurants that she usually goes to with her friends, and on Sunday, she introduced me to some of her friends, and we visited the zoo and the Centenial Hall together. I learned from Dafna that Dorotka has just got divorced, and this was a weekend when her son is with his father. Hence, I could see why she would want company, and it somehow made me feel more comfortable about my relying on her hospitality. I used to be in that same situation after my divorce, and I still remember what it is like.
 

I got to know Tomasz via a Hebrew web portal, in a forum that focuses on Polish culture. He is nine years older than me, a Pole with a passion for Judaism, Hebrew and Israel. He had learned about us a lot, stayed in Israel for several periods and speaks Hebrew well. Currently, he is organizing and guiding visits to Poland. He wishes to show us Israelis that there is much more to Poland than the casual trail from Warsaw to Cracow, a trail that traverses tombs of righteous Rabbies, abandoned Shtetles, former Ghettos and death camps. I met him on Monday morning, and spent a fun day with him until it was time for me to leave for the airport to catch a flight back to Warsaw. With Tomasz, I got to visit some of the spots that I have not visited with Dorotka. Both of them told me interesting stories that I had not read in the tourism web sites, and had not heard on the guided tours that I took. I have not met Anna's brother eventually, and for that I am sorry.

 

Wroclaw is a city in south western Poland, within a five hours bus ride from Warsaw. It is located on the banks of the Odra River, aka Oder in German. The river originates in the eastern Sudetes mountains in north east of the Czech Republic, and it goes north east through south western Poland until it reaches the Baltic Sea. Along with the Neisse River that connects to it, it constitutes the post war border between Poland and Germany. The historical records of Wroclaw begin with a medieval town on an island, one of many at the center of the Odra, in a region called Lower Silesia. Wroclaw changed hands several times throughout its 1000 years of recorded history. Initially, it was a Slav town named Vratislava that was alternately ruled by Polish and Czech monarchs. Then, it became part of the Austrian empire of the Habsburg dynasty. For the 200 years that preceded world war two, it was a Prussian and then a German city named Breslau. At the end of WW2, the Soviets deported the entire German population of Breslau, and inhabited it with the Poles that they had deported from the Ukraine and the Baltic countries. They also renamed it to Wroclaw. The novel "The sand mountain" by Joanna Bator tells the story of a Polish family that was deported to the west, and settled in a house where a German family used to live. It is no wonder, that the urban landscapes of old Wroclaw reminded me more of eastern German towns than of Polish towns I've seen. There is something about them that is more severe, more restrained, more Protestant.
 

The island where Wroclaw started is called Ostrow Tumski. The city's cathedral is built on it. Bridges were built to the other islands, and the old city was built on one big island in the middle of the Odra. The main market square, aka Rynek, is in the heart of the old city. The Rynek is the main touristic attraction of Wroclaw that one finds on the front page of every tourism brochure and every tourism web site. In ancient maps, one sees two concentric water canals that defend the old city wall. But ever since then, the wall fell down, the inner canal was drained and became the ring shaped street around the old city, and all that was left from the outer canal is some segments of it, narrow bodies of green water that reminded me of the Yarkon river near Bavli quarter in Tel-Aviv. The canal that separated Ostrow Tumski from the northern bank of the Odra has also been dried, so it is no longer an island. But when one climbs up the tower of the cathedral, or up the tower of the Maria Magdalena church, one can still see the Odra flows in the remaining canals, and the bridges that connect the remaining islands. When I first wrote this post in Hebrew, I noticed that when I use the name Odra, I refer to the river as a female, grammatically, but when I use the German name Oder, I refer to it as a male.
 

Another focal point of touristic attractions is east of the old city, where one finds the Centennial Hall, the fountains, the zoo, the Japanese gardens. The Centennial Hall is an impressive building of modernist architecture, and there is an interesting historical story to it. It was built on the twilight of the second German Reich, on 1913, to celebrate one hundred years jubilee of the defeat that Napoleon's armies took from the armies of the rising power, Prussia. As the third German Reich came to power, the building was renamed to "the people's hall", and as the Soviets drove down the third Reich, they kept that name, only translated it to Polish: "Hala ludowa". It was only when the communist regime was replaced by today's democratic Poland that it was decided to return to the original name, in an attempt to forget both the Nazis and the Soviets. The Centennial Hall is currently used for conferences and all sorts of events. Next to it there is a lake, where there is a nice multimedia fountain show. When the weather is nice, one might sit in the cafeteria of the Centennial Hall and watch the fountains. Then, one might want to proceed to the Japanese gardens, or the Szczytnicki Park. The European and the north American travelers might not be all that interested in such botanical gardens and urban parks, but I am an Israeli, who is accustomed to dry landscapes colored yellow brown and red, that are only covered with some green foliage during the short winter, just leave me on a trail within these tall green trees, between these bluish green water canals, on this soil that smells of humidity, and I will need nothing more.
 

In both of these focal points one would get along fine by foot, but to go from one to the other, one would need to use some transport. Wikivoyage is praising the public transport network in Wroclaw, but I was not able to get around with it, I had to rely on my local friends for that. I could not find a good map of the bus and tram routes, I was not able to interact with the ticket vending machines that are installed on each and every vehicle, and the kiosk near my hostel that was supposed to sell tickets has just run out of them. On the other hand, go figure, perhaps if I was not able to rely on my friends, if I really had to learn how to use the public transport, I would eventually learn how to.

 

Three days are quite enough time to tour Wroclaw, even two days can be enough if one opts for a tight schedule. But if one can only allocate 24 hours to it, one would better take that day from midday to midday, rather than from morning to evening. One would want to spend the night somewhere near the market square of the old town, because at dusk, lights are lit on the bridges and on the church towers, they are reflected on the waters of the Odra, and it is really nice to go for a walk again and see the same streets that has been walked through at daylight, see how they look at night time. Of course, one also meets a different kind of people at night time.
 

One other nice thing to do, early in the morning this time, is to track the gnomes. The city of Wroclaw has placed little black metal statues of gnomes across the old town and on the main bridges, each with its unique posture and character. At the tourist information office, one can obtain a map of the old town with the spots where the gnomes were put, and an explanation of what it stands for. When I first read about it on the internet, it struck me at the tackiest kind of tourist trap, something that some copywriter hired by the city has invented in order to produce a buzz among parents who has nothing to do with their children on weekends. But it turned out that this was an authentic tradition. A rather new tradition, but still an authentic one.
 

And here is what Tomasz told me. In the latest years of communism in Poland, a protest movement called "the orange alternative" appeared in Wroclaw. Every night, protesters came along to paint graffiti and paste posters that ridiculed the regime, and when the police came in the morning to ask who done it, people would answer that the gnomes did that at night. Well, this does not sound as something that one says to a policeman, but it does sound as something one tells his friends that he told the police, after the policeman is leaving. On and on, the gnomes became part of the local urban folklore. The tailor placed a statue of a gnome sewing outside his shop. The shoemaker placed a statue of a miniature gnome fixing a shoe. Outside the local bank, a statue was placed of a gnome pulling money from the ATM.  The improvised private gnomes were replaced by standard industrial gnomes that were probably casted in the same foundry, but still, they are nice, funny and amusing. Early in the morning, when the old town is empty, except for the last few swingers who leave the clubs and the first few citizens who take the dog out, this is a fine time to stride in the old city, tracing the gnomes.

 

I would also like to recommend the free walking tours that are offered in Wroclaw. Just google "Wroclaw free walking tours", and you get a Facebook page that outlines details of walking tours in English and in German. The tours depart from the market square, they have various themes, and they are mostly led by students of the humanities. In Berlin, I got all lost when I tried to locate such a tour in Pariser Platz, that was packed with tourists and tour guides, but in Wroclaw it was easy to find the guide with the flag, with the few tourists that surrounded him, mostly young adults. I joined two tours: one that traced beer breweries in Wroclaw, and ended in a beer cellar that was located right below my hostel, and the other one that traced the Jewish heritage of Wroclaw.
 

Like in many European cities, not much was left from Wroclaw's Jewish heritage. Hence, you get to hear more than see in the tour. Meaning, the group gets to some point in the middle of some crowded street, and then the guide stops and tells a story. A good story, usually. The leaders of Wroclaw understood that there is a demand for Jewish heritage, and so they have been renovating several streets to the south west of the old town, and they have called it "The quarter of four denominations", meaning, the quarter when Catholics, Protestants, Pravoslavs and Jews live together in harmony. It reminded me a lot of Florentin quarter in Tel-Aviv, another area of small industry and trade that was gentrified and got a face-lift so that it can be marketed to tourists as "colorful". At the heart of the quarter of four denominations there is a small synagogue called "Under the Stork". It survived the Kristallnacht because it is located inside a dense residential area, so the Germans refrained from burning it. They probably would if the area was inhabited by Poles, but it was mostly inhabited by Germans, as was most of Wroclaw. Nowadays, it is used mostly for cultural events. The small Jewish community, 1000 people according to Wikipedia, only uses it for prayers on Jewish holidays. The synagogue was closed when I got to it on Saturday with Dorotka, and again on Sunday, when I got to it with the Free Walking Tour, but when I got there on the third time on Monday, with Tomasz, it was open, and we got in. I am happy to report that it is designed and decorated tastefully, something one cannot fail to notice when visiting a Jewish site, and that the entrance does not require a body search. Wroclaw's main synagogue has not survived the Kristallnacht. The leaders of Wroclaw have placed a grey marble stone where it used to be, and it tells its story. It is rather tasteful too.
 

Jews have lived in Wroclaw on and off since medieval times. They were expelled and then returned. They were massacred and then rose up from the ashes. There is evidence for Jewish life in Wroclaw that date back to the 12^th century, primarily in Christian records. I'd assume that Wroclaw is not mentioned in Jewish scripts because no outstanding Rabbi ever lived in it. In the 16^th century, all Jews were expelled from Wroclaw, which was already called Breslau at the time, and were allowed to return only during the Napoleonic wars. From that time on, the Jewish community grew rapidly, and became one of the biggest and richest communities in Germany. Breslau's great rabbinical seminar, which belonged to one of the liberal streams of Judaism, was well known throughout the world of liberal Judaism. Jews held leadership positions in the economical and academy life of the city and the state. On the general elections to the Reichstag in the early 30's, the Nazi party got an exceptionally high percentage of the votes in Wroclaw. Perhaps this is not a coincidence.

Before WW2, some 30,000 Jews lived in the city. Ironically, some 70,000 Jews lived in it after the war, more than twice. They were all Polish Jews, remnants of the Jewish communities that the Soviets annexed to the Ukraine. But that community vanished too. Recurring waves of Anti-Semitism in the Polish People's Republic urged Jews to emigrate from Wroclaw, and the Anti-Semitic campaign of 1968 emptied it completely. Nowadays, when discovering Jewish roots and exploring them became a fashionable thing in Poland, some Poles take on Jewish identity, while others show interest in the Jewish past in Poland. Both take on preserving the Jewish heritage of Wroclaw.

 

Tomasz asked me in what ways could Israeli travelers be persuaded to discover Wroclaw, and I was not able to come up with a simple answer. Wroclaw is indeed charming, but as I see it, one has to come up with a good story in order to make Israelis travel to a midsize European city, one that is not within one hour drive from the city where the flight from Israel lands, one where no outstanding Hassidic Rabbi is buried, one where there was no Ghetto during the holocaust, because the Germans have not set up Ghettos in Germans cities. For that last reason, it will not make sense to add Wroclaw as another station in what is known in Israel as "the visit to Poland", that includes Warsaw, Lublin and Krakow, and is already long a stressful as is.
 

That is, unless Israel's Ministry of Education could be talked into dragging the Israeli teenager from Krakow to Wroclaw in order to tell the story of the failure to revive Jewish life under the PPR, a story that might inflict the message that alright, the holocaust only happened once, and we will never let it happen again, but there are plenty of other ways to make life a hell for Jews in Europe. Even when things initially look hopeful and promising, as we currently hear from Israeli Jews who move to Berlin, a period of depression will eventually come, and we know at whom the fury of the Europeans will be directed.  But then again, of course Israel's Ministry of Education will not go for that story. I'd assume that the people of Wroclaw are too eager to tell it either, although they can blame the Russians for everything that happened at the times of the PPR.
 

Another thought might be to attach Wroclaw to Prague, which has already been marketed to Israelis as a romantic spot for weekend vacations. Many Israelis have been attaching Prague to Budapest, spending half of the week in one and another half in the other, and then flying home. Since Budapest is rapidly becoming a nasty place for Jews to be in, Wroclaw can be offered as an alternative. Or, it can be a destination for a day trip from Prague, on a bus that leaves the hotel in Prague at morning and returns there at night.

Just a thought.
 

 

How come I am touring Poland?

 

I had started touring Poland in 2008, and have done so five times by the time this blog has been created. I have recorded my experiences from Poland in a Hebrew blog that I maintain. Lately, it occurred to me, that my experiences might interest some people who do not speak Hebrew. Comparing my recordings to those of other Israeli Jews who document their visits to Poland on the Internet, I've come to believe that my perspective is quite unique.

 

People often ask me if my interest in Poland is due to my family origins in Poland. Well, my mother's family originates in the territory that used to be Poland and is now part of the Ukraine. So it is not like I'm visiting Poland to rediscover the genealogy. My mother has not spoken Polish with me, or with anyone I know. Yes, I did start my acquaintance with Poland with a pilgrimage to the death camps. But it has not stopped there. Here is what happened.

