Dear Great-Grandfather Wolf and Great-Grandmother Bascha,
Though I have never written to you, I have carried your image and felt your comforting presence ever since that first day when your son, Shimon, told me about you.
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One day, when I was very young, I sat upon Shimon’s knee. Looking down urgently, but with deep affection, he said to me, “Varn, [he always called me Varn through his distinctive Polish accent] you are named after my father, Wolf Mahler. I lived in Krosno, Poland with my father, Wolf, and my mother, Bascha, and 13 brothers and sisters, and aunts, uncles, and cousins.”
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Shimon talked about all of you with pride, but as he told me this, he seemed rather sad. I asked him if you still lived in Poland, and he responded that his mother had died of a heart attack in 1934, and his father and most of the remainder of his family were no longer alive.
When I asked him how they had died, he told me that they had all been killed by people called “Nazis.” I questioned why the Nazis killed our family, and he responded, “Because they were Jews.”
Those words have reverberated in my mind, haunting me ever since.
According to Ashkenazi [European heritage] Jewish tradition, a newborn infant is given a name in honor of a deceased relative. The name is formed by taking the entire name or just the initial letter of the ancestor’s name. I had the good fortune of being named after you, great-grandfather Wolf.
As it has turned out over the years, you not only gave me my name, but you and Bascha also gave me a sense of history and a sense of my identity.
Shimon left Krosno with three sisters toward the end of 1912, bound for New York City, leaving you and his remaining family members. Already in this country was one older brother. As he left, a series of pogroms targeting Jews had spread throughout the area. He often explained to me that he could only travel by night, with darkness as his shield, to avoid being attacked and beaten by people who hated Jews.
He arrived in the United States on New Year’s Eve in a city filled with gleaming lights and frenetic activity and with his own heart filled with hope for a new life.
Shimon returned to Krosno with my grandmother, Eva, in 1929 to a joyous homecoming. This was the first time he had seen you since he left Poland. He took with him an early home movie camera to record you on film. While in Poland, he promised that once back in the United States, he would try to earn enough money to send for his remaining family members who wished to join him, but history would thwart his plans.
During that happy reunion, he had no way of knowing that this was the last time he would ever see you alive. Just ten years later, on September the 1st, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland.
Shimon heard the news while sitting in the kitchen of his home in Brooklyn, New York. He was so infuriated, so frightened, and so incensed that he took the large radio from the table, lifted it above his head, and violently hurled it against a wall. He knew what this invasion meant. He knew it signaled the end of the Jewish population in Europe as he had known it. He knew it meant certain death for people he had grown up with, people he had loved, and people who had loved him.
Shimon’s fears soon became real. He eventually learned from a brother who escaped into the woods with his wife and young son that Nazi soldiers murdered many members of his family either on the streets of Krosno or about 20 kilometers away in a mass grave in the forest. The Nazis dumped others up a small hill in the Krosno Jewish cemetery.
The Nazis murdered you, Wolf, in the Krosno ghetto. They eventually loaded other friends and relatives into cattle cars and transported them to Auschwitz and Belzec concentration camps.
Shimon never fully recovered from those days. Though he kept the faces and voices from his homeland within him throughout his life, the Nazis also invaded my grandfather’s heart, killing a part of him forever. My mother, