Thread by @BenMFreeman

During my 2012 trip to Eastern Europe, I spent three weeks in Poland exploring sites connected to both Jewish life and Jewish destruction.

In Warsaw, the capital of Poland, I visited the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery. This is one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe.

There are 250,000 graves as well as mass graves containing the bodies of Jewish victims of the Warsaw Ghetto. Like other Jewish cemeteries in Poland, it was used as a site for mass executions.

In an act of degradation and cruelty, the Nazis would use Jewish headstones to pave roads. This was done in various places in Poland, including in Krakow and the Plaszow labour camp (featured in Schindler’s List).

Since the fall of Communism, the cemetery has once again become a place to commemorate Jews.

Families of those murdered in the Shoah erect plaques in their memory, Jewish headstones, once used to pave roads, are now reclaimed and are displayed with respect.

There is one statue in the cemetery. It depicts Janusz Korczak. Korczak is someone I relate to on a very deep level. He was an author and educator. He ran the orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto. He provided parentless children with a refuge amidst the destruction of the ghetto.

His writings on the rights of the child are said to have inspired the United Nations Conventions on the Rights of the Child.

As we know, the Nazis indiscriminately murdered Jewish children en masse. 1.5 million Jewish children were murdered during the Holocaust.

On 5 August 1942, the Nazis came to deport the children in Korczak’s care. He had been offered an escape route of the ghetto but he refused and decided to stay with the children. He accompanied them to the trains.

He then got on the trains with them and then he travelled with them to Treblinka, all the while caring and tending to their needs. Helping calm these frightened children until their last moments. Korczak was murdered along with his children in Treblinka.

Mary Berg was an eyewitness to the deportations of Korczak and his children:

'Dr. Janusz Korczak's children's home is empty now. A few days ago we all stood at the window and watched the Germans surround the houses. Rows of children, holding each other by their little hands...

...began to walk out of the doorway. There were tiny tots of two or three years among them, while the oldest ones were perhaps thirteen. Each child carried the little bundle in his hand.'

The murder of 1.5 million Jewish children was an act of unbelievable barbarity and an attack on the very idea of Jewish life, Jewish continuity and the possibility of a Jewish future.