 

When the iron curtain fell, and the new regime in Poland allowed for organized groups from Israel to visit the death camps in Poland, I was not all that excited. In my opinion, one could have learned all there is to learn about the holocaust from books, films, museums. I had my fair share of those, and have not felt that I would benefit from such a visit. Frankly, I could not see how anyone would. In just a few years, those visits became an industry. Many excursions to Poland have been offered by both private tourist agencies and public associations of all sorts, governmental and non-governmental. Schools and youth movements started to send young persons on these excursions. Soon enough, stories about inappropriate behavior of young Israeli persons in Poland started to spread. I thought that the whole thing was very nationalistic, and I was pretty much appalled by it.

 

Then, my wife at the time, who was a high school teacher, was asked to join a group of her pupils who went on the visit to the camps. She happily agreed to do so. I stayed home with our son, who was three or four years at the time. After her return, some of her dearest pupils came over, sat in our living room and shared stories about the visit. I sat there with them, feeling drawn to their adolescent enthusiasm and at the same time thriving not to be perceived as creepy by the female pupils. They were all very nice. Nothing about them was nationalistic or inappropriate. One of them, a bright attractive young woman, agreed to let me read the notes that she had taken during the visit. I was very much moved by these notes.

 

Years went by, my marriage fell apart, and my son became a high school student. Now, he wanted to go on a tour to Poland, with a group that was organized by the youth movement he has been with. These tours had evolved over the years, and now included time spent in Warsaw and in Cracow as well. They were now being preceded by a series of meetings in which the members of the group were prepared to the tour, both in terms of information and in in terms of emotional work. Again, I expressed my ideological reservations. Again, they were overlooked. He went on the tour. Upon his return, he told me stories about what he and his friends have been through, that I found quite amazing. I felt drawn to his adolescent enthusiasm, and this time, I did not need to worry about being perceived as creepy. I decided that I wish to go and find out myself what this was all about. And, I had my own group ready for that. And that is another story.

 

 

 

Two years after my divorce, I joined the Re-evaluation Co-counseling (RC) community. What had started as a way to break away from my solitude, has quickly become a major part of my life, right after family and work. It is a community that is based on the idea that people can help each other heal from emotional hurts that happened early in their lives. I became a devoted member, and then a teacher. The work I did was valuable in many areas, including keeping close relationships with my sons, and building a new relationship with Dafna, my current partner.

 

In the early 2000's, an international leader in the RC community initiated a by-yearly workshop in Poland, which was meant to deal with emotional hurts that seemed to originate from World War Two. At some point, they added an optional organized visit to the death camps right before the workshop, so as to allow the attendants to feel the emotional hurts right before they proceed to work on healing from them.

 

An elder Israeli RC teacher, to whom I was close at the time, decided that my personal growth would benefit greatly from my attending that workshop. I would not hear of it. She insisted. We have been fighting over this for a while. I still have filed somewhere that letter that I wrote to her, with some 8 reasons why I thought I should not go. Reason number 1 was my belief that most of the attendants will be "activists" with anti-Israeli attitudes, and that I would have to endure their attacks. Then, that dear teacher went through a domestic accident and had to put her RC leadership aside.

 

So, when I heard my son's stories and decided that I wanted to be where he was, opting for that RC workshop and the visit that precedes it was an obvious move. As for the anti-Israeli attacks, well, I decided that I could endure the pain for the promised gain. On May 2008, I flew to Cracow with a bunch of Israeli RCers, went on the visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau with a larger group of RCers from several countries, and then moved on with them to the workshop near Warsaw.

 

 

The visit was good, I actually learned some things that I have not known, and experienced more than I expected to. But the workshop afterwards was the real treat. We were 144 people from some 15 countries or so, and some amazing emotional healing work has been done. I decided that I will return for this workshop each time it is be offered. There actually were some anti-Israeli sentiments targeted at me. Three people offered them on three occasions. All three were diaspora Jewish "activists". Three out of 144 is not a lot, and not more than I could handle.

 

One of the Israeli RCers attended just the workshop, without attending the visit to the death camps. She told us that she had gotten to Warsaw on the previous day, after touring central Europe for several days. She said that she had stayed in the OkiDoky hostel in the center of Warsaw, which she thought was really cool. When 2010's workshop was declared, I decided I'd do what she had done. I flew to Warsaw, spent a day and a half walking in it, stayed in the OkiDoky hostel, which was indeed quite cool, and fell deeply in love with Warsaw and with Poland. I will write about this here.

 

Because of the increasing demand, the workshop became a yearly workshop. Then, there began to be two workshops per year. I've been to the workshop in each of the years to follow. One other RCer told me about the Couch Surfing, and I joined it. Hence, my next three travels to the workshop in Poland were accompanied by CS experiences in Warsaw, Cracow, Lublin and Torun. I will write about them too. Or rather, translate what I have already written in my native tongue. Yeah, English is not my native tongue, so please excuse any language mistakes I might have made. After all, the main point is to communicate a story, not to impress you with my language skills.