Can the past be buried and erased completely? Or does the past continue to live on and course through the present like an unsuppressable force? Consider the following:

In the Winter 2017 edition of the Jewish Review of Books, there was a fascinating–and deeply disturbing–article by Devin E. Naar. His piece explores the author’s connection to his ancestral home of Thessaloniki, also called Solonika (alternatively spelled Solonica), Greece, as well the fate of its Jewish cemetery. The city became the cultural center of Greek Jews, descendants of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. Just as Vilna’s centrality to Ashkenazi culture was embodied in the expression “Jerusalem of Lithuania,” Solonika became known as the “Flower of the Balkans” and “La Madre de Israel” (The Mother of Israel).

In April 1941, Nazis occupied the city. Between March and August 1943, 90% of the city’s 50,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only a few thousand Jews from the city remained alive after the war. 

But the Nazis were not content to destroy the Jews of Solonika. They also aimed to erase the memory of the Jewish presence. So, as with many Jewish cemeteries in Poland, they destroyed the cemetery, which held close to 350,000 graves. This occurred in December 1942, before most of Solonika’s Jews were deported and murdered. The gravestones were cut up and used for building materials. 

The Greek government, Naar notes, was not innocent in the desecration. They wanted the 86 acres of prime real estate that the cemetery occupied. The municipality had, even before the Nazi occupation, planned to expropriate the land in order to expand the campus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. 

This is how the author describes the destruction:

At the municipality’s expense, five hundred workers with pickaxes laid waste to the Jewish cemetery of Salonica in December 1942. Marble flooded the market, and its price plummeted. Jewish tombstones were stacked in masons’ yards. With the permission of the director of antiquities of Macedonia and under the supervision of the metropolitan bishop and city officials, they were used to line latrines, pave roads, repair the Church of Saint Demetrius, lay the courtyard of National Theater of Northern Greece, construct the cafeteria of the Yacht Club of Thessaloniki, and, of course, build the university itself, whose medical students used leftover tombstones for their dissection tables. (https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2417/memory-and-desecration-in-salonica/)

Fragments from the Jewish cemetery of Solonika

It wasn’t until 2014 that the University acknowledged, by placing a memorial marker, that it was built on top of the Jewish cemetery. (http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/news/1.625677) Today, a local retired businessman, Jacky Benmayor, devotes his time to scouring the city for fragments of the old headstones. They can be found anywhere, in churches, buildings and sidewalks. When he finds one, he contacts the city archaeological service, which digs it out with shovels or and pickaxes. (https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-06-19/rescued-jewish-tombstones-thessaloniki)

Jacky Benmayor examining a remnant of Solonika’s Jewish cemetery

This article reminded me of another story, published shortly after I returned from Poland in 2015. That summer, Poland suffered a drought, causing the Vistula, the river that flows through Warsaw, to be at record low water level. And, lo and behold, guess what was revealed?: Jewish tombstones. They were believed to be from the Brodno cemetery, one of the town’s pre-war Jewish cemeteries. As in so many places, the Nazis used the tombstones as building materials. As a Jewish representative who participated in the recovery of the stones remarked, “The Vistula River is hiding no end of secrets. They are everywhere.”

Fragment of Jewish tombstone in the Vistula River

 Warsaw is the epitome of the veiled presence of the past. The Nazis razed the city during the Warsaw uprising of 1944. Very little of the original city remains. 

Warsaw following the Nazi destruction

It has been almost entirely rebuilt, including the so-called “Old Town,” which is but a post-war reconstruction of how it was depicted in an 18th century artist’s rendition of the city. (See https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/22/story-cities-warsaw-rebuilt-18th-century-paintings.) 

But if you know some history, and carry the past with you, you experience the present moment both in terms of absence as well as presence. Take the case of the Great Synagogue of Warsaw. It was a magnificent edifice, as depicted in this photo: 

The Nazis blew it up on May 16, 1943, to mark the end of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. After the war, the Polish Communist Party built a hideous structure called the “Blue Tower” in the spot where the synagogue stood. 

Next to the synagogue stood, and still stands, the Jewish Historical Institute. You can see the building housing the institute in the photo of the synagogue, above, and below, across the street from the Blue Tower.

The institute has been named in honor of Emmanuel Ringleblum, martyred historian of the Warsaw Ghetto. Today the institute stands next Blue Tower, instead of the beautiful synagogue. It serves as a continuing reminder of the Jewish presence in Warsaw, a city where once 400,000 Jews resided.

During our visit to Warsaw, we spent several hours at the institute, where dedicated workers, many of them young non Jewish Poles, devote themselves to preserving the memory of the Jewish past in Poland. It was at the institute where one of these researchers helped me discover the names of my great great grandparents and my great great great grandparents on my mother’s side. Next to the missing synagogue, I recovered my own past.

And if you know where to look, you can find traces of the Warsaw Ghetto, or at least the brick wall the Nazis built to imprison hundreds of thousands of people before most were gassed at Treblinka. The wall is still visible in two places. (The web site “Trip Advisor” ranks this as 33, or alternatively, 59, of 368 things to do in Warsaw.) I did not see this part of the wall, which is located in the courtyard of an apartment building. 

 

But I did find what I believe to be another part of the wall. These are the photographs I took, which reveal bullet marks, probably remnants from the Ghetto uprising and its suppression. 

 

 

Next to the wall, someone painted, in Polish and Yiddish, “This was the Ghetto.”

To go to Poland now, as a Jew, is to view the present through the lens of the past. Most of the Jews and the artifacts of their lives are gone. But not all. The past, no matter how deeply buried or erased, cannot remain hidden forever. The evidence is not readily visible, nor is it far from the surface. Remnants exist, others wait to be revealed. The past, though veiled, remains.