On Sunday, activists and supporters attended an event called “The Bialystoker Home: Past, Present, Future,” designed to showcase the building’s cultural significance and strengthen the arguments for landmark status. The Lo-Down reported yesterday:

The home, shuttered months ago, was until recently being marketed online as a development site. That listing has now vanished, amid rumors that the secretive Bialystoker board was close to signing a deal to sell the building. They have apparently signaled that the prospective buyer would surely walk away from the negotiating table if the the building is designated as an historic landmark. This afternoon there are new indications that a contract could be inked as soon as this week.

According to the same article, State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has stayed out of the issue:

“Among the Speaker’s most ardent supporters on the Lower East Side, members of Grand Street’s Jewish community, there has been little enthusiasm for saving the Bialystoker, in spite of the building’s significance as a Jewish landmark.”

Preservation Groups Make Their Case For Saving the Bialystoker Home [The Lo-Down]
Sale of Bialystoker Home Could Be Imminent; Activists Hope For Political Intervention [The Lo-Down]
Closing a Nursing Home, and a Chapter of New York History [NYT]

The doctors said there were several options this time. We could do nothing and my father would die in a few weeks. He could undergo chemotherapy, and if it worked it would give him another few months. They could give him radiation treatment, but the chances were that that would hurt more than it would help. Or they could operate and remove his tongue and his larynx. It was a complicated surgery that would take more than 10 hours, and, considering my father’s advanced age, the doctors didn’t think it was a viable option. But my dad liked the idea. “At my age, I don’t need a tongue anymore, just eyes in my head and a heart that beats,” he told the young oncologist. “The worst that can happen is that instead of telling you how pretty you are, I’ll write it down.”

The doctor blushed. “It’s not just the speech, it’s the trauma of the operation,” she said. “It’s the suffering and the rehabilitation if you survive it. We’re talking here about an enormous blow to your quality of life.”

“I love life,” my dad gave her his obstinate smile. “If the quality is good, then great. If not, then not. I’m not picky.”

In the taxi on our way back from the hospital my dad held my hand as if I were 5 years old again and we were about to cross a busy street. He was talking excitedly about the various treatment options, like an entrepreneur discussing new business opportunities. My dad is a businessman. Not a tycoon in a three-piece suit, just a regular guy who likes to buy and sell, and, if he can’t buy or sell, he’s ready to lease or rent. For him business is a way to meet people, to communicate, to get a little action going. Just let him buy a pack of cigarettes at some kiosk, and within 10 minutes he’s talking to the guy behind the counter about a possible partnership. “We’re really in an ideal situation here,” he said, totally seriously, as he stroked my hand. “I love making decisions when things are at rock bottom. And the situation is such dreck now that I can only come out ahead: With the chemo, I’ll die in no time at all; with the radiation, I’ll get gangrene of the jaw; and everyone’s sure I won’t survive the operation because I’m 84. You know how many plots of land I bought like that? When the owner doesn’t want to sell, and I don’t have a penny in my pocket?”

“I know,” I said. And I really do.

When I was 7, we moved. Our old apartment had been on the same street, and we’d all loved it, but my dad insisted that we move to a larger place. During World War II, my dad, his parents, and some other people hid in a hole in the ground in a Polish town for almost 600 days. The hole was so small that they couldn’t stand or lie down in it, only sit. When the Russians liberated the area, they had to carry my father and my grandparents out, because they couldn’t move on their own. Their muscles had atrophied. That time he spent in the hole had made him sensitive about privacy. The fact that my brother, sister, and I were growing up in the same room drove him crazy. He wanted us to move to an apartment where we would all have our own rooms. We kids actually liked sharing a bedroom, but when my dad makes up his mind, there’s no changing it.

One Saturday a few weeks before we were supposed to leave our old apartment, which he’d already sold, my dad took us to see our new place. We all showered and put on our nicest clothes, even though we knew we weren’t going to see anyone there. But still, it isn’t every day that you move to a new apartment.

Though the building was finished, no one lived in it yet. After dad made sure we were all in the elevator, he pressed the button for the fifth floor. That building was one of the only ones in the neighborhood that had an elevator, and the short ride itself thrilled us. Dad opened the reinforced steel door to the new apartment and began to show us the rooms. First the kids’ rooms, then the master bedroom, and finally the living room and the huge balcony. The view was amazing and all of us, especially my dad, were enchanted by the magical palace that would be our new home.

“Have you ever seen such a view?” he hugged my mom and pointed to the green hill visible from the living room window.

“No,” my mom replied unenthusiastically.

“Then why the sour look?” my dad asked.

“Because there’s no floor,” my mom whispered and looked down at the dirt and exposed metal pipes under our feet. Only then did I look down and see, along with my brother and sister, what my mother saw. I mean, we’d all seen earlier that there was no floor, but somehow, with all my dad’s excitement and enthusiasm, we hadn’t paid much attention to that fact. My dad looked down now too.

“Sorry,” he said. “There was no money left.”

“After we move, I’ll have to wash the floor,” my mom said in her most ordinary voice. “I know how to wash tiles, not sand.”

“You’re right,” my dad said and tried to hug her.

“The fact that I’m right won’t help me clean the house,” she said.

“OK, OK,” my dad said. “If you stop talking about it and give me a minute’s quiet, I’ll think of something. You know that, right?” My mother nodded unconvincingly. The elevator ride down was less happy.

When we moved into the new apartment a few weeks later, the floors were completely covered in ceramic tiles, a different color in each room. In the socialist Israel of the early 1970s, there was only one kind of tile—the color of sesame—and the colored floors in our apartment—reds, blacks, and browns—was different from anything we’d ever seen.

“You see?” my dad kissed my mother on the forehead proudly. “I told you I’d think of something.”

Only a month later did we discover exactly what he’d thought of. I was alone at home taking a shower that day when a gray-haired man wearing a white button-down shirt came into the bathroom with a young couple. “These are our Volcano Red tiles. Direct from Italy,” he said, pointing to the floor. The woman was the first to notice me, naked and soaped up, staring at them. The three of them quickly apologized and left the bathroom.

That evening at dinner, when I told everyone what had happened, my dad revealed his secret. Since he hadn’t had the money to pay for floor tiles, he’d made a deal with the ceramics company: They would give us the tiles for free, and my dad would let them use our place as a model apartment.

The taxi had already reached my parents’ building, and when we got out, my dad was still holding my hand. “This is exactly how I like to make decisions, when there’s nothing to lose and everything to gain,” he repeated. When we opened the apartment door, we were greeted by a pleasant, familiar smell, hundreds of colored floor tiles, and a single powerful hope. Who knows? Maybe this time, too, life and my father will surprise us with another unexpected deal.

Translated by Sondra Silverston

The fact is I’ve been haunted for years by a line from Hotel Terminus, Max Ophul’s movie about Klaus Barbie, the infamous “Butcher of Lyon,” that went like this: “Only Jews and old Nazis are interested in Jews and old Nazis.” If this is true—and in large part I believe it is—then the audience for Holocaust films is even smaller than the audience for Ukranian imports, one that is yoked together by questionable motives. The pleasure principle, that is, is generally so absent from Holocaust cinema that the only impulse to see a new film is one of masochistic duty to the victims or sadistic reminiscence on the part of perpetrators—and there we are, bound together once again with our tormentors.

I was struck recently by these thoughts when I went to see a screening of Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness, which has been nominated as the Polish entry for Best Foreign Film and is scheduled to open in wide release in January. More than two decades after making the much-acclaimed Europa, Europa, and after moving on to such disparate work as The Secret Garden, Washington Square, and the HBO production of Shot in the Heart (based on Mikel Gilmore’s memoir), Holland has returned to the theme of the Holocaust. In her director’s statement, Holland, whose father’s family died at the hand of the Nazis and who had an aunt who survived by being smuggled out of the ghetto in her sister’s coffin, observes in the press notes: “One may ask if everything has now been said on this subject. But in my opinion the main mystery hasn’t yet been resolved, or even fully explored. How was this crime (echoes of which continue in different places in the world from Rwanda to Bosnia) possible? Where was Man during this crisis? Where was God? Are these events and actions the exception in human history or do they reveal an inner, dark truth about our nature?”

The screening took place on a Wednesday night at the comfy Sony screening room at 550 Madison Avenue in New York, where the seats are widely spaced the better for you to stretch out your legs and pretend that you’re Irving Thalberg, chomping on a cigar, checking out the dailies. (Sony Pictures Classics—but who else?—has picked the movie up for American distribution, with limited release in New York and Los Angeles starting Dec. 9.) I could find no one among my friends who wanted to see the movie with me, although I imagine I would have had no such trouble with almost any other offering. No one explicitly said, “Not another Holocaust movie,” but they might as well have. There was a clutch of people waiting for the publicist to arrive when I got to Sony, and by the time we entered there were about 20 of us. I looked around anxiously: No old Nazis as far as I could make out, but no one appeared to be brimming over with anticipation either.

In Darkness is is based on a true story of a Righteous Christian, a sewer worker and petty thief by the name of Leopold Socha, who over a period of 14 months helps hide a small group of Jews, including men, women, and children, in the sewers beneath the Nazi-occupied city of Lvov, Poland. The film’s power derives in part from Robert Wieckiewicz’s brilliant, unsentimentalized performance as Socha, whose empathy is complexly formed and tenuously maintained until the very last moment when it overrides his conflicts, and in part from Holland’s underplayed directing, which includes deft contextual touches that bring the larger brutality taking place outside the netherworld of the sewers acutely home.

Agnieszka Holland. (Photo by Krzysztof Opaliński, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

The Monday after the screening I arranged to meet with Holland at the bar of the Regency Hotel, at 4 in the afternoon. The place was thronged with people who looked pleased with themselves in that way that successful people often do; at the table next to mine I spotted the literary agent Ed Victor, holding forth to an audience of one. Holland, who was born in 1948 in Warsaw, wore glasses, had a short haircut, and was simply dressed. She had been interviewed by Forward columnist Masha Leon right before me and looked a bit weary of the whole process, although she put on a welcoming smile.

Having read in the press notes that Holland had turned down the movie twice before the writer and co-producers, who had initially insisted that the film be in English, agreed to let her shoot it in the original languages (Polish, German, Yiddish, and others), I asked her what drew her so strongly to the story. “What interested me is that the Pole is not so good,” she said in heavily accented but excellent English. “This tension is my aim as a storyteller. You don’t know what he’ll do; he is walking on the wire. It’s not a struggle between good and bad—he isn’t conscious enough for that. This guy doesn’t know what he’ll do next. Everything is in the present. I tried to be behavioristic, not psychological. There is no moralistic issue or sentimental building up.” Holland went on to say that another impetus for her making the film at this moment was her irritation with many of the Holocaust movies that have emerged. “I’ve seen an incredible amount of bad Holocaust movies. Kitschy ones. Life Is Beautiful made me angry. It said, ‘If you really love your child you will save him.’ To try and take a moral lesson from the Holocaust is wrong.”

