It’s difficult to envision something that is not there. Perhaps there is a plaque, or a wall, or maybe a dilapidated building that stands to represent what once was. You squint, use your imagination, and try to conjure what might have been. But it’s challenging.
Walking around Warsaw, Poland, a modern city rebuilt after the ravages of war, I tried to visualize what I was told once held a vibrant Jewish community, the largest urban concentration of Jews in Europe. But all of my imagination and education couldn’t quite illustrate the history I could not see.
Until I entered the cemetery.
Rows upon rows, stretching over acres, canopied by endless trees, lie headstones – some intact, some in shambles. Standing among the stones – each representing a beloved Jewish person who was once part of this thriving community – it finally sunk in. Oh, this community was huge. This is what was lost.
The precious hours I spent exploring the Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw remain one of the most profoundly moving and educational moments of my life. Putting such a moment into words proves difficult.
In April, I traveled to Poland alongside over three dozen other young Minnesota Jewish leaders as part of Cohort XI of the Harry Kay Leadership Institute. It was a culmination of over a year and a half of meetings to hone our leadership skills, learning about and fostering connections in our local Jewish ecosystem. Nearly all of the cohort traveled to spend a week in Poland; portions of the group later went on to spend a second week in Israel. The trip mostly centered around Holocaust history, as we visited Auschwitz and Birkenau and participated in the March of the Living for Yom HaShoah.
The experience of The March of the Living is one that I will cherish forever, and encourage every single Jewish person to participate in at some point in their lives. It was deeply moving and irrevocably shifted my Jewish identity.
Yet when I look back on my time in Poland, my most treasured memory is not in the big, demonstrative March, but rather lies in the quiet, contemplative few hours I spent in the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw.
The cemetery wasn’t on our official jam-packed itinerary. In fact, in carving out time to explore this cemetery I had always wanted to visit, I had to forgo a trip to Treblinka. But as I weighed my decision on where to visit that day, my husband stared at me with a forthright face, saying, “Babe, you know where you want to go.” (I have indeed dragged this man to cemeteries from Salem, Massachusetts to Edinburgh, Scotland. He knows me well.)
Sometimes described as the Okopowa Jewish Cemetery due to its location of Okopowa Street, the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw is immense, sprawling across 83 acres just northwest of the city center. Its founding in 1806 represented a “new” cemetery for Warsaw Jews, having been established after another cemetery was reaching capacity.
Unlike more well known Jewish spaces, like the Warsaw ghetto which is memorialized only in fragments of walls and plaques, the cemetery appears far more tangible. With over 200,000 graves, the cemetery is a visible testament to the thriving Jewish community that resided in Warsaw pre-World War II. During the war, Poland lost a larger number of Jews than any other country, nearly 3 million, decimating the Polish Jewish population by 90%.
This loss is keenly felt in the cemetery itself. Without an organized Jewish community due to such immense loss in the Holocaust, the cemetery has spent decades in disrepair. Some stones that were stolen by Nazis to pave the roads were recovered in pieces, propped up or lying haphazardly near the entrance. Other stones faded or broke from neglect, vandalism, or age. Most visibly: before the war there were no trees in the cemetery, now there are an estimated 8,000.
Nature took over what humans could not maintain.
Walking through the cemetery feels other-worldly. It’s nearly silent, the trees softly swishing in the breeze. Nature heals, but also damages. Moss, ivy, leaves, roots, all disturbing the space but adding a palpable atmosphere. Some headstones stand erect, their Hebrew inscriptions revealing details of who is buried there. Others lie in disarray, the information lost to time. And yet here I can finally envision, sprawled across acres, what the Warsaw Jewish community was, and what was lost when nine out of ten died in the Holocaust.
In Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present, she asks: “What was the point of caring so much about how people died, if once cared so little about how they lived?” The only way we can genuinely, respectfully care about those who died in the Holocaust is if we value that they lived in the first place.
The fact that I am finding this life in a cemetery is not as contrary as it may seem.
Despite some people’s views that cemeteries are morose or all about death, I find cemeteries are absolutely bursting with life and love. To read familiar common Jewish names, explore the diversity of styles of headstones, decipher common symbols found on Jewish headstones – all of it is a testament to life.
In this person was an entire world. They are memorialized here because they lived, and were loved. Cemeteries exist because life occurred.
As the afternoon stretched on, we walked row upon row of graves for over an hour, murmuring small commentaries. Here’s one with Kohen hands. Look, this is a Tenenbaum. The birds sang above us, the leaves crunched below us. As the cemetery approached closing hours and we had to leave, I felt I could have spent eight more hours wandering and reflecting, and vowed to return someday.
Visiting the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw, this place of eternal rest, was transformative in shifting my mindset on remembrance. This space, this bet chayyim, was where I finally found a space teeming with life.
