No Forgetting The Past
Son of a Holocaust survivor tells of horrors of Polish towns remaining in denial
By STEVE CYMBROWITZ
F
or my late parents, Sam and
Sonia Cymbrowitz, Poland
was the place where they
met and fell in love. It was also the
place where they spent hellish
FIRST PERSON
years in a slave labor camp called
Warta in the town of Czestocova,
with my mother dipping her hands
into acid for hours each day mak-
ing bullets for the Nazis.
Outside these walls lived Pol-
and’s non-Jewish population: peo-
ple who, while Nazi-occupied, did-
n’t have to suffer the misfortune of
being imprisoned in a labor camp
or shipped off to Auschwitz or
Buchenwald, as my paternal grand-
father did, never to be seen again.
Were there some righteous
Gentiles in Poland who risked their
lives to hide their Jewish brethren?
Certainly yes.
Was there a significantly larger
Polish population who knew their
Jewish neighbors were being carted
away by the Nazis to labor and
concentration camps and who
remained silent, whether out of fear
or apathy or, worse, virulent anti-
Semitism? Also yes.
Poland’s president has just
signed into law a controversial bill
that makes it a crime to accuse that
nation of complicity in the Hol-
ocaust, meaning that using a term
like “Polish death camps” could
land you in prison. The law – offi-
cially called the Amended Act on
the Institute of National Rem-
embrance (or, more accurately,
national forgetfulness) – has right-
fully come under fire in the U.S.,
Israel and worldwide for its attempt
to rebrand Poland as an unwitting
victim of the Nazis.
For me, a child of Holocaust sur-
vivors, this law is more than a cal-
culated decision to whitewash his-
tory. I feel the pain and disgust on a
very personal level.
Jews in the Polish town of Demblin during World War II.
This law is a shameless and rep-
rehensible move to erase the suffer-
ing of my parents and relatives,
most of them people who never
lived to tell their own stories. By
sanitizing Poland’s role in the
Holocaust and assigning it unde-
served victimhood, we de-legit-
imize the actual victims: the three
million Polish Jews for whom
Poland became not only their place
of birth but their place of violent
death. That’s 90 percent of Pol-
and’s entire Jewish population.
A few years ago I visited my par-
ents’ old town, Demblin, and noted
that the Jewish population has, in
fact, already been erased. So has
every trace of Jewish culture: even
the synagogue and Jewish ceme-
tery are gone. All we have left are
the stories passed down to me and
the other children of survivors. I
imagine that in the current political
climate Poland holds itself blame-
less for Auschwitz, too.
The anti-Semitism that my par-
ents experienced in Poland during
World War II is the very anti-
Semitism from which Poland
seems intent on distancing itself
now. Unlike Germany, Poland has
never initiated reparations for the
survivors and families of those
whose lives were stolen during the
Holocaust. Perhaps that deliberate
omission should’ve clued us in on
the power of selective memory.
Every year in my Brooklyn
Assembly district I sponsor a con-
test for children in grades three
through 12 to express what they’ve
learned about the Holocaust. My
parents were the inspiration for this
Poland’s president has just signed into
law a controversial bill that makes it a
crime to accuse that nation of
complicity in the Holocaust, meaning
that using a term like “Polish death
camps” could land you in prison.
contest and, up until a few years
before they died, they regularly
attended the ceremony honoring
the student winners. I’ve invited
many Holocaust survivors to
address the children as well, so
they can see for themselves what
history books cannot possibly con-
vey.
W henever I speak to young
people about the Holocaust
I remind them that the past and
future are interconnected. Absorb
JEWISH TRIBUNE • FEBRUARY 23 - MARCH 1, 2018
the lessons of the past, I tell them,
and there’s hope that we can pre-
vent anti-Semitism and other
forms of bigotry from raging out
of control.
But if we ignore the past -- and
in the case of Poland’s leadership,
actually re-write the national his-
tory to obliterate the nation’s col-
lective guilt and shame – we’re in
very serious trouble as a civiliza-
tion. In a few generations, with the
survivors and children of survivors
gone, and history permanently
altered in at least one Eastern
European nation, who will be
around to tell the truth about the
Holocaust?
We should be very worried
indeed.
Assemblyman Steve Cymbrowitz
represnts the 45th A.D., which
covers parts of Brooklyn.
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