We moved on to talk of other things. Holland, who has directed episodes of television series like David Simon’s The Wire and Treme, is set to direct the premiere episode of the second season of the much-acclaimed detective drama series The Killing. She told me she divided her time between Los Angeles, France, and Poland. Inevitably, though, we returned to In Darkness and the subject of the Holocaust. Holland wanted the film to be seen by “as many people as possible” although she admitted it was not as “entertaining” as Europa, Europa. “Not everyone can go to such a painful place,” she said. She noted that the last 10 years had brought “unpleasant facts about Polish history post-Holocaust” to light that had shattered the Poles’ image of themselves as innocent victims of the Germans and “allowed Poles to grow up.” She thought Americans, on the other hand, had adopted the Holocaust as part of their history “because of movies and TV” but that they “haven’t done their homework yet, haven’t accepted their own guilt for doing nothing.” Holland attributed the growing power of anti-Semitism in Europe to Israeli politics, which “angers leftist intellectuals” and “allows them to feel that the burden of guilt can be thrown away.” Holland was also convinced that if ever there were a lesson to be learned from the Holocaust, its moment has all but passed: “We are at the point where people forgot it.”

Actually, the feelings might be even more negative. As Holland spoke, I thought back to the aftermath of the screening I had attended at Sony. On my way down in the elevator a Jewish literary agent I knew said to her husband and the couple with her: “Now, that was relentless.” I turned to her and asked her what other people—those who had nothing at stake—were going to think if this was her response. I felt like a schoolteacher, especially since no one had solicited my opinion, but I nevertheless added that I had found the film compelling and moving. The two couples looked dutifully abashed, but I had the feeling they couldn’t wait to get out of the elevator and leave me and my reprimanding tone behind them.

That night, I kept thinking of the last scene in the film, when the Jews make it out of the sewers, looking dazed in the light of the day as around them Polish passersby laugh uneasily to see these strange, forlorn apparitions suddenly appear in the middle of their street. “These are my Jews,” Socha says delightedly. “My Jews,” finally taking credit for his own unsung acts of heroism. There are no brass bands, no memorials, just an extraordinary Polish man who could not bring himself to see Jews as repugnantly Other. It is a deeply stirring moment that closes the human circle of warmth—bringing into focus the surprising sense of kinship that motivated otherwise ordinary people such as Socha—but I found myself wondering how many people will ever get to see it, or be receptive to it after two and a half hours spent in a dimly lit sewer.

For this is the hard (or maybe too-easy) truth: At some point, there will be no more old Nazis, and no more Holocaust films. Until then, I suggest that, come January, you elect to spend some time with Leopold Socha and his Jews, down in the darkness, with the rats, the stench, and the internecine bickering. At the end of the tunnel is a dazzling burst of daylight that is worth the wait.

Veterans Day provides a compelling opportunity to look back at Andrea Crawford’s 2007 essay written upon the publication of an English translation of Holy Week, Jerzy Andrzejewski’s 1945 account of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Holy Week was a novel, an outsider account in the most literal way possible—it was written after Andrzejewski, a Pole, witnessed the uprising from his apartment—and, unsurprisingly, it was not particularly well-received in Poland. The novel attacks anti-Semitism and chastises the complacency of well-meaning but inactive Poles, depicted in the protagonist Jan’s struggle over whether to hide a female Jewish friend fleeing the ghetto.

Though Andrzejewski, born in Warsaw in 1909, gained widespread attention for publishing the first account of the uprising, the book, unavoidably raw and difficult to digest, failed to garner critical attention and succeeded to make nearly everyone—Catholics, Jews, other writers—uncomfortable and then angry. “It is possible, however, that it will find a new generation of readers who value the immediacy of its author’s honest eyewitness account,” Crawford wrote of the English translation. “Perhaps such readers will not dismiss the book as a confirmation of stereotypes, but find in Andrzejewski’s story a new understanding of one Pole, who witnessed the ghetto burning, watched friends die, and immediately put into print—for the first time in Polish literature, Swan claims—not only his countrymen’s anti-Semitism in violent form but also a tragic tale about the weakness of human nature.”

Read Wartime Truths, by Andrea Crawford

My first encounter with the real Poland took place a decade ago when I was invited to the Warsaw Book Fair. I remember feeling surprise when I walked out of the airport, a reaction I couldn’t account for at the moment. Later, I realized that I had been surprised that the Warsaw spread before me was alive in Technicolor, that the roads were full of cheap Japanese cars, not horse-drawn carriages, and yes, also that most of the people I saw were utterly clean-shaven.

Over the past decade, I traveled to Poland almost every year. I kept getting invitations to visit and, although I had generally been cutting down on flying, I found it hard to refuse the Poles. Although most of my family had perished under horrendous circumstances there, Poland was also the place where they had lived and thrived for generations, and my attraction to that land and its people was almost mystic. I went looking for the house my mother was born in and found a bank there. I went to another house where she had spent a year of her life and found that it was now a grassy field. Strangely enough, I didn’t feel frustrated or sad, and even took pictures of both sites. True, I would rather have found a house instead of a bank or a field. But a bank, I thought, was better than nothing.

During my last visit to Poland a few weeks ago, for a book festival in another part of the country, a charming photographer named Elzbieta Lempp asked if she could take my picture. I agreed happily. She photographed me in a café where I was waiting for my reading to take place, and when I returned to Israel, I found that she had emailed me a copy of the picture. It was a black-and-white shot of me talking to a tall, mustached man. Behind us, out of focus, was an old building. Everything in the photograph seemed to be taken not from reality, but from my childhood imaginings of Poland. Even the expression on my face looked Polish and frighteningly serious. I stared at the image. If I could have unfrozen my photographed self from his pose, he could have walked right out of the frame and actually found the house where my mother was born. If he were brave enough, he might even have knocked on the door. And who knows who would have opened it for him: the grandmother or grandfather I never knew, maybe even a smiling little girl who had no idea what the cruel future had in store for her. I stared at the picture for quite a while, until my 5-year-old son came into the room and saw me sitting there, eyes glued to the computer screen. “How come that picture has no colors?” he asked. “It’s magic,” I smiled and ruffled his hair.

Translated by Sondra Silverston

• Republican opposition to a motion that would prevent a London-based company with ties to Iran from having a stake in an American mining company raises questions about the Republican position on sanctions against Iran. [Washington Jewish Week]

• Poland has reopened investigations, abandoned while the country was under Communist rule, into crimes committed at Auschwitz during World War II. [AP]

• An investigation by the pro-choice organization NARAL into “crisis pregnancy centers”—which are not medical facilities—reveals, among other things, that a Jewish woman who visited five different centers was encouraged by volunteers at each center to convert to Christianity. [Think Progress]

• Oprah visited Crown Heights, Borough Park, and Brooklyn Heights for her new show. Her visit to Brooklyn Heights included a tour of a mikvah. [Chabad]

• Photos (with recipes!) of the most intricate bite-size reproductions of Jewish deli food you’ve ever seen, ever. Borscht bite, anyone? [The Polymath Chronicles]

But as it turns out, 36 hours is simply not enough time to spend in Krakow if you’re looking to get an in-depth, nuanced look at this charming city in a country with a complicated Jewish past. The kid sister to storied tourist sites like Prague, Budapest, and Berlin–all mentioned in the very first paragraph of the Times piece–Krakow comes with its own baggage and a unique Jewish legacy that institutions like the Krakow JCC, Galicia Jewish Museum, and the annual Jewish Culture Festival are working to not only preserve but also renew. It takes time to see the many layers of Jewish life, both past and present, that linger in the streets of Kazimierz, the former Jewish quarter that has since been revived as a tourist destination and even more recently has developed its own newfangled form of Jewish identity.

While according to the Times, which cited the city’s many art museums and hip hangouts, “All this means that Krakow may soon be the cool, post-Communist enclave with which Europe’s next crop of emerging cities is compared,” for this daily Jewish life publication there is more at stake. Namely, how to enjoy a city once home to so many Jews that, demographically speaking, can never be recreated. I still am not entirely able to reconcile this reality. But that’s the beauty of Krakow, a city that challenges its Jewish visitors to reconsider broad-sweeping notions of Poland both in its aesthetic appeal and its commitment to addressing its Jewish past and embracing a future in which Jewish life remains alive. You just have to look for it.

36 Hours in Krakow, Poland [NYT]

Produced by David McGuire and Ari Daniel Shapiro. Photography by Magda Braniewska.

“We try to do the least amount of conservation on an object,” Bisaga, 31, says in Polish, describing how she approaches her daily work. “They are damaged, and their state is telling of their history.”

Bisaga, who lives in Oswiecim, Poland, is one of 11 conservators who work meticulously to preserve the past at the former concentration camp established by the Nazis in occupied Poland during World War II. Bisaga has been working at Auschwitz since 2003.

At the museum, and particularly in this conservation department, which handles fragile items like prisoners’ artwork and thousands of documents, shoes, and suitcases, preservation is seen as an ethical as well as a practical issue. But these conservators must also wrestle with questions about the proper role of restoration. “People who come here don’t want to see a replica of how something might have once looked,” says Ewa Cyrulik, another conservator. “They are looking for the original condition, as if the objects exist as guardians of history.”

Conservation work at Auschwitz is unique; while some basic rules of conservation do apply, others defiantly do not. And threading that needle is an ethical conundrum the conservators face daily. “It’s an experiment in doing something unbelievable, but we have to guide ourselves this way, and work in an orthodox way,” Cyrulik says. “Then we have a chance that these objects will affect the people who come here, that they’ll see these original, historical objects.”

A new conservation department, with new workshops, opened at Auschwitz in 2005. Its budget last year was 11.3 million euros, around $15 million. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation is seeking to raise an additional 120 million euros in a two-year campaign ending this year for an endowment to fund future preservation work. So far about 85 million euros, or $122.5 million, has been committed, according to Pawel Sawicki, a spokesman for the museum and a Polish radio journalist, including a subsidy from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and a grant from the European Infrastructure and Environment Operating Program.

When Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet army in January 1945, it covered 40 square kilometers, with three camps, sub camps, and an additional area that was supervised by SS administration. “There were some voices [saying] that it should be completely dismantled because this memory is so difficult,” says Sawicki. But a group of former prisoners began talks with the local government to keep the former concentration camp intact as a memorial. The Polish government began initiatives to preserve the site, giving the Ministry of Culture and Art the authority to preserve parts of it. The ministry named former prisoner Tadeusz Wasowicz as the head of the Protection Board, and in 1946 work began on creating a museum.

Since then, the fragile future of artifacts in the museum’s possession has been constantly discussed. Among the artifacts are 110,000 prisoners’ shoes, 3,800 suitcases, 6,000 works of art, and, often most harrowing for visitors, the pile of hair collected from the heads of 30,000 murdered women.

Beyond the artifacts, one of the impending projects is the preservation of 45 brick barracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau’s former women’s camp. Environmental conditions are viewed as the biggest barrier to preservation. “This is very difficult because protecting a standing building is relatively easier than protecting a ruin from all-natural conditions, atmosphere, rain, and cold, which is the biggest threat here,” Sawicki says.

The foundations themselves are also fragile. “The structures in Birkenau were built by prisoners and were not built to last 70 years,” he says. “They were built from weak materials; these are weak constructions. And the fact that they are still standing today is a miracle, and this is more and more difficult to upkeep them and preserve them.”

For all the rigorous ethical standards that guide their everyday work, conservators believe they have a bigger mission than daily preservation. “We need to conserve objects that speak of the many histories of this place,” says Cyrulik. “We maintain that history for the future. Maybe in some way, with our work, this will protect someone, and in the future, these things won’t happen again.”

