BERNARD ZISSMANwho
AS SOMEONE had lived through the Second World War as a child, been rushed into the air raid shelter every night and evacuated from the bombing in my home of Birmingham, I asked myself why I knew so little in 1945 of the horrors that had struck the Jews of Europe. We had seen reports in the cinema and images in the newspapers of the liberation of the camps, scenes of skeletal human beings and the discovery of the mass graves. And then nothing! No further pictures, very few, if any, reports, no debate, no discussion. Through my teens I cannot recall any reporting of a tragedy which had claimed six million Jewish lives and millions of other lives, until the Nuremberg trials.
Perhaps the pictures were deemed too horrific for us to see. We would be too shocked and some might not even believe what had happened. Or maybe with the onset of the Cold War, no one wanted to upset West Germany a key ally.
And then there were the survivors themselves. Too scarred to even speak, many for 50 years, of their own terrifying experiences and unbelievable loss. Thank God they have found the courage to share with us what happened, and the Jewish people have been given the opportunity and responsibility to continue to uphold the traditions and way of life for which many survivors’ parents, brothers and sisters, children and extended family all died.
I have spent every minute during my visit to Poland and since thinking of what I feel or indeed should feel. I felt as if I intruded into the deeply personal loss of each survivor, into so much private grief. I thought of my own grandparents and great-grandparents who fled Poland and Russia in time and protected me and my children and grandchildren from such a horror.
I simply cannot get my mind around the numbers, I cannot imagine the scale of killing and utterly inhuman tragedy, all perpetrated by a nation of such intelligence and cultural history. This was not a people of uncivilised tribal savages but a nation who were proud to “get it right” and yet surpassed every other country in their organised crime and tyranny.
We stood in the centre of Birkenau and listened in respectful silence to our “own” survivor, Ivor Perl. He recounted his experience by the side of a wagon similar to one in which he travelled as a 12-year-old boy, watching an SS guard nod his head or click his fingers, deciding who would live and who would die. We stood in the billet in which he and his brother had lived, and as we walked through the gas chambers which The March of the Living had claimed the lives of his loved ones, we could feel his emotion and his struggle to overcome the terrible memory and desperation of what had occurred in this hell on earth. This experience will live with me for as long as I am allowed to live
We were privileged to have Clive Lawton as our educator and he explained in graphic detail that we should not confuse the death camps, of which there were only six, with the concentration or labour camps; the former designed by the Nazis primarily to exterminate Jews and others and the latter where those who died did so from hunger, disease, over-work and being shot for being too slow, too old, too young or too infirm.
We visited Madjanek and Belzec where we stood, many in tears and recited the memorial prayer El Malei Rachamim and the mourners’ kaddish remembering family of those in our group. These sites were places of personal quietude, little natural habitation, no shrill of birds, just a silence, a place of unbelievable death, of the memorials so erected and maintained with such care by Polish people who themselves had been decimated with huge loss of life, murdered by the cruel Nazi machine. To witness the sight of mass graves of children, “our” children, torn from the grasping hands of utterly distraught parents, some shot and thrown into a heaped grave, some still alive. cannot be absorbed by the human mind. I felt totally helpless and even a sense of shame that I had known so little.
Our visit ended on a note of hope. We stood by the memorial at Madjanek and joined young Israelis as we sang together the Hatikvah, the anthem of hope, stood as one people, the young, the old, those who had survived, those who had been spared the horror, those who were deeply religious, and those who were not.
And that hope was the core of the March of the Living, 11,000 marchers from the four quarters of the world in the midst of a sea of Israeli flags, many in silence, some with strong voices.
Sir Bernard Zissman served as President of the Birmingham Hebrew Congregation, remains President of the Birmingham and West Midlands Representative Council and a former Lord Mayor of Birmingham.