Louise Steinman

an excerpt from "The Crooked Mirror"

WANNSEE CONFERENCE ( ©.2009 Louise Steinman)

On January 20, 1942, in an elegant villa on the shores of Berlin’s Lake Wannsee, the Nazi elite under the chairmanship of Reinhard Heydrich—head of the Reich Security office—and his “Jewish expert”—Adolf Eichmann-- gathered to discuss implementation of the so-called “final solution to the Jewish question.” Sixty years later, in another Wannsee villa—an altogether different kind of gathering takes place. One those criminal minds would never have dared imagine.

This was the 4th annual meeting of One by One, a group founded by descendants of “survivors, perpetrators, bystanders, and resisters” to explore the legacy of the Holocaust and the Nazi regime. One by One’s expanded mission is less specific and more inclusive-- to “transform the legacies of conflict, war and genocide through dialogue.”

What brought me—an American Jew who grew up in Los Angeles-- to Wannsee? My mother—daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants-- could barely utter the word ‘Poland’—so deep was her bitterness toward the Poles and her grief at the loss. If anything, my antipathy to Poles trumped my discomfort and rage at Germans. Yet I’d never met any Poles, nor did I know much about Polish history.

In fall 2000, at the invitation of L.A. rabbi, Don Singer, I attended a week-long “Bearing Witness Retreat” at Auschwitz-Birkenau, sponsored by the Zen Peacemaker Order. I went to Birkenau as a skeptic—I came away confused and inspired by the dialogue among the inter-faith and international gathering. Most significantly, I discovered the encumbrance of my own unexamined prejudices. To take an honest look at them had brought me here to Wannsee.

Rabbi Singer had long been interested in Polish- Jewish reconciliation— a concept I could not begin to comprehend. After all, there weren’t any Jews left in Poland! Three million Polish Jews had been wiped off the face of the map. Yet Rabbi Singer told me, “When I went to Poland for the first time and met some Polish people, I realized they had a bum rap. I felt somehow we knew them, we understood them...”

A bum rap? Wasn’t it common knowledge that the Poles were worse anti-Semites than the Germans? The Nazis must have located their extermination camps in Poland for a reason. My maternal great-grandfather was the Grand Rebbe of Radomsk, Poland. Over 10,000 Jews from Radomsk—among them unnamed relatives—were murdered in the Holocaust. Even after the war, the Poles were murdering Jews. The infamous pogram in the town of Kielce, Poland, in July 1946, convinced those Polish Jews who’d survived the war to flee the country.

I knew next to nothing about the Polish side of my family. Poland was the blank page in my ancestral story. Just before I left for Birkenau I learned of the existence—courtesy of Google--of the Radomsk Yizkor (Memory) Book, an account-- compiled by survivors of the Shoah-- of the Jewish community in Radomsk.
In the yizkor book I encountered a lively community where Zionists and Bundists, Hasids and Poles, artists and shoemakers lived their lives shoulder to shoulder. There are accounts of Poles who harmed Jews during the war, but there are also tales of those who helped. As Eva Hoffmann has written, “in the impossible calculus of that time, it took at least several people to save a Jewish life; it took only one person to cause the deaths of many.”

Among the fifty or so of us who came to Wansee were an elderly Polish survivor of Ravensbruck; a granddaughter of a German resistor; a survivor of Theresienstadt; the grand-niece of the SS commandant of France, a woman whose baptized Jewish father was murdered in Auschwitz; a former member of the Hitler youth; a German woman whose mother was in the SS in Warsaw; a Dutch woman whose Jewish parents placed her – a baby of 9 months—in the safekeeping of good Christians before they themselves were deported and murdered. An Armenian human rights activist would report to us on Armenian-Turkish reconciliation. There would be reports about on-going dialogue groups in Bosnia. A Jewish woman, who wore a black bowler hat and many earrings, would tell us about her work with violent young Neo-Nazis in Berlin.

We were from Rome and San Diego, from Amsterdam, Cape Town and Munich. We were from Berlin and Los Angeles and Warsaw and Brooklyn. This was a group of people called upon—for many reasons-- to tackle the burdensome legacy of a traumatic past, in the service of breaking what some One by One members call “the conspiracy of silence.”

Silence does not take “sides.” Beate, 37, —who grew up in East Berlin --suffered the silence passed down from her grandfather, a German anti-Fascist who served as a courier for the resistance. Betrayed, he spent two years in Buchenwald. After the war, the GDR government deemed him not sufficiently enthusiastic about Communism, and incarcerated him in a labor camp for five years. A bitter, broken man, he became violent towards his family.