Suzanne Rozdeba, a freelance journalist and graduate student at New York University, was a 2011 participant in the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics.

But Ya’akov Arbel, an Israeli tour guide and an old Poland hand, has been around long enough to know that hasn’t always been the case. “Before Spielberg made Schindler’s List,” he told me on a recent visit to the city, “there wasn’t a dog coming to Krakow.”

***

On a rain-soaked Friday morning late last year, Arbel led three dozen Israelis visiting Poland. He was in a rush—the group was headed to Auschwitz and Birkenau, the highlights of the tour—but some of the visitors were enjoying the rain, a refuge from the Israeli heat. One by one, they climbed aboard the bus. Arbel, counting and recounting, was still two people short. Finally, the stragglers arrived. It was an elderly couple, and the wife, an Auschwitz survivor, had gotten cold feet and had to be persuaded to join.

A few minutes after the bus pulled out, Arbel took the microphone and started talking. He talked about Jews and Nazis, Poland and Germany, concentration camps and death camps. To ease the tension, he spiced his speech with bits of trivia, even the occasional joke.

“I must do all the talking here,” Arbel told me during a rare moment of rest, sipping tea to soothe his throat. “One of the most important attributes for a tour leader to Auschwitz is the understanding that he should talk as little as possible inside the camps, because the eyes tell the story there.”

Arbel’s bus joined another 30 in the huge parking lot outside the camp, and some of the visitors wrapped themselves in Israeli flags as we headed toward the entrance. There, in accordance with Polish legislation aimed to protect the local workforce, the group was handed over to a Polish tour guide, one of the 250 men and women employed by the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau. Arbel was there only to translate. Mostly silent, he followed his group, looking and listening.

***

Arbel was born in Germany. His parents, Holocaust survivors, fled to Israel when he was a year old. He is a banker by profession, and 10 years ago he decided to devote himself to his love of history and geography and become certified as a tour guide. “I love doing it,” he said, “and it’s a cheap way to go places.” In the last three years, he has mostly been accompanying groups headed to Poland, visiting that country three or four times a year. As we walked through the gate leading into the camp, Arbel paused for a moment. “Every time I come here I want to cry,” he said. “But I can’t cry. I must be professional and separate myself from the place, and one of the tools is to use humor. But you must be sensitive to the component of the group. Sometimes humor can’t fly here.”

The breakdown, he added, comes often after the tour. “When you are walking in Auschwitz, you are on a mission, a mission to tell the story of a foregone Jewish life. But once you are done, and you let it decompress, you get back to your hotel and just wrap yourself in depression. And since every tour is different, and unexpected things happen here, this depression goes home with you. I have many horrible flashbacks in my sleep long after I return from here.”

I commented that such a lifestyle, consisting of repetitive visits to this dark place and the bouts of depression that are bound to follow, was somewhat masochistic. Arbel shrugged. “It is the least I owe to my predecessors, to the history of Jewish life,” he said, before heading into one of the prison cabins.

***

Arbel is in the minority among Israeli tour guides specializing in Poland. Most of them are graduates of programs run by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust museum and research facility, and sponsored by the Ministry of Education to train guides to lead groups of high-school students and soldiers.

There are 300 such guides currently working in Israel. To join their ranks, one must respond to a newspaper ad inviting people to enroll in the program. Each year, said Dorit Novak, the director of the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, 50 people apply. “We pass the names and résumés to the Ministry of Education, where the first selection is processed,” she said. “Then, we invite the final candidates to one day where we conduct interviews and psychological assessment, and we usually end up with 20 finalists.”

The Yad Vashem course lasts almost six months and includes many seminars and workshops. The candidates then go on a tour of Poland, followed by two more tours on which they serve as guides. If they receive positive feedback they must take one final test, which examines the depth of their knowledge of the Holocaust. The drop-out rate is 15 percent.

“The guide is a key figure in the educational experience young students and soldiers go through while traveling in Poland,” Novak said. “A good guide must have great knowledge and even greater sensitivity for the group as a whole and to every group member. He or she must deal with an age group where the people are very sensitive and about to be exposed to a shocking experience.”

The challenges are part adolescent psychology and part crisis management. (The museum makes an exception to its Polish guide policy for these specially trained leaders.) “A good guide shouldn’t tease,” Novak added. “He shouldn’t manipulate and move people from one experience to the other, but let every experience sink in with the kids. Understatement is the most important thing, because words can never match the visuals.”

This being a delicate undertaking, it calls for a certain sort of person. The average guide is between 30 and 50 years old, has another job or has chosen to become a tour guide as a mid-career change of vocation, and is committed and knowledgeable. While the guides vary in gender, socioeconomic backgrounds, and places of residence, many are children of Holocaust survivors, Novak said.

Hanni Efrimov, 40, graduated from the Yad Vashem program in 2003. In the last few years she’s been to Auschwitz 12 times every year. “It is not normal,” she said. “I must admit that I am a little bit addicted.” But, she added, the tours are not “a pornographic journey into the Holocaust. We deal mostly with Jewish life in Poland, because in order to understand what we had lost, we must first learn what we had. The death camps are not the most important part, and it’s also the shortest trip. It is more important to see how people lived in the ghetto, what choices they have made in a world with no choices, to learn about the thinkers and writers. We must teach about the forces, because suffering doesn’t teach you anything.”

Another important part of the guide’s job, Efrimov added, is to tailor the experience to suit the sensibilities of young men and women who are either in the midst of, or are about to enter, their mandatory military service. The Holocaust, she said, is the quintessential lesson of the dangers of using force and the importance of preserving one’s humanity. “We teach them about the thin line between being a human being and a monster,” she said, “but also about the inspiration of true friendship, where you are starving but still willing to share your 20 grams of bread.”

***

Ya’akov Arbel’s tour group is now midway through its tour of Auschwitz. Their Polish guide, Magdalena Adamczyknycz (pronounced adam-chick-nitz), is a 36-year-old local woman, married and the mother of a young girl. She first visited the camp in the eighth grade as part of a class trip. “It was the first time I heard about the Holocaust,” she told me when we were standing outside cabin 27. Like most Israeli groups, this one had decided to hold a small, private candle-lighting ceremony and to share their personal stories about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. Adamczyknycz was waiting for them to be done, standing in the chilly fall breeze.

“I traveled a lot after school,” she said as she waited, “and I realized that when I say in Polish the name of the place where I was born, Oswiecim, no one recognized it, but when I was saying the name in German (Auschwitz) then everyone knew about the tiny place where I come from. That made me realize about the history of my birthplace and of my history and how I am part of it.” Like her Israeli counterparts, Adamczyknycz, too, had to pass a series of exams to obtain her position. With 1.3 million people visiting the camp last year—a steep increase from 2004’s record of half a million visitors—the demand for tour guides is only growing.

Adamczyknycz got her certification in 2005. “I felt that it is my mission to try and tell the story of every person who perished here, more than a million stories,” she said. She used to work full time but now works only three or four months a year. This, she said, was a necessary step she had to take after becoming a mother. “It is a huge conflict,” she said, “because you are facing a trauma, sometimes live testimony of a survivor, and then you must go home and switch it off, play with your daughter, switch immediately from the complete gloom into a shining mother. It made me very pessimistic about life and about human nature, and that’s why I decided to decrease my rate [of work].” Instead, she found part-time employment as an English teacher in the local school, but the camp, she said, is always on her mind. “The ability to keep the memory alive,” she said, “to educate kids about Auschwitz and one year later see them coming back here with their parents, I miss that.”

Not, she added, that being employed by Auschwitz was without its downsides. Apart from the psychological toll of constant immersion in such grim subject matter, Adamczyknycz said, identifying oneself as an Auschwitz employee kills all chance of small talk and makes sharing work stories with friends deeply uncomfortable. “But it is still worth it,” she said, “especially when we get a group from Israel, where you really don’t know what will happen.”

Such impromptu outbursts of emotions are common with Israeli groups, and one occurred when the group I had joined visited the second floor of cabin 16. Walking between a glass-encased display of suitcases and another filled with hair and shoes, someone let out a terrible shriek.

It was Yehudit Barnea, 72, from Tel Aviv, the Holocaust survivor who earlier that morning had had her doubts about joining the tour. Shaking, she stood in front of a photograph on the wall, pointing at two little girls. “This is my sister and I on the day the Russians liberated the camp,” she said in a broken voice.

Barnea arrived to Birkenau in 1944. She was 6 years old. “Usually, they killed kids my age,” she said after we finished walking in Birkenau, where she had to revisit the memories she struggled to forget. “But we were twin sisters, and we were immediately led to Mengele’s cabin.” She has strange memory about the place. “I remember that everyday he was taking blood from us and he was experimenting with our lungs, and I remember that we were his favorite kids. I was actually very disappointed to see him in a movie, because I remembered him as a very tall and blond and beautiful man who had nicknames for us. But after walking here, I can’t believe that I was here, that I got out of here. It is just a story, it’s not really me.”

***

The drive back to Krakow was long and silent. At the hotel, a much-needed rest awaits, followed by Shabbat dinner. Outside the door of my room, someone had hung a silhouette of an old Jew holding a Bible. From my window, I could see the old Jewish cemetery. And yet there is no real Jewish life in Krakow. The reality of Jewish life here oscillates between the cemetery and that silhouette, a kitschy object the likes of which clutter many stores and cafés. Drivers for hire offer a tour of the Schindler factories or the ghetto. Even the toilets in Auschwitz are a commercial enterprise, costing 1,000 zloty (about 30 cents) per use.

I was musing about commercialization, memory, and authenticity as I walked to dinner, passing on the way a steakhouse that featured a klezmer house band. But as I reached the restaurant, I was dismayed to find the other members of the group in a decidedly different mood. They, too, could see the Holocaust business and the profits Krakow gathers from exploiting the memory of its dead Jews, but it was a price they were willing to pay.

They came here to look for something that is long gone, to run after a metaphor, to see and forgive and forget. They had come here hoping to get lost in the past. For that, they needed good guides.

“A guide in this kind of tour, he owns great power over the people he guides,” Arbel told me after we finished the emotional prayer for the wine and challah, and waitresses were serving traditional Jewish food to the table. “You don’t show them here tourist attractions, but you guide them through their past, their purpose, you go through what could have been their alternative life.”

Ze’ev Avrahami is a writer living in Berlin.

“I’ve asked them to be consistent in using the appropriate German names of the camps and this applies also to the Internet,” Zdrojewski said. “At the moment the .pl is misleading and might make people associate the camps with Poland.” Luckily, we now have the Internet to help us correct such faulty notions as a history of murderous Polish anti-Semitism.

Poland Wants Auschwitz Website To Drop .pl Suffix [The Telegraph]

Each change of regime, each military campaign, brought death on a massive scale—from combat, but still more from imprisonment, massacre, deportation, and deliberate starvation. Between 1933 and 1945, 14 million civilians and prisoners of war were killed in this region. As Timothy Snyder emphasizes in his important new history, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, $29.95), this fantastic figure does not include combatants, even though half of all the soldiers killed in the Second World War, on all fronts around the globe, died in Eastern Europe.

What it does include, of course, are the 5 to 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, which took place exactly in the region that Snyder designates “the bloodlands.” Something like 40 percent of the civilians killed in the bloodlands were Jewish victims of the Germans and their collaborators. Or, as Snyder writes in another attempt to put the Jewish experience in perspective, “Jews were less than two percent of the population [of the USSR] and Russians more than half; [yet] the Germans murdered more Jewish civilians than Russian civilians in the occupied Soviet Union.”

