Landing in Poland is to leave behind the future
walking the cobblestones of Krakow is to take each step
back in time and conjure huddled poor peasants, traders,
scholars and merchants
plying the streets of Kazimierz.
Hard to imagine the buildings in 1558 and the worshippers
in the REMOH Shul,
dusty tomes of old printed editions,
few volumes of the Talmud committed to memory.
Darker shadows then force themselves on this idyllic scene
the sound of Nazi boots marching in perfect unison
on the cobbles reverberating to a sinister rhythm.
Now terrified Jews are being hurried to the Umschatzplatz
the elderly and weak, the children and screaming babies,
disposed of early on by Nazi guns, blood flows
between the cobbles, then silence.
80 years later
that silence lingers
death lingers here
the past never lets go
the silence is deafening
there is a pollution in memory that cannot be atoned for or purified.
How can we walk these streets without them
1943, after some 400 years of Jewish creativity
silence, no more.
Excised from the body of Krakow
as if the Christians of the Old City
could continue without its Jewish Quarter
the Ecclesia without the Synagogue
who do the priests vilify on christmas eve now?
The blindfolded woman of disgrace, the synagogue
is no longer standing next to the eclesia, who will take her place?
So Poles come to the old city Jewish Quarter
to hear hassidic music
taste blintzes, czulent and challah
and stare at hassidic dancers in cheap wall paintings
in order to appropriate some cultural memory
of “the other” the non-christian
in their desperate search for a pre-communist identity.
Then a group of Israeli student pass by being indoctrinated by their
teachers as to the powerlessness of diaspora Jews
and Krakow on their way to Auschwitz some 60 km away
as proof of the need for Zionism.
“Never again” is their doctrine
“Muscular Judaism” in their F 16ʼs and physical prowess.
Kina (Lamentation) for Krakow
Next a group of boisterous Hassidic students from New Monroe NY
davening by the tombs of the REMAH, the BACH, Tosafos Yom Tov,
and the Megale Amukos, hurriedly reciting Psalms
before being rushed to the bus for the next town,
a lightning trip around Europe to visit
Rabbinic grave sites, as if the Tremendum never occurred.
or that the only response to the Holocaust is to recreate
the shtetl of Eastern Europe
in New Square or Monroe (albeit with i-phones).
The groups walk the cobblestones with ease and comfort
oblivious to the red stains and silent walls.
The nightmare is complete
a surreal movie set
where memory is erased or appropriated
local cultural museums integrating Jewish memory
into a celebration Polish historical mosaic of cultural diversity.
The heart mourns their absence
manʼs inhumanity, indifference, callousness, to man
I hear the jackboots marching to my pulse
“eli eli lama azavtani?”
a paradoxical cry from both the psalmist as well as Jesus!
In this movie set the actors will never arrive, the director withdrew to heaven
and the lights donʼt work.
In the darkness of the old and new cemeteries, the dead look onthey
did not go up in flames and smoke-their blood congealed slowly
in the cold Polish soil and their names fade slowly
with time as the tombstones
face the cold silent winter nights.
Cry for the departed
the absent actors
the absent director
despite the cameras and movie directors
present to sell these stories
to a new generation of moviegoers.
Cry for the city
the quarter that hosted the holy rabbis
who studied through the Polish winter nights
Cry for the children deported and torn form their parents
by the Nazi horde.
Cry Cry.
