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| Wound II by Anna Wojtczak |
So my son was
on a trip, a semester-long program in Israel, and then they traveled to Poland.
And they traveled to Poland for, I think, about ten days. And on this program,
he made a good friend, a new friend, named Mason. And when they got to Poland,
they were touring some of the centers of Jewish life before the war, and they
were also going to the camps. And on the third or fourth day of the time in
Poland, Mason disappeared for the day with one of the counselors on the
program.
And he wouldn't tell anyone where he was
going, and he came back and he wouldn't tell anyone where he had been. And then
he told my son, because they were friends or because my son noodged him a lot
to tell him. And this is what he told my son. He said, "My grandparents
were survivors. They were married three weeks before the deportation to
Auschwitz. And in Auschwitz they were separated, obviously, and he would go
every evening to the fence separating the men's and the women's sides of the
camps, to bring her a crust of bread or an extra potato if he could, or even
just to see her.
"Until my grandmother," he
said, "was transferred to a rabbit farm on the outskirts of Auschwitz."
The Nazis were doing experiments on rabbits that had to do with finding a cure
for typhus. "And the rabbit farm was run by a Polish man who noticed,
pretty early on, that the rabbits were getting better quality food and
attention and care than the Jewish slave laborers. So he started to sneak in
food for the Jewish slave laborers and the inmates.
"And then," Mason told my son,
"my grandmother cut her arm on a piece of barbed wire, and the cut became
infected. And it wasn't a serious infection, if you had antibiotics. But of
course, if you were a Jew in that place, in that time, there was no way you
were going to get antibiotics. So what did this Polish man who was running the
rabbit farm do? He cut his own arm open, and he placed his wound on her wound
so that he would get the infection that she had, and he became infected. And he
went to the Nazis, and he said, 'I'm one of your best managers. This rabbit
farm is very productive. If I die, you're gonna lose a lot of productivity. I
need medicine.' They gave him medicine, and he shared it with her. And he saved
her life."
So Mason said to my son, he said, "Where
was I, when I left the other day and I disappeared? I went to see that Polish
man. He's still alive and living on the outskirts of Warsaw, and I went to say,
thank you for my life. Thank you for my life."
Rabbi Ariel Burger
Source: https://onbeing.org/programs/ariel-burger-be-a-blessing/#transcript
Wound painting by Anna Wojtczak
https://twitter.com/richardfromla/status/1363314301893664770 Typical US ignorance. Croatia was a German puppet state, it run Jasenovac camp, committed terrible crimes. Ukraine had two parts - small Western Ukraine, nationalistic, anti-Polish, about 100 000 Christian victims, big Eastern Ukraine, exterminated by the Soviets (Holodomor) and plundered by Germans.Poland was the first enemy of Nazi Germany.
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/Ben_Ezra_Cohen/status/1363914672194416646 The text by Zaryn is much better than the tweet by Ben Ezra Cohen. There is one error by Zaryn - Auschwitz was a (cruel) concentration camps for Poles and a death camps for Jews.
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/WeOnlyGet1Earth/status/1364569593625399301 Poland is too antisemitic to visit. BTW Jews are being killed in the USA, not in Poland.
ReplyDelete