“Jews were in a category of their own,” Snyder goes on to write. The language of history reflects this: We speak of the Holocaust as a unique event, in some way different from the mass killing that took place all around it. One of Snyder’s major achievements in Bloodlands is to preserve this sense of the singularity of Jewish experience, even while showing its complex relationship to the terrible experiences of the peoples among whom Jews lived. This is notoriously a very difficult thing for historians to do, and the ground Snyder covers in this book has often been the source of controversy and recrimination. To Jews, any attempt to put the Holocaust “in context” can sound like an attempt to diminish its importance, to relativize it.

Jews have also been troubled by any emphasis on the suffering of other nations under Hitler—of Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians—because collaborators of all these nationalities played a crucial role in the murder of the Jews. Indeed, the Holocaust could not have happened without the participation of the Slavs. To take just one of the countless illuminating statistics in Bloodlands: In Lithuania, the German unit (Einsatzkommando) in charge of killing the Jews of Kaunas “numbered only 139 personnel, including secretaries and drivers, of which there were forty-four.” Yet between June and December of 1941, such small units managed to kill 114,856 Lithuanian Jews. Clearly, the work of killing was done mainly by native Lithuanians: The Nazis “had as many helpers as [they] needed,” Snyder writes.

Yet Snyder also does justice to the experiences of the Slavic peoples, which were often as terrible as the fate suffered by Jews. The first chapter in Bloodlands is titled “The Soviet Famines,” and it centers on Ukraine in 1932-33, where more than 3.3 million people died of starvation. This is half as many as died in the Holocaust; and while they died of hunger, rather than gassing or shooting, they were deliberately killed by Stalin just as surely as the Jews were by Hitler. Snyder explains why and how, “facing no external security threat and no challenge from within, with no conceivable justification except to prove the inevitability of his rule, Stalin chose to kill millions of people in Soviet Ukraine.”

The reason was, first, economic. Intent on industrializing the Soviet economy, the Communists seized food from the peasants of Ukraine—the Soviet Union’s “breadbasket”—in order to sell it abroad, thus earning the money to pay for foreign technology and industrial equipment. In other words, there was never really a food shortage in the USSR; Stalin could have stopped the famine simply by stopping food exports. Adherence to Marxist ideology—which saw the urban proletariat as a more revolutionary class than the rural peasantry—led Stalin to make war on one section of his own population. In this way, Snyder shows, Communism led to the same kind of ideologically inspired killing as Nazism, though the victims were defined more by class than by ethnicity.

Yet Stalin did also practice what Snyder calls “National Terror,” in addition to “Class Terror.” He persecuted the Poles of the Soviet Union because of his fear of Poland, against which the USSR had fought a war in 1920, and the secret police fed these fears by inventing ludicrous conspiracy theories about Polish espionage. In 1937-38, during the Great Terror, almost 700,000 Soviet citizens were killed; of these, 85,000 were Poles, even though Poles made up less than one half of 1 percent of the Soviet population. Similar atrocities were directed against Lithuanians, Koreans, and other peoples who could theoretically look to a foreign state as a protector. Snyder convincingly argues, in the last chapter of Bloodlands, that the resurgence of Soviet anti-Semitism after 1948 can be seen as a late example of this kind of national terror. Once the Jews of the USSR could look to Israel as a homeland, Stalin began to see them as another potential threat. Before he died, in 1953, he encouraged the concoction of the “Doctors’ Plot,” which accused Jewish doctors of medically murdering high-placed Soviet officials—possibly as a prelude to another mass purge.

The relationship between Jews and Communism is probably the most explosive of all the subjects Snyder addresses, and here he benefits most from the strengths he shows throughout the book—deep learning, wide compassion, and clear, careful moral judgment. To this day, there are some in Eastern Europe who continue to minimize, or explain, or even justify the Holocaust by pointing to the atrocities inflicted on their own peoples by so-called Jewish Communists. Snyder shows the reasons why this line of argument has found adherents, especially in the war years. It was never true that most, or even many, Jews were Communists; but it is true that many prominent Communists were Jews. Maxim Litvinoff, the Soviet foreign minister during the 1930s, was Jewish—Stalin dismissed him in 1939 when he made his alliance with Hitler, in deference to Nazi anti-Semitism. Lazar Kaganovich was one of Stalin’s most loyal enforcers and played a major role in both the Ukrainian famine and the Terror.

Jews were also disproportionately represented in the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. There were historical reasons for this, which Snyder might have stated more explicitly: It was the experience of Tsarist anti-Semitism that led so many Jews to feel that Communism was their best hope. But in the 1930s, the association of Communism with Jews—fed by Hitler’s propaganda, which referred incessantly to “Judeo-Bolshevism”—made it dangerously easy for many Eastern Europeans to see patriotism, anti-Communism, and anti-Semitism as part of the same package. The fact that one of the last acts of the Soviet regime in Poland and the Baltics, before the Germans arrived in 1941, was to massacre political prisoners only added fuel to the flames. By the time the Nazis arrived, these conditions made many Balts and Slavs feel that killing Jews was somehow striking a blow for their national dignity.

While Snyder explains the feelings behind this view, he also scrupulously shows that it was factually baseless. There was, of course, no connection between massacring Jewish women and children and resisting Soviet power. What’s more, Soviet Communists were themselves active persecutors of Jews, especially in Poland. As Yehuda Bauer showed in his recent study The Death of the Shtetl, Soviet rule everywhere destroyed Jewish civilization: No one was more viciously opposed to Judaism and Jewish culture than Jewish Communists. And, of course, only a small fraction of Jews were Communists at any time, in any sense; more were socialists or Zionists. Still, the association of Jews and Communism lingered even after the war, when some of the Communist rulers imposed by Stalin on Eastern Europe were Jews.

Lithuanian or Ukrainian nationalists who helped the Germans kill Jews, hoping that it would serve their own causes, were quickly disabused. When Snyder turns from the Soviet to the Nazi side of the story, he shows that the Holocaust of the Jews was not the only genocide the Nazis had in mind. They had similar plans for the whole of Eastern Europe, involving the mass murder and starvation of Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians. In accordance with Nazi racial theory, these peoples were to be reduced to slavery, in the service of German settlers who would turn the whole of Eastern Europe into an Aryan agricultural empire. If the German Army had captured Moscow in the fall of 1941, knocking the USSR out of the war as Hitler intended, the Nazis planned to starve 30 million people to death so the invaders could feed themselves.

When the invasion stalled, the Nazis decided to focus on the one aspect of their “utopia” it was still in their power to achieve: the extermination of the Jews. “The Final Solution,” Snyder writes, “was the one atrocity that took on a more radical form in the realization than in the conception. Soviet Jews were supposed to work themselves to death building a German empire or be deported further east. This proved impossible; [so] most Jews in the East were killed where they lived.” Four of Snyder’s 11 chapters are devoted primarily to the Holocaust, a measure of how central it was to the fate of the “bloodlands.” Indeed, anyone who wants to fully comprehend the Holocaust—at least, as far as it can be comprehended—should read Bloodlands, which shows how much evil had to be done in order to make the ultimate evil possible.

Not to make light of the whole affair, or Brodsky’s situation, but there is an amusing aspect to his legal troubles. Under the terms of the Polish extradition ruling, the German government—no doubt much to its chagrin—is not permitted to charge Brodsky with anything—like, say, espionage—more serious than forgery. Moreover, the maximum penalty in Germany for forgery is a fine; Brodsky is unlikely to do jail-time even before and during any trial. Moreover, the reason the Polish courts have ruled that Brodsky cannot be tried for anti-German espionage is because spying on Germany isn’t a crime in Poland—which (this is the part I find amusing) actually makes perfect sense if you know your European history.

German Report: ‘Uri Brodsky’ To Avoid Jail [Ynet]
Suspected Mossad Agent Loses Extradition Fight Over Dubai Hit [Haaretz]
Will The Real Uri Brodsky Please Stand Up? [Tikkun Olam]
Earlier: Brodsky To Be Extradited on Lesser Charge
Related: Murder in Dubai [Tablet Magazine]

• Seeing an opportunity in effective sanctions and technical delays, President Obama is again trying to engage Iran. [WP]

• A Polish court upheld Uri Brodsky’s extradition to Germany. Brodsky, an alleged Mossad agent, is accused of fraudulently procuring a German passport for one of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh’s assassins. [Haaretz]

• Diplomacy-wise, Israel and Turkey have seen far better days. Economically, they remain strong and important partners for each other. [NYT]

• A sad, panoramic sketch of the shrinking of the Dead Sea. [NYT]

• Reginald Levy, the pilot of the plane hijacked by Black September in 1972, died at 88. He received a hero’s welcome after Israeli commandos (led by Ehud Barak) stormed the plane and rescued the passengers,. [NYT]

While Israel had hoped the Polish judge would deny Germany’s request for extradition altogether, the ruling was actually not nearly as bad, from Israel’s and Brodsky’s perspectives, as it could have been: It extradites not for the much more serious charge of espionage, but rather for the lesser crime of forgery. Why? Because—unsurprisingly, when you come to think of it—spying on Germany is not a crime in Poland.

Brodsky (which may or may not be his real name) is not suspected to have been directly involved in the assassination. Rather, he stands accused of procuring a fraudulent passport for one of the assassins in the name of Michael Bodenheimer—a real-life Israeli rabbi who, being the American-born son of a pre-World War II German citizen, is entitled to a German passport under German law. Al-Mabhouh buffs will recall that the single German passport used by the assassins was, in fact, a genuine one.

Poland To Extradite Alleged Mossad Agent [JPost]
Alleged Mossad Agent May Appeal Extradition Over Dubai Hit [Haaretz]
Related: Murder in Dubai [Tablet Magazine]

So now this is back in the news, and with it comes renewed discussion of the assassination’s wisdom (or lack thereof). Israel “now,” writes columnist Yaakov Katz, “has a new crisis to deal with—this time with one of its last two remaining friends in Europe: Poland and Germany.”

And while Melman points to Poland’s efforts to keep the arrest quiet as evidence of its friendship with Israel, he adds,

The fact that this is the first arrest of an Israeli suspected of being a Mossad agent involved in the Dubai assassination indicates that the matter refuses to fade away.

The Dubai hit may have been a success operationally, but it has severely damaged Israel diplomatically. …

The political damage to Israel comes as a series of actions—or lack of actions—indicate that the world is sick of Israel’s deeds and sees Israel as a neighborhood bully that disregards and violates international norms. Israel’s good friends, like Australia, Germany and France are finding it difficult to defend Israel and to justify their support of Israel to their publics.

Of course, as a defender of the assassination might say, Mabhouh could not be reached for comment.

Is Israel Losing Another Ally Because of Dubai Hit? [Haaretz]
Analysis: Was Mabhouh Worth It? [JPost]

Poland To Rule on Suspected Israeli Spy Within a Month [Ynet]
Related: Murder in Dubai [Tablet Magazine]

• The Israeli government warned that it would oppose a peace plan that the United States writes and then imposes on the parties. A solution to the conflict, it said, must be “homegrown.” [WSJ]

• French President Nicolas Sarkozy cautioned that a failure of the international community to act on Iran would result in a “disastrous” Israeli strike. [Ynet]

• Israeli troops shot and killed an Islamic Jihad militant who was trying to plant explosives on the Gaza border. [NYT]

• Yom HaShoah celebrations in New York City over the weekend emphasized the passing of stories and memories on to the youngest generation. [NYT]

• Late Polish President Lech Kaczynski continues to be remembered as an unprecedented friend to the Jews and Israel—the first Polish leader to attend a Polish synagogue, for example. Prime Minister Donald Tusk (who was not on the plane) is also considered friendly to Israel. [JTA]

• Accused leaker Anat Kamm said she would waive journalistic immunity, and urged Uri Blau—the Haaretz reporter who wrote the article allegedly based on her documents—to return from Britain. [Haaretz]

• Defense Secretary Robert Gates disclosed that the U.S. government does not believe that an Iranian nuclear bomb is inevitable. [Ynet]

• An amended military order enables the expulsion of West Bank residents who lack an unspecified “permit.” A human rights group worries it could pave the way to thousands of Palestinians being kicked out. [NYT]

• An Iran expert argues that extra U.S. pressure on Israel over settlements won’t help make the Arab world come around to the U.S. side vis-à-vis Iran. In fact, a U.S.-Israel divide may further harden the stance of Iran itself. [WP]

• President Obama’s nuclear summit begins today. Administration officials are seeking to emphasize common ground and downplay controversial issues, most notably the Mideast conflict. [LAT]

Sonya Oshman in Italy, late 1940s.
CREDIT: Courtesy of Lisa Oshman

Sonya’s speech at the podium impressed on me her sheer will to survive, gratitude for surviving, and mission to share her story. Her drive filled me with awe, but also with dread. What, I wondered, infused my life with comparable purpose and fiery will? For me, and I imagine for my peers, Holocaust stories serve a similar function as the Torah did for pre-World War II generations: They offer lessons on morality, love, death, betrayal, and triumph and provide a strong reason for maintaining a Jewish identity.

Several weeks after the film screening, I sat in Sonya Oshman’s sunny living room at her assisted-living facility in New Jersey. At 86, she was small but sturdy, with feathery brown hair, round deep-set eyes, and thin eyebrows that arched upwards when she smiled. She wore a wool vest over her button-down shirt and a shin-length pleated skirt, all in white and brown. I had arrived fascinated by the enduring image of the Novogrudek Jews clawing at the land that had been their home for generations, escaping underground like mice. I wanted to immerse myself in Sonya’s story and to find out what kept her going. She called to me from the kitchen.

“Mamale,” she said, “what can I give you?”

From the couch I scanned framed photographs on the walls and on the top of the shiny piano. Some were sepia-toned portraits of her parents and grandparents, photos that friends had found among their belongings and mailed to her from Europe after the war. Sonya returned to the couch carrying a can of ginger ale, peeled grapefruit sections in a Styrofoam bowl, and a muffin wrapped in a napkin, all of which she saved from that morning’s breakfast, knowing I was coming.

***

In 1931, Sonya Gorodinsky was 9 years old, the eldest of four children, with a sister yet to be born. The family lived on Pilsudski Street, in a home next to Sonya’s maternal grandparents, who employed two young Polish women who did housework and looked after the children. “I had a good youth,” Sonya told me. “I was one of the privileged ones.”

Sonya’s parents, Abraham and Tamara, owned an appliance store. Abraham called his daughter Sonyaleh. Many of his customers, non-Jewish state officials, befriended him and called him Abramaleh, or Meme. When there was tension between the Jews and Poles of the town, they would often turn to Meme to mediate.

During the week, the Gorodinsky children ate dinner with their grandparents and were in bed by the time their parents came home from work. But on Fridays, before the Sabbath, her parents came home early. Tamara blessed the candles, and Abraham blessed the wine and challah before the meal. Sonya watched as her father gathered tzedakah to bring to the rabbi, the Jewish orphanage and hospital, and the Zionist youth movement.

The children attended Jewish schools where they studied Hebrew, Torah, and Jewish history, as well as math, science, and literature. She went on to study to be a doctor and was accepted to medical school in Bialistok, to begin in the fall of 1939.

By September of that year Novogrudek was in danger of German invasion. The Polish authorities fled, knowing they would be overpowered. The Jews there believed the Russians would be more sympathetic rulers than the Germans, and so when Soviet soldiers marched into town on September 17, they were greeted with flowers and hugs.

***

The afternoon of June 24, 1941, Sonya was the only one at home on Pilsudski Street. As she passed the tall brick chimney in the center of the house, she heard a bomb fall. Then another. She stood frozen while the entire house collapsed in a heavy sigh of dust and boards. After the smoke settled, Sonya stood stunned next to the brick chimney.

The Germans had invaded Novogrudek and turned the Jewish neighborhoods to rubble. The shops in the marketplace, mostly Jewish-owned, were burnt and smashed, as were the Jewish libraries and schools. Of all the synagogues, only a few walls remained. There were 300 casualties, mostly Jewish.

***

It was bitterly cold six months later, on Saturday, December 6, when 6,500 Jews, half the town’s population, were instructed to assemble at the courthouse yard. The Gorodinskys trudged toward the town center clutching pillows, boxes of photographs, and sacks of clothing. Soldiers locked the gates of the courthouse yard behind them.

For two days, the Jews neither slept nor ate. On December 8, Sonya’s grandparents and little brother were sent to their deaths, while Sonya, her parents, and her remaining siblings were locked into the courthouse compound along with Novogrudek’s remaining 1,500 Jews. It was a makeshift ghetto surrounded by a barbed wire and armed guards. The people inside were craftsmen saved for their skills. Each morning the ghetto gates would open and tailors, shoemakers, metalworkers, carpenters, saddlers, and mechanics, along with their families, were ushered under gunpoint to their workshops to sew fur linings into boots, manufacture guns, or mend German army uniforms.

***

On May 7, 1943, there was another roundup in the courthouse square. SS guards swarmed around the exhausted crowd. Among the guards was Zbisheck, Sonya’s former neighbor, who looked her in the eye.

Zbisheck’s family had lived across from the Gorodinkys on Pilsudski Street. Zbisheck and Sonya were playmates for years. Perhaps when Zbisheck saw Sonya in the crowd he was reminded of her bicycle, her summer dresses, the scallions in her garden. Zbisheck motioned for Sonya to follow him. They entered a room in the courthouse where the skilled workers waited, including her father. Sonya grabbed Zbisheck’s arm and whispered, “You saved my life and I thank you. But please, can you help my sister and my mother too?” Zbisheck answered under his breath that he had already risked his life to save her.

That day the ghetto population was reduced by half. Sonya heard later that her mother linked arms with relatives and her 11-year-old daughter and said “Come, let’s go together to the grave.” Now only an essential 250 workers, along with some children, remained. They began to plot their escape that night.

***

Sonya Oshman.
CREDIT: Courtesy Lisa Oshman

The original breakout plan had been to storm the ghetto gates on a Sunday night, when the guards notoriously drank and grew lazy. In preparation, some people had bribed hand grenades from guards, others smuggled in guns from peasants outside the ghetto, still others stole iron rods and knives from their workshops. The Jews would throw everything they had and run. The casualty rate would be high, but it would be better than certain death at the hands of their oppressors.

Everyone was ready in their places on the appointed evening. A man near the front gate was poised to throw the first grenade. Sonya, waiting in the bunk, fingered a small gold ring in the pocket of her tattered skirt. A few weeks before her death, her mother had pulled her daughter aside and tugged at her finger. Pressing something small and warm into Sonya’s palm, she said, “Listen my daughter. Have this ring. Maybe you will need it. Maybe you will survive.”

Before the first grenade was thrown, a reinforcement of guards arrived at the main gate, braced for action. The action was called off. Each subsequent night, a reinforcement of guards arrived at dusk, and the Jews eventually abandoned their escape plan. The wife of an injured doctor had leaked word of the plan, not wanting her husband to be left behind and killed. But the younger Jews didn’t want to wait for death. “We saw that everything was finished,” Sonya told me. “What was left was only one person from each family. The young people started to scream, ‘We don’t want to die like our parents died. We’ll run away.’ ” But the older people didn’t want them to run, because the Germans would kill whoever remained in retribution.

Berl Yoselevitch, a carpenter, thought of a tunnel as a compromise. The weak and injured wouldn’t have to run fast or fight. They would hide themselves when everyone else left. The Jews would dig a passage from under a bed located along the northern barracks wall, closest to the outer walls of the ghetto and the woods. The tunnel would drop four and a half feet, then run north under the ghetto to a field next to the forest. They would escape on a moonless July night, when the wheat and grass were uncut and high enough to provide cover as they ran. Once out, they hoped to join the Bielski partisans and seek revenge.

“We wanted to show the world that Jews are not sheep that go to the slaughter,” Sonya remembered. “We decided whoever will make it will make it and whoever would not would not. It was better to die this way than the other way. And maybe someone will survive to tell the world what happened.”

Digging began right away, and details were kept to a select few in order to prevent information leaks. Not everyone was for it. Some Jews feared the tunnel would be impossible to complete before the Germans found out about it. There was one man whom nobody trusted; to ensure that he wouldn’t talk to the Germans, the Jews killed him.

Throughout the summer of 1943, Sonya clawed at the soil underneath the courthouse to escape a place she had, until recently, loved her whole life. Much of the tunnel was dug by children and small men, who could maneuver within its narrow walls. An electrician named Rakovski diverted a current from the ghetto and strung electric bulbs along the tunnel ceiling. He also figured out how to disconnect the searchlights that surveyed the ghetto grounds, and he did so occasionally, so the Germans would get used to these “shortages” and not suspect anything when one took place on the night of the escape.

The children dug lying down, bellies pressed against the earth. I asked Sonya if she remembered the smell of the earth, how it felt on her cheeks and under her fingernails. “I did not smell or feel a thing,” she replied. “We were anxious to get out as fast as we can because we had death waiting for us. I don’t even know whether I was breathing or not. I didn’t care at all, Mamika. We were full of worries that we forgot about anything else. We just wanted to get out. We wanted our lives.”

In order not to soil their only clothing and arouse suspicion, the children dug naked or wore robes of burlap sacks or old cloth sewn especially for the task. Sonya dug with her brother, Shaul, sometimes with a cousin, and with her new friend, Aaron Oshman, who at 30 was 10 years older than she and had been moved with his brother to the Novogrudek ghetto about a year earlier, when his ghetto in Ivinitz, a small town in White Russia, was liquidated. Theirs had been a wealthy family before the war; their father owned a hardware business. When Aaron arrived in Novogrudek, he sat in an empty workshop crying for his parents. In a Shoah Testimony video interview, given before his death in 2004, Aaron recalled the first time he saw Sonya. “In walked a beautiful woman. She was 19 years old. She said, ‘Don’t cry, young man, you still have your life.’” Aaron discussed philosophy and Zionism with Sonya. He was articulate and kind. Four feet underground, muddy with damp soil, Sonya and Aaron fell in love.

To remove dirt displaced by the tunnel, the diggers filled sacks of it that they then passed back until it reached the hole under the bed in the ghetto. Half a million pounds of earth were packed into false double walls built in the courthouse barracks. Soil was hidden in corners where the attic ceiling slanted to meet the floor, and buried under floorboards that were ripped up and then replaced. Ghetto residents smuggled sacks of soil to toilets—holes in the ground—outhouses at the end of the camp. One of the group’s carpenters laid a wooden track along the tunnel floor so they could use a cart to haul the dirt out.

By July 1943, the tunnel was about 240 feet long and near completion. But July was rainy that year, and the soppy earth leaked, muddying the tunnel. The group feared the tunnel would collapse. Determined not to let his plan fail, Berl Yoselevitch stole wood slats from his workshop to reinforce the walls and ceiling. He also organized the digging of small drains and channels in the floor to divert water.

In the meantime, the wheat fields were harvested, leaving a vast area of open ground between the camp and the forest. Rumors floated that the ghetto was to be liquidated further, leaving just 20 people alive. Many of the Jews wanted to leave immediately, but more decided to delay departure and dig 100 feet farther, which would put the tunnel’s exit closer to the forest. They’d leave the digging of the actual exit until the night of the escape. The first people to go through would be the young, carrying shovels to dig the final distance and guns and hand grenades should they face guards when they surfaced. The older people would wait take up the rear so that if they moved too slowly or fainted they wouldn’t hold everyone else back.

In August, the tunnel was complete. It was 750 feet, and the Jews watched the late summer sky for signs of a storm that would provide cover during an escape. But the nights were clear, and the moonless days passed. While they waited, 11 skilled craftsmen, including Sonya’s father, were transferred to Koldichevo, a camp that ran a weapons factory. Of Sonya’s family of seven, only she and her brother Shaul remained in Novogrudek.

Over the next several weeks the Jews rehearsed their escape to see how long it would take. Two to three hours seemed enough time for 240 people to pass through the tunnel. They submitted names of those they wanted to leave with, and were instructed when to appear at the mouth of the tunnel.

***

Sunday, September 26, 1943, was a moonless stormy night. Around 8 p.m., Rakovski, the electrician, cut power to the ghetto searchlights and turned on the tunnel lights. Nails in the barracks’ tin roof were loosened, amplifying the sounds of the falling rain in order to mask sounds of escape. The Jews quietly assembled, waiting in the darkness for their turn to lower themselves into the lighted earth. Sonya stood with Aaron and her brothers. Some families tied themselves to one another; others held hands.

One couple had secretly given birth in the ghetto. Before the escape, the mother strangled her child to death—the group could not take the chance that the baby would cry during its escape and alert guards above ground.

Like the Jews fleeing Egypt, the Jews of Novogrudek crawled as quickly as they could through the dirt. Sonya was in the middle. At her hands were people’s feet, at her feet, others’ hands. She felt like a mouse in a line of them, crawling silently. She hypnotized herself with a chant: Sonya, you got to make it, you got to make it. She then changed it to, God, please let me go through. Don’t bury me. Don’t bury me. Don’t bury me. Every movement she made, she was sure that the world would bury her alive.

At the end of the tunnel, it was pouring rain, and the escapees couldn’t see in the new darkness above ground. Seventy of them accidentally ran toward the ghetto and were shot by guards who thought partisans were ambushing them. Among them were two of Sonya’s cousins and Berl Yoselevitch, the tunnel’s mastermind.

When Sonya emerged, she immediately lost Aaron and her brother in the confusion. She heard shots and shouting from the right, and to her left she could just make out a road. “I got into a little ditch and out from the ditch I went through a cornfield where the leaves and the stalks were quite high. During the night I crawled around. During the day I sat in the bushes and waited.” She had no shoes. Her dress was torn. She ate nothing.

Early the morning after the escape, Germans stormed into the barracks to see why no Jews had lined up for the daily roll. By one account, they found an ironically formal letter explaining that Jews were needed elsewhere. In another version, the letter informed the Germans that they were liberating themselves and that they would take revenge. Afraid to enter the tunnel in case bombs or traps had been set up inside, the Germans forced a member of the Judenrat to crawl through. When he arrived safely on the other end, he was hanged. Peasants crowded into the courthouse to gaze at the gaping hole the Jews had left behind.

For two weeks Sonya ran through the forests during the night and tried to rest and hide during the day. She grew so hungry that when she finally saw a little house with a light on at the bottom of a hill, she couldn’t resist trying for help, despite the frightening prospect that her fate depended on the kindness of the person inside. Through the window she saw an old man at a table, patching clothes. He looked like pictures she’d seen of St. Nicholas, with white hair and beard. Sonya knocked on the window and when he came to the door he simply said, “I know who you are. I want to help you.”

The Novogrudek escape had been on the radio, and the Nazis announced that anyone who turned in a Jew would receive several pounds of sugar. But the man offered Sonya his cellar, about 10 feet from the house, where he stored potatoes. Sonya buried herself there, thinking about a future without her family and friends. During the day, she didn’t move. Late each night the old man would bring her bread, a little milk, a cooked potato, whatever he had. After six weeks, he came with only a small bit of bread. He had nothing left for either of them to eat. Sonya looked at the ring her mother had given her and said, “Please take this. Sell it for food.” The man refused. The whole town knew he was poor. If he came to them with a gold ring, they would know he was hiding a Jew.

Nearby, at the edge of the forest, there was a house where people often came and went by horse in the middle of the night. He had heard that these were the Bielskis, and he offered to cover Sonya with straw in the back of his wagon and take her to that house. Sonya agreed. There she found her brother Shaul, some surviving relatives, and friends from neighboring ghettos. She also found Aaron, whom she asked to marry her.

In the Bielski group, everyone had a job to perform. While Sonya’s relatives made fur hats and boots, Sonya stood look-out on a hill. One morning about two weeks after she arrived, Sonya saw a group of men walking toward her. From their skeletal frames, she could tell that they were escapees hoping for refuge. They told her they had recently fled Koldichevo, the camp where her father had been held. Sonya asked about him. “He had escaped with us,” they told her. “He’s probably on his way to see you now.”

Sonya stood guard for two days and nights, forgoing sleep, watching for a familiar figure. Finally, on the third day, a man approached. He was smaller than her father, but, she thought, perhaps he’d shrunk under hardship. She sobbed waiting for him to reach her, to see the crinkle in his eyes, to hear him call her Sonyaleh.

When the man was near enough, Sonya saw that it was not her father.

“Why are you crying, child?”

“I am waiting for my father, Abraham Gorodinsky, from Koldichevo.”

“Stop crying, my child,” he said. “Your father is never coming.”

The man had been a doctor at Koldichevo, while her father had worked fixing watches and appliances. Each night, the Germans appointed a different inmate to guard their jewels. When it came for Abraham’s turn, he knew he was too tired to stay awake and hired a friend to take his turn rather than risk falling asleep on the job and being killed for it. But his friend was exhausted too and fell asleep in the barracks before even taking up the post. When a guard came to check that a watchman was there, he discovered an empty chair. The next day, the Germans made all the inmates gather around as they beat Abraham so badly that his body lost its shape. “However,” said the doctor, “your father yelled to the soldiers when the beating began, saying, ‘You will kill me today, but I have a son and a daughter and they will survive and tell what happened here.’ ”

When they heard that the war had ended, the remaining Jews of Novogrudek marched back to their hometown. They found nothing but painful memories. With other refugees, Aaron and Sonya walked across Europe to a displaced persons camp in Italy. They hoped it would be a stopping point on the way to Israel, but Sonya got sick and needed penicillin, which was available then only in the United States. The couple married and departed for Brooklyn shortly after the birth of their first son.

Aaron died six years ago, after 56 years of marriage. Sonya has two sons, both lawyers, and four grandchildren. She travels to schools, synagogues, community centers to share her story. “My name is Sonya Oshman,” she says, “and I wish to speak of my father. From 30,000 Jews [in the region], perhaps only 150 survived, and from the Gorodinsky family, I am now the only living member. My brother who escaped with me died five years ago. He was a major in the Israeli army. But I want to keep my father’s promise, so I am standing here tonight and filling out the last wish of my dad. I am telling you a little fragment of my story. In this way, I hope my father’s life will be one of the lives remembered.”

Meanwhile Novogrudek’s Jewish graveyard is overgrown, its headstones mostly missing; peasants have scavenged the granite slabs to line their basements and the walls of cisterns. Once home to 6,500 Jews, Novogrudek now has one.

Gila Lyons has written for the Forward, the New York Press, and the Berkshire Review. She is a staff writer at the health site Go Ask Alice and a correspondent for The Faster Times, and she is working toward an MFA in nonfiction creative writing at Columbia University.

• Polish anti-abortion activists are using Hitler’s image on billboards, reminding folks that the Nazis legalized abortion in conquered Poland. [Haaretz]

• In an op-ed, Ireland’s foreign minister blasts the Gaza blockade as “unjust and completely counterproductive … inhumane and completely unacceptable.” [IHT]

• Interesting interview with the son of a Hamas leader who, he just revealed, was an Israeli informant during the Second Intifada. [BBC]

• Speaking of! An important Danish journalist has come forward to admit he also worked with the Mossad. [Haaretz]

• Watch the launch of the Sabbath Manifesto.

• Syria symbolically reaffirmed its membership in Iran’s bloc by hosting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; the Iranian president said he hoped for a Middle East “without Zionists and without colonialists.” [JPost]

• Bernard Madoff’s daughter-in-law is changing her and her children’s last name to “Morgan,” due to the name’s association with “defrauding numerous investors in his companies.” [HuffPo]

• A profile of a Polish neo-Nazi turned ultra-Orthodox Jew describes a broader trend that has seen many Catholic Poles, particularly those who learn of different pre-World War II roots, convert to Judaism. [NYT]

• Another arrest was made in connection with Bernard Madoff Investment Securities. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• A visual adaptation of our Vox Tablet podcast with Fugs frontman Tuli Kupferberg. [Vimeo]

Tuli Kupferberg Jon Kalish Fuggin’ Around from Thelma Blitz on Vimeo.

How would you like to tap into an exclusive private intelligence service staffed by ex-CIA analysts who glean exclusive information from shadowy sources, cross-grid raw intel to detect relevant patterns, and alert you by email when the product requires your attention? Membership in this elite club will cost you just $349 a year, and you’ll also get a free book that predicts the next 100 years of human history.

Welcome to Stratfor, the brainchild of George Friedman, a Texas academic and sometime U.S. government consultant, who became an intelligence entrepreneur and runs what the press routinely calls “a private CIA” out of an office building in downtown Austin. In a crowded market where The New York Times can’t successfully charge for premium content, Friedman’s thriving business targets a key market niche: corporate types with geopolitical exposure who are too busy or too ill-informed to use Google.

“Controlling costs but without skimping on quality” is the secret to the McDonald’s-like commercial success of Stratfor, Friedman explains during a break from his New York book tour. “The secret is the division of labor: we have people who collect intelligence, people who analyze intelligence, and people who write,” he says. “It’s designed to give the subscriber a consistent product.” Friedman is promoting an exercise in futurology titled The Next 100 Years—it’s the book you get free with your $349—that teems with counter-intuitive assertions, for example, that Poland will become Europe’s great power by the middle of this century. Poland? I spent some time in the country a few years ago, pitching the Polish finance ministry on sovereign debt issues for Credit Suisse. You could have fooled me.

Friedman and I meet in the bar of a New York hotel, where I sip a cappuccino while Friedman drinks white wine. He checks the label of the bottle of house white burgundy with the eager eye of a man who has recently traded up to the good stuff from academic plonk. With his diminutive frame, wide mouth, and pedantic smile, he reminds me of Yoda, but without the Eastern European grammar. The child of Holocaust survivors who fled the Communist regime in Hungary, Friedman attended public schools in New York and put in 20 years teaching at middling colleges with side gigs consulting for the defense community. His children are yeshiva-educated, and two of them are serving as officers in the U.S. military.

Does being Jewish affect the way you view the world, I begin. “Being Jewish keeps things in perspective,” he says, smiling. “We lost two temples.”

Friedman is not selling sophistication. Subscribers to his premium service get more items in their inbox than the most avid geopolitics junkie could digest. Friedman’s private CIA, for that matter, isn’t much different from the official version. My old boss from Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council, Norman Bailey, always read the press himself to make sure he caught key items that the CIA analysts missed. Most of the cubicle-dwellers in the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence are academics who didn’t get tenure and chose the government’s health and pension benefits over the uncertainties of adjunct teaching.

For all his commercial focus, Friedman does not pander to his readers’ prejudice. The Next 100 Years dismisses the stuff of scare scenarios—Islam taking over Europe, China confronting the United States, a failed Mexican state dumping its surplus millions over the American border—and offers an idiosyncratic vision that will leave most readers confused. Forget Russia and China, Friedman insists: they will collapse of their own weight during the next generation. The great powers of the future are Japan, Turkey, Mexico, and Poland. The great crisis of the mid-21st century, he believes, will be a war between the United States and a fearsome Turkish-Japanese alliance.

It’s old-fashioned geopolitics doped with some eyebrow-raising professorial assumptions. China, India, and Russia will fail as states, while the Muslim states will remain stable enough to crush radical Islam. And Poland will arise as Europe’s major power.“Poland hasn’t been a great power since the sixteenth century,” he wrote. “But once it was—and, I think, will be again.”

Poland? I ask Friedman if he’s kidding. He isn’t. In his book, Friedman cites two factors. “First will be the decline of Germany,” he writes. “Its economy is large and still growing, but it has lost the dynamism it has had for two centuries. In addition, its population is going to fall dramatically in the next fifty years, further undermining its economic power.”

I protest: But isn’t Poland’s fertility rate even lower than Germany’s? According to U.N. projections, Poland’s working-age population will fall by half between 2010 and 2050—from 25 million to 13 million. Germany’s is projected to fall from 50 million to 30 million.

Friedman brushes this aside. “The most important reason for Poland’s ascendancy,” he says, is that Germany didn’t have the benefit of a Nazi and Communist occupation. “Poland is a blank slate and is free to develop any way it wants, while Germany is crippled by its historical obligations.”

I wonder: If you’re looking for a European power without the baggage of Nazism, why not pick on France? France has the highest fertility rate in Europe, close to replacement, while Poland is at an apocalyptic 1.3. “The high fertility in France is due to Muslim immigrants,” Friedman replies. That stretches credibility; the fertility rate for French-born women is around 1.8, according to available data. We argue for a minute or two and move on.

Next, I question Friedman’s claim that Japan will not only become a great power but will then ally with Turkey and go to war against the United States. “The fragmentation of China in the 2010s and the breakup of Russia in the 2020s will create a vast vacuum from the Pacific to the Carpathians, Friedman wrote. “Because of cyclical instability in China, Japan will have to protect its assets.”

In the low variant of U.N. projections—which Friedman in his book says he considers most accurate—Japan will have an elderly dependency ratio of 85 percent by the year 2050. Are the Japanese going to war with the United States in submersible armored wheelchairs?

To be fair, Friedman’s scenario for a mid-century war between the United States and a Japan-Turkey alliance starts not with wheelchairs but with the deployment of Battle Star satellites. The United States will use its Battle Stars to force Japan and Turkey to limit their acquisition of territory, he writes, and Japan and Turkey will react—but no spoilers. If you want to find out who wins the Great Battle Star Battle of 2050 you have to buy Friedman’s book.

So we have American satellites hovering above Turkey and Japan, and Japanese battle robots roaming through a splintered and chaotic China, operated by joysticks by orange-haired septuagenarians who cut their teeth on computer games during the 2010s. Warfare no longer depends on demographics, Friedman explains with exquisite patience. With precision-guided munitions and battlefield robotics, Japan can project military power without a large army. Israel, after all, is the biggest military power in the Middle East, and its demographic presence is trivial. “One computer scientist is worth a great many soldiers,” Friedman says.

That ends the discussion of Japan. “But you also predict that Mexico will rise up and confront the United States by 2080,” I add, remembering one of the most exciting passages of Friedman’s book: “If the United States and (its ally) Poland were both defeated” by Turkey and Japan, “then Germany would have an opportunity to move in quickly for the kill… The only other possible member of the coalition might be Mexico, however unlikely. Recall that Mexico was invited into an alliance by Germany in World War I, so this idea is hardly unprecedented.”

I ask how many doctorates in computer science Mexico graduates each year. Friedman doesn’t know. The correct answer is nine. Japan is going to be a world power despite its vanishing population because it’s got the computer scientists, and Mexico is going to threaten the United States despite its lack of computer scientists because of its large unskilled population.

Doesn’t all of this seem inconsistent? “Not at all,” Friedman answers. “I look at the discrepancy between economic status and economic potential and draw conclusions from there.” And that, in essence, is what his method entails. He looks for countries with a high growth rate, like Turkey or Mexico, and projects this forward 50 years in a straight line. He is not trying to be sensational; he is simply being academic. Why a country like India, which now produces more graduate students in math and sciences than the United States, does not figure into Friedman’s vision of the future is perplexing. “You can’t speak of India as a unified country,” he says. “They have marvelous technology in Mumbai, and a hundred miles away they have Maoist guerillas. India was invited by the British. It has vast political diversity.”

The fact that India and China are graduating millions of bright young people trained at the cutting edge of technology and conversant with Western culture—China is training more than 50 million classical musicians—doesn’t matter, for Friedman takes for granted that the world’s two largest nations will turn into failed states, while Mexico will become America’s geopolitical rival.

Don’t demographic trends, though, tell us something about the spiritual character of a country? When people choose leisure and hedonistic pursuits above children, haven’t they given up on the future?

Friedman waves this aside with the first lapse from professorial patience in the hourlong discussion. “People always were hedonistic,” he responds. “In the past children were cheap labor and social security. Having children coincided with economic needs. Having children was self-interested then, and not having children is self-interested now.”

So moral, cultural, and spiritual factors play no role whatever in his geopolitics? “My training was in political philosophy,” Friedman says. My advisor was Werner Dannhauser,” a student of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, “so I am keenly aware of Athens and Jerusalem. But I see the world in terms of three stages: barbarism at the beginning, decadence and decline at the end, and with luck, a brief civilized moment in the middle.”

The comparisons of Stratfor with the CIA are not entirely off-base. By main force and superior salesmanship, George Friedman has managed to replicate the key features of the intelligence establishment on a private footing. He didn’t invent what I call McStrategy—the splintering of tasks that puts one analyst at the deep fryer, another at sandwich assembly, and a third at the cash register. But the eccentricity of the final product is easily recognizable.

The truth is that even a moderately interested consumer could gain more accurate and detailed information in two minutes of searching on Google. As a random (and of course unscientific) test I picked the most recent Stratfor comment on Iran on the day of the interview, a January 28 bulletin noting that President Barack Obama had said nothing about the prospective nuclear power the previous week, while Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel had warned of stricter sanctions. That could hurt German business, Stratfor notes: “Tehran has relied on Germany as one of its most consistent supporters in the West. German businesses, particularly in the heavy industrial sector, exported nearly $6 billion worth of goods in 2008, a marked increase from barely $1 billion in 2000, especially considering the worsening relations between Tehran and the rest of the West’s powers.”

Typing the relevant search terms into Google News, the top item to pop up was in fact a lot more informative than the bulletin I received from Stratfor. On January 27, Richard Kiessler of the German-language news site derwesten.de had reported that German exports to Iran were melting down, falling to only $4 billion in 2009. This isn’t news; a senior German official had told me in November that German exports to Iran would collapse. “Massive Israeli pressure,” the site reported, had canceled a German contract to construct the Bandar-Abbas port in Iran, and big industrial contracts from Siemens and Thyssen “are in the pillory.” The Stratfor item lacks the updated export data and the telling detail from the Google News article – that Germany’s biggest construction contract with the Islamic Republic had already been canceled. In my random but entirely unscientific sample, it was Google News 1, Stratfor 0.

Stratfor’s entrepreneurial success sheds valuable light on the failures of U.S. foreign policy. Americans really are incurious about the rest of the world; they do not learn foreign languages, absorb other cultures, or think much about world history. It was Barack Obama, our shining model of the intellectual as public servant, who recently told a Viennese audience that he did not know how to communicate in “Austrian.” American officials can absorb only so much information about the rest of the world, and we forgive our own dire ignorance with startling alacrity. The nuggets of McStrategy beamed to Stratfor subscribers really do resemble the briefings that senior officials get. And that explains a lot.

David P. Goldman, a senior editor at First Things, formerly headed global fixed income research at Bank of America. He also writes the “Spengler” column at Asia Times Online.

But the truth is the historian’s business, and a historian of the Holocaust, like Bauer, is used to imagining the unimaginable. “Real events that happened in real time can, with a great deal of effort, be reconstructed,” Bauer writes in his preface. “The events happened to real people, whose stories must be heard and analyzed.” That is Bauer’s goal in this short book, which keeps a narrow focus on one under-researched aspect of the Holocaust: the experience of the shtetls of eastern Poland between 1939, when they were occupied by the Soviet Union, and 1944, when the Red Army returned to find the shtetls completely destroyed. It may sound odd of Bauer to claim that not enough is known about this subject, since there seems to be no end to the writing of books about the Holocaust. But the question that interests him, he makes clear, is not the motives and actions of the Germans, or the mechanics of the Holocaust. “We know that the Jews were murdered—for that we do not need more research,” he writes. What we do need to learn, rather, is “how the Jews lived before they were murdered, [and] what were their reactions in the face of the sudden, unexpected, and, for them, inexplicable assault on their lives by a power whose policies they did not and could not understand.”

The Death of the Shtetl does not claim to be a complete answer to those questions. One of its strengths is Bauer’s readiness to admit when he is baffled—by lack of evidence, or by the impossibility of finding patterns in the evidence. The methodological problems in writing the history of the shtetlach at the end of their existence are, of course, enormous. Almost all of the Jews who had lived in shtetls—which Bauer helpfully defines as not villages but towns, with Jewish populations ranging from 1,000 to 15,000—were killed during the World War II, mostly in 1941 and 1942. Contemporary written documents are almost nonexistent. There were thousands of survivors, and very many of them recorded their testimonies; but their stories are, by definition, exceptions, not the rule. In addition, Bauer points out, survivors were usually “people with a middle-class background and not … the vast majority of the poorer members of the Jewish population,” for the simple reason that “people with more property or wealth” were at an advantage “when they tried to find hiding places in the forests or with peasants who wanted to be paid for the food they supplied.”

In the face of these obstacles, Bauer limits his focus to one region of Jewish Eastern Europe: the marches, or kresy, of eastern Poland. Of prewar Poland’s 3.3 million Jews, 1.3 million lived in the kresy, 60 percent of whom lived in shtetlach. Bauer’s chosen region contained no large cities, so the experience of the Jews of Warsaw and Vilna, with their urban ghettos, is not part of his book. Even more significant, the kresy were the part of Poland that bordered on the Soviet Union, and the region had an extremely troubled geopolitical history. Before World War I, the area had been divided between the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires; when the empires disappeared and the region was fought over in a series of murderous invasions and civil wars, as Soviet Russia, Ukraine, and Poland each tried to assert control.

By the 1920s, the area had been incorporated into Poland, but the residual nationalist hatreds were intense. In the kresy, Poles were in a minority, struggling with Belorussians and Ukrainians to define the region’s culture and allegiances. What all these groups had in common was anti-Semitism, both the traditional kind based on religious, cultural, and economic conflicts, and a new nationalist and racist kind that drew inspiration from Nazi Germany. By the 1930s, the life of Jews in the shtetlach was already a different universe from Fiddler on the Roof: they were living in what Bauer calls a “failed state,” suffering from the global fallout of the Great Depression, and deeply worried about the future.” There was no easy way to escape the shtetl,” Bauer writes, “and almost everyone wanted to escape.” One result was that shtetl life became intensely politicized, with Zionists urging emigration to Palestine and socialists urging revolution. But Palestine, under British rule, was closed to Jews, and the Polish socialist parties held their Jewish comrades at arm’s length.

This prolonged crisis came to a dramatic end in September 1939, when the Germans and the Soviets, according to a secret agreement, divided Poland between them. Where the Germans took control, as in Warsaw, killing and ghettoization of Jews began immediately, though the Holocaust itself was still to come. But the kresy fell to the Soviet sphere, and there the situation was more complex—and in some ways, Bauer writes, more troubling. The Communists were hostile in principle to Jewish communal life, and immediately broke up the shtetl’s Jewish institutions. But Soviets were also opposed, in theory and at this point usually in practice, to anti-Semitism, and they brought access to a new culture and what looked like a new economic model.

Most important, the Jews often welcomed the Soviets as protectors against Germany and against their Ukrainian and Belorussian neighbors. Some shtetlach built triumphal arches to greet the Red Army, and in the town of Baranowicze “people kissed the soldiers’ dirty boots.” More surprising is that the Jews acquiesced in the Sovietization of their lives: Hebrew schools and yeshivas were closed, holidays were no longer observed, Bibles and prayer books were banned, and “most synagogues became clubs, cinemas, storage places, and the like.” Significantly, however, many Jews continued to keep kosher, since they could do so at home, in private.

“So a rich ethnic and religious tradition, which had developed into a distinct culture over many centuries, collapsed like a house of cards within a few weeks,” Bauer writes. “Can totalitarian regimes eradicate cultures that easily? This is a frightening and worrying thought.” He offers a few explanations of why the Soviets were so successful in erasing Jewish life in the shtetl—the economic situation, the threat of Nazism, the promise of an end to anti-Semitism—but he concludes, here as elsewhere, that “I am not at all satisfied with my own explanations. I am deeply worried as a Jew by the ease with which Jewish culture was destroyed by a totalitarian regime with both attractions and existential threats.”

What would have happened to the shtetl in the long term, under Soviet rule, is impossible to know. In June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and cultural threats were replaced by physical destruction. As promised, Bauer devotes little space to the killing of the shtetls’ Jews, simply noting that, in most places, the Jews were rounded up and shot in a series of major “actions” between summer 1941 and late 1942. The murders were carried out by a combination of German and local—Polish, Ukrainian or Belorussian—units, and the hostility of the surrounding population meant that it was virtually impossible for the Jews to resist or flee. There was simply no place to go.

Anyone who has wondered why—in a question much asked after the war, above all by Jews—the Jews of the shtetlach did not “fight back” need only read Bauer’s account of what happened in Tuczyn, on September 24, 1942. When German and Ukrainian soldiers surrounded the town, the head of the Judenrat called a meeting and advised the Jews to burn the ghetto and run for the nearby forest. Most did so—many Jews, including the rabbi, chose to jump into the flames—and some 2,000 people managed to run away. In the following days, most of the women and children were caught by the Ukrainians and killed with axes and pitchforks. Others starved, or returned to Tuczyn to look for food and were killed there. Sixty men tried to form a fighting unit but couldn’t find any partisans in the area. At the end of the war, Bauer says, 20 survivors emerged from the forest: 1 percent of the original escapees. In Poland in 1942, resistance was as futile as passivity.

That only began to change in 1943, as the Germans were beaten back by the resurgent Red Army. The Soviets managed to establish effective partisan units in the forests and marshes of the kresy, and while many of these were themselves brutally anti-Semitic, they offered at least a shred of hope for the few thousand Jews who had managed to survive until then. Bauer devotes fascinating chapters to the partisans—including the famous Bielski group, featured in the recent movie Defiance—and to the few heroic neighbors, many of them pious Christians, who helped and hid Jews. He sheds much light on the dark subject of the Judenräte, the Jewish Councils that tried to run the shtetlach and ghettos under Nazi rule, showing that their leaders included both villains and heroes.

But in the end, Bauer comes to the conclusion, unsettling for the historian and for readers of history, that these stories do not show any kind of pattern or lead to any conclusion. One shtetl collapsed in despair while another, superficially no different, found the strength to practice what Bauer calls Amidah or “standing up”—cultural resistance and self-help. Some Judenrat leaders were thieves and collaborators, while others helped organize resistance, and still others committed suicide rather than hand over Jews to be killed. Some Ukrainians hid and fed Jews, at great risk to themselves and their families, while others informed on hidden Jews or killed them for their possessions. In the face of such randomness, Bauer writes, “I believe that we have to take recourse to explanations that may sound unusual coming from a professional historian[:] character, chance, and luck.” Which may be another way of saying that, while we can record the death of the shtetl, we can never really understand it.

Please consider giving to the American Jewish World Service’s Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund, here. Alternatively, you can text “Haiti” to 90999 to automatically donate $10 to the American Red Cross’s relief efforts.

Relatedly, this letter to the editors of the New York Times appeared today:

The lack of security protecting Auschwitz is unlikely to be “perplexing” to anyone who has visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. Visitors are far more likely to be perplexed if not appalled by the utter disrepair of the Birkenau site and the snack bar selling hot dogs and ice cream at Auschwitz.

Poland Questions Two Thieves Over Auschwitz Sign Theft [Haaretz]
Auschwitz Draws in Record Number of Visitors in 2009 [Ynet]

A recent entry reads: “Grandpa says that the war will soon be over. He says that soldiers also have families. How is that possible? They have a family, but they kill families.” Zytomirski’s 1,700-plus friends, most of whom are Polish, use the site to respond with a touching sincerity to a tragedy most of them were not alive to see: “I can’t imagine such beastliness,” wrote one. “They have no heart,” wrote another. Explains Buzek: “People write things on Henio’s page that we don’t speak about every day.”

While many young Holocaust victims have been declared “the next Anne Frank,” and young adult Holocaust literature remains a flourishing genre, Buzek’s use of Web 2.0 to illuminate Zytomirski’s story has touched a new chord. “Maybe I’m naïve, but I have a good feeling that Henio’s entries can make the world a slightly better place. They are making a contribution to ensure that something like the Holocaust never happens again.”

Young Holocaust Victim Has Over 1,700 Friends on Facebook [Deutsche Welle]

Yesterday, London’s Jewish Chronicle got the Polish pol, Michal Kaminski, to admit he’d worn the insignia of a violently anti-Semitic nationalist party from the 1930s. Today, the Guardian’s editorial board wheeled around to attack David Cameron, the Conservatives’ leader, for abetting the whole situation. And who does the paper invoke to make Cameron feel extra-special bad? Colin Powell, who apparently told the Latvians to knock off their Nazi memorial rallies when they were negotiating to join NATO. “If a Republican U.S. secretary of state can grasp a simple truth about Latvia’s past, why can’t David Cameron?” the editorial asks.

Latvian Waffen-SS: No Ifs, No Buts [Guardian]
Previously: British Actor Upsets Poles

First, a new program requires Polish prison inmates to take part in the rehabilitation of Jewish sites throughout the country. Hopefully this gig will be an improvement on whatever prisoners were forced to do before—otherwise the plan might be creating a new population of future ex-cons with a bone to pick against the Jews.

Meanwhile, in the latest attempt to repurpose something Nazi-related, the mayor of Jaslo, a southeastern Polish town, has decided to cut down a 67-year-old tree originally planted to mark Hitler’s birthday and replace it with a tree commemorating Polish soldiers killed by Soviet forces. It’s unclear whether honoring the dead by killing a tree is an act of vengeance or merely a misguided gesture.

And over in Warsaw, provocative Israeli film artist Yael Bartana has started construction on a mock kibbutz, as an attempt to “revive the Jewish spirit again.” (As opposed to the socialist spirit, which, presumably, is long past rekindling.) And elsewhere in town, a Reform synagogue has hired Poland’s first openly gay rabbi, Aaron Katz. The remarkable Katz has made quite an evolution, from a bearded Orthodox rabbi with a wife and kids in Sweden, to a clean-shaven man hosting dinner parties with his partner, Kevin Gleason, a convert and former reality-TV producer. Mazel tov!

And that’s all from Poland.

Polish Convicts to Renovate Jewish Sites [JPost]
Hitler’s Tree to Get the Axe [Arutz Sheva]
Israeli Artist Builds Mock Kibbutz in Heart of Polish Capital [AP]
Poland Gets 1st Openly Gay Rabbi [Fox News]

Virtual Shtetl [Museum of the History of Polish Jews]
High-Tech Edge for Poland’s Jewish History [AFP]

Growing up, Ann Kirschner heard virtually nothing about her mother’s life before 1946. She knew only that before emigrating to the United States just after the war, Sala Kirschner, née Garncarz, had grown up in the Polish town of Sosnowiec, that she’d somehow survived a Nazi camp, and that she had no desire to ever set foot on Polish soil again.

All that changed in 1991 when, on the eve of triple bypass surgery, Sala came to Kirschner with an old cardboard box containing a diary, photographs, and over three hundred letters she’d received while imprisoned in Nazi work camps from 1940 to 1945. “What do you want to know?” she asked, prepared, at last, to answer all her daughter’s questions.

Armed at last with information about her mother’s past, Kirschner began to further research the places and events the letters described or alluded to (that research would ultimately bring her to write the book Sala’s Gift: My Mother’s Holocaust Story, and to create, with the New York Public Library, a traveling exhibit of the letters and documents). Then, in 1994, she decided to travel to Poland so she could see those places close up. Much to her amazement, her mother said she’d like to go, too.

Kirschner speaks with Nextbook about that trip, which proved quite harrowing, and about a return trip this past summer which upended many of her first impressions.

Left: Postcard from Raizel Garncarz. This is Raizel’s first letter from a camp, telling Sala that she and their sister Blima were forcibly separated from their parents. The “Z” stamp indicates that the letter was censored.

Center: First page of Sala’s diary, October 28, 1940, “From the time of departure from Sosnowiec [Poland].”

Right: Birthday card, March 5, 1944. In 1944 and 1945, Sala received no mail from the outside world, only birthday greetings that were smuggled from one room of the camp to another.

Photo: Music & Menorah by Jurek Durczak; some rights reserved.