‘Hollyłódź’

Sunday morning (July 15) began early as our suitcase-clad group loaded onto the van to travel to Łódź (pronounced ‘woodge’), the third largest city in Poland. Łódź, which means ‘boat’ in Polish, is about 85 miles southwest of Warsaw and the journey was uneventful (except for me having to stop the van to pee. C’est la vie. Actually, ‘such is my life’ would be a more appropriate phrase.) When we arrived, we immediately went to the Łódź cemetery which is either the largest or second largest Jewish cemetery in Europe (after Salonika in Greece) with 200,000 tombs. Yet the largest Jewish tombstone in Europe is in this cemetery belonging to Izrael Poznański, the world famous textile factory owner. Poznański, who one of the most influential and successful Jewish businessmen in Poland (and Central Europe) during the turn of the 20^th century, established his factory in 1892, and this multi-building complex grew to encompass several acres. (Today the red-brick buildings have been turned into a grandiose shopping complex called ‘Manufaktura’ where we went for lunch. Our visit to the Poznański Palace, aka his “house,” located next door to the ‘Manufaktura,’ solidified our raised-eyebrow impressions of Poznański if his mausoleum of a tombstone wasn’t enough.)

Izrael Poznański's tomb in the Łódź cemetery 

Poznański's home, more appropriately called the  Poznański Palace.

            ‘Impressive’ is not the correct adjective to use to describe a cemetery, I am well-aware, but the sheer magnitude of the one in Łódź was truly impressive. Back on the van, we headed to the Radegast Holocaust Memorial (Radegast was the German name of the train station in Łódź where Jews from surrounding areas were dropped off to be herded into the Łódź ghetto). The memorial was completed in 2004 by a right-wing artist when Łódź also had a conservative, right wing mayor, thus (generally speaking) visitors sense the spirit of Polish suffering and victimhood throughout the site. The message is clear; what happened in Łódź was done by the Germans, thus in attempt to dissociate the Polish name of a town only German labels are used. Thus Łódź during the war was no longer Łódź, but Litzmannstadt, and the horrors that Litzmanstadt witnessed from 1939-1945 were German-instigated horrors (even though every occupied town, city, and region had its own collaborators—called shmaltzovniks in the Polish case). This emphasis that these places belonged to the Nazis even though they happened to be built on Polish soil quickly become a powerful movement since the fall of Communism; when any leader misspeaks and says ‘Polish death camps’ or ‘the Polish ghettos,’ representatives in the Polish government, embassies, powerful organizations etc. are quick to demand a correction (to ‘Nazi death camps in occupied Poland’) and an apology.

The Radegast memorial, est. 2004

The Radegast train station

At the gate.

            From the Radegast Memorial, we proceeded to the Park of Survivors where the Jan Karski mound is located with a statue of Jan Karski seated on his bench in the same style as the statues in Georgetown, New York, and Kielce. After hiking the mound, I was greatly saddened that the statue had been defaced with permanent marker. Karski’s kind, yet stoic face, had been blackened with a mustache and side-burns. Looking beyond the statue (and its unfortunate graffiti) one had a perfect view of several large concrete slabs that formed the shape of the Star of David and listed the names of the Polish Righteous Among the Nations (Sprawiedliwi Wsród Naradów Świata) who helped and/or saved Jews during the Holocaust. The names of thousands of Poles are written on those walls.

The Jan Karski Mound

Karski and I

From our successive visits of the morning, I think many of us were feeling the ‘weight’ of this recent history. Thus when it was finally time for lunch and I noticed a nearby sign labeled ‘Hollyłódź’ which sounds very similar to ‘Hollywood’ when pronounced in Polish, I instantly laughed at the intentional pun—glad that someone’s sense of humor could elicit one of the first genuine smiles of the day from me. It felt good to have a much-needed light moment before our journey continued to the town of Oświęcim, or Auschwitz in German.

Hollywood anyone?