Seventy years is a flash — also, an eternity. Look back at 1846. Surely, those alive then thought it was a long time since America’s Declaration of Independence, 70 years earlier. Not to mention, the rumblings of a possible Civil War were on the horizon. Since the Declaration, history had moved on.
The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was long ago, and history has moved on. The number of survivors of that uprising, never large to begin with, who were present last week in Warsaw to mark the 70th anniversary, was precisely two. There is one other living survivor.
True enough, the ceremony was attended by the Polish president and prime minister, and by Israel’s minister of education. Church bells rang. Sirens sounded.
One of the survivors, Simcha Rotem, said, “People go, but the memory remains.” Does it? For the survivors, yes; for those who knew the survivors, to an extent; but for anyone else?
A rabbi and representatives of the Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Churches held a joint prayer. Warsaw’s main synagogue hosted educational events about the uprising. A group laid flowers on the grave of the uprising’s last commander to die, Marek Edelman, who passed in 2009 in his early 90s. Yellow daffodils were the flower of choice.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews were deported from Warsaw to Treblinka, there to be gassed to death. Three innocent people are killed in Boston, and America is horrified, as, of course, it should be. Seventy years ago, hundreds of thousands of innocent people were killed from a single city. The world, including the US Senate, and including President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, said nothing. The most heinous crime in history fades. Now Poles walk around the city wearing the daffodils.
“It really felt as if the city was commemorating something from Polish history, not only Jewish history, and it made me aware that Poles realize the shared heritage,” said the executive director of the JCC of Cracow, Poland. His words, to be sure, would be news to the victims, since countless Poles, at best, did nothing to shelter Jews hunted down by Nazis, and countless other Poles joined enthusiastically in the hunt.
Such, then are the revisions when a long time passes, and much history has come and gone. The Civil War generation did not remember, or at least remember accurately, the generation of the Declaration of Independence. Seventy years after the Holocaust, facts get rearranged.
Pots and vases of daffodils decorated the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, reports JTA; and there thousands of visitors flocked to see the striking new building, attend concerts and films, and buy souvenirs in the gift shop.
Copyright © 2013 by the Intermountain Jewish News
