Merkos Shlichus in Poland Day 9

Gdansk.

The day started out a little shaky. We had a meeting at 11, but we didn’t realize the meeting was an hour and a half away, so we were already delayed. We had arranged for a translator to come with us to our meeting with us. He was an 18 year old boy, who wasn’t Jewish. When his grandmother moved to Gdansk, there were Germans, and Jews. The Jews befriended her, the Germans didn’t. She came to like the Jews, even though she was Catholic, and pushed her grandson to do the same. He goes to shul regularly, to help the Jews of the community, and does whatever he can, to help the elderly Jews of the community. When I asked him if his parents were happy with his behavior, he told me,

More pictures in the Extended Article!

“They generally don’t mind, but they don’t like that I don’t go to church.”

I asked him what he liked best about the Jews, he said,

“The old people are so special, and all the historical places like in Krakow etc…”

Moving on, we drove to a place called “Zelgoszcz”. The family there, consisted of a woman around 75 (too young to talk Yiddish!), her husband, who wasn’t Jewish, and later her son showed with his family and we put Tfilin on him, for the first time ever. The woman was lying in her bed, her left arm visibly swollen, later we found out she had cancer.

She told us her story through the translator. It goes as follows;

During the war, she and her family were in the Warsaw ghetto, she was two. Somehow she got separated from her family, she wasn’t really clear how though. She was brought to a camp in Belgium, where a polish SS officer, whose two year old daughter had died, decided to take her in as her own ( she later said she has a hard time understanding this, being that he had killed Jews in the camp as well). When she was thirteen, she moved back to Poland. Fast forward a couple of years, she’s now around 50, living in Poland, and she has a son around twelve. She has friends in the community, including some of the Jews there as well. They have some type of alter ceremony, for her twelve year old son, at the church. So she invited a couple of friends, including the Jewish ones. At the ceremony, she starting singing a Jewish song, that she remembers her mother singing to her when she was a baby. Her neighbor, and older Jewish woman, with she had been pretty close friends with over the years, comes over to her and says to her,

“You know, I used to sing that to my daughter when she was little, but we got separated during the war, and I’ve been looking for her ever since.”

So the other lady says,

“Let us compare documents and do some research.”

Turns out she was her mother.

After we left, the boy that was traveling with us, told me,

“I am extremely happy that I came today.”

We then drove three hours to Koszalin. We met two Jewish women there, one of them was married to a goy, he was there to. Also there was a friend who spoke English, who wasn’t a Jew, he was a German, but felt very bad, because his uncle was an SS officer. He said, his father and him don’t speak to his uncle because of their difference in views about the Jews. Later on during the meeting, we found out one of the women actually spoke French, so we had yet another way to communicate. The woman who spoke French, was pretty sure she was Jewish, but had no way to prove it. Her grandmother lived in Lithuania, before the war, and in Koszalin after, but where they were during the war she didn’t know. Her uncle’s son, whom she believes changed his name when he moved to Israel, was Yona Gora, and a Jew. She asked us how she can find documents to prove she is Jewish. We told her to email Yad Vashem, and contact the city hall in vilna, to find out if they had documents about her grandmother.

The other women, who was married to a non Jew, asked me why I it’s so hard for a non Jew, to get a Rabbi to teach them about Judaism. I answered,

“the reason it is hard is, Jews are not like Christians, who run after others to become like them. If someone wants to learn about Judaism, or convert, they have to show they are really interested and even though it is hard to follow up, they still prevailed.”

Then she told me her story, her grandmother was found during the war, a two year old, under a mattress, with a spear wound to the neck. Evidentially a German soldier was doing his last touches on the house, and probably just stuck the butt end of his rifle, through the mattress to make sure no one was hiding there. She was brought up by a polish family, who had informed her she was Jewish. Later on the woman did some research about her grandmother and found her parent’s passport in the city hall with her grandmother listed as their child. Her grandmother had been found in brisk. They later went to brisk and looked for the house her grandmother was born in, which was described in detail by the polish woman who found her. It was the last house standing from before the war, and they were getting set to demolish it.

As we were leaving the German guy told me,

“The woman wants her husband to convert, but he hesitates, because he is afraid of a Bris.

We then drove to Szczecin to sleep the night this time in a pretty high class hotel.

Day 9: Thursday 21st of Tamuz 24th of July.

Szczecin:

We went to the Jewish community center, which was right next door to the shul. Pretty much all the Jews we had to meet were there, like 10 of them. There was one really cute old man, who in his hey day must have been over 6 feet, because he was pretty big. He was 92. He was really funny. He said, he used to live in “veiss rusland”, in brisk. When we asked him why he moved to Poland after the war he said,

“Ver vilt voinen in veiss rusland!!”