Cheryl, who grew up in Manhattan, was thirteen before she learned both her parents were concentration camp survivors: “It was as if I had landed on the moon all by myself out of an egg carton." Rozette grew up in Amsterdam with foster parents who could tell her nothing about her family history. “I was always on the search but I didn’t know what I was searching for. I had no ‘told’ history.”

Among the many possibilities on the conference agenda, I was most eager to participate in a workshop on German-Polish-Jewish dialogue.

Mona was our workshop leader. It was her mother who had served with the SS in Warsaw, and it has long been her desire to bring together Germans, Jews, and Poles in dialogue. Before you consider passing judgment on her—consider the barest details of her story. Mona’s SS mother turned her twisted rage against her own daughter, in fact—tried to kill her. She taunted her daughter: “if you were alive in Hitler’s time he would have gassed you like the Jews.” Mona fled her home at 14. With a lot of good therapy, she has created an admirable life for herself and her daughter. If there is ever a window broken at the synagogue in her gritty Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg, you can count on Mona to stand guard through the night shoulder-to-shoulder with like-minded friends.

We each briefly stated why we were here. Cheryl revealed that she had decided to join the workshop just two minutes before it began. Intensely conflicted, she even phoned a trusted friend in Colorado-- another daughter of survivors—to ask, “"Are we Polish?”
"Why-- who wants to know?" her friend responded. Then, “Well, yes. We are of Polish descent. Our ancestors lived there for centuries. We still eat the food.”

Cheryl was here with us, but very uneasy. “Both my parents were from Poland,” she said. “My father’s family owned the Grand Hotel in a small town. After the war, when he straggled back to his town, his house… his childhood friends shot at him. My question is, ‘do the Poles want us back?’”

It was Zofia’s turn. I met Zofia, 86, two years earlier at the Auschwitz retreat. She was a courier for the Polish resistance before she was captured, and is now a sculptor of renown in Poland. Zofia is beautiful, tough and serene. Dorota, her young compatriot, translated: “From Ravensbruck, where I was held for five years, we were led on a forced march in the snow at the end of the war. Beside us, fleeing the Soviets, marched the German Army. From above, we were bombed by Allied planes. Soldiers and prisoners—bombed together. I looked at the faces of the soldiers and I saw the depths of their suffering—these people who had destroyed my life and destroyed my country. I thought to myself, “this is the fate of all humanity sent to war by fanatical leaders. I thought that we had been made equal by suffering. I know that dialogue is a necessity. Indeed—it is the only way for us to be saved.”

Mona placed stacks of index cards on the table and asked each of us to write down—in a few sentences per card-- the emotions, historical issues, points of fact—that we would like to put on the agenda in the future. I immediately began scribbling. I wanted to talk about the Kielce pogrom. I wanted to talk about the Polish rescuer Jan Karski. About restoring Jewish cemeteries and historical monuments together. I wanted to talk about the despair and the excitement I felt in attempting this dialogue. One of Dorota’s cards read: “Compassion is a very small cake,” her metaphor for the way Poles and Jews compete for recognition of what they suffered. On another she wrote: “accusations become counter-effective if they come too fast and too many.”

We filled many hours and many index cards. Just before our dinner break, Cheryl--overwhelmed by emotion—left the room. I encountered her later that evening, after the exhausting session was finally over. We headed towards town to unwind, debrief.

Over a glass of wine, Cheryl confessed that the person who’d made her most uncomfortable in the workshop—was me. I was incredulous. Why? “Because you have so many strong feelings about Poland. Issues to discuss. Questions to raise. I have no relationship to Poland. I’ve never allowed myself to think about Poland. Poland is where everything was lost.”

When we returned to the villa at midnight, the front door was locked. We contemplated throwing pebbles at someone’s window. On the back terrace, we discovered Dorota and Magda—her friend, also Polish-- smoking in the dark. We joined them. At first, an uneasy silence. Then Dorota asked shyly, “Cheryl, why didn’t you return to the workshop after dinner?” The question caught Cheryl by surprise. “Why do you ask? Did you notice I wasn’t there?” “Yes,” Dorota said, “ I missed you.” A pause. “ I was so happy when you said that you were Polish.”

I asked Dorota, “You were born after the war. What did it feel like to grow up in a Poland without Jews?”
“You could feel the absence,” she said softly. “it is like being part of a fabric where there is a huge hole torn out of the middle.” She told us about her own family—incarcerations for sheltering Jews during the war; disappearances and imprisonment during the Stalinist era.

We talked quietly long into the night. You must remember, we were sitting in the dark. We could see each other only in silhouette. In this way we grew more comfortable with one another. Moonlight shimmered off Lake Wannsee. It was my first intimate conversation with Poles of my generation, the first of what I hope will be many more. This is how we will learn each other’s stories, how we will rediscover our intertwined history. One by one.