Photo Credit: archive

Over a decade ago, I went to Poland with my oldest daughter. I had hoped to support her as she learned. I didn’t need to learn anything because I had read EVERYTHING, knew EVERYTHING…and quickly learned that for all I had read, for all that I had learned, I knew nothing, needed to learn as much, and probably more than my daughter.

For eight days, I saw, I cried. I asked why…no, not why the Holocaust happened, but why Israel didn’t pull up all the graves, all the bones, all the ashes, and bring them home to Israel so that in death, they would get the respect denied to them in life. Why would we leave our precious souls in the cold grounds of Europe? And when I met some of the few Jews who remain in Poland today, I couldn’t stop myself from asking why they lived there still.

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I spoke to a woman who was born in 1946 in Poland. Are your parents still alive? I asked her. No, they died long ago, she answered. She even has a daughter living in Tel Aviv and when I heard that, I lost it, “WHAT are you doing HERE?” I asked her. She just smiled and said she knew no other home. I stopped asking people after that; it was something I knew that I would never understand.

For the past few weeks and months, I have been writing wherever I can, asking Jews of Europe to leave. I am one person, not a politician, not well known. A mother, a writer…one voice…but there are so many other voices saying the same thing that I have hoped they would listen. Some are, some have written that they are trying. Many know the time is fast coming.

For the last day or so, I have been staring at a picture that reminds me of Poland and the days I spent there. My first two days in Poland involved visiting cemeteries, many desecrated, all abandoned and decrepit. I visited mass graves in forests and parks, as Polish families played and picnicked nearby.

As we approached our first concentration camp on the tour – Maidanek. I walked next to my daughter and her friend and heard we were approaching “Har Effer” (or maybe it is called Har Ha’Effer). “Har” means mountain in Hebrew. I struggled in my mind with the word “effer” and finally asked my daughter, whose Hebrew will always be stronger than mine.

I looked ahead and saw what resembled a spaceship, a concrete mountain with wings coming out in a perfect circle…I thought for a second that it was a symbolic name – Mountain of Ashes…and then, to my horror, I realized it was most definitely not symbolic.

As we entered, I saw that indeed, there was a mountain of ashes…really…in the center and the spaceship-like structure was simply meant to keep the ashes on display despite wind and rain. I looked at this huge mountain…I had two thoughts.

The first was that Jews don’t do this – we don’t put our dead on display. What little dignity in death that mankind could have afforded them after they were rounded up, gassed, and cremated by the Nazis, was being stolen from them by the Poles and their “exhibit.”

My second thought quickly pushed the first away as reality finally hit. I walked over to one of the Israeli guides. Most of our conversations until that point had revolved around my asking why Israel allowed this cemetery to remain, desecrated like this. Why we had not taken the graves to Israel? Each time, he didn’t really give me an answer though he was patient enough to listen.

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Paula R. Stern is CEO of WritePoint Ltd., a leading technical writing company in Israel. Her personal blog, A Soldier's Mother, has been running since 2007. She lives in Maale Adumim with her husband and children, a dog, too many birds, and a desire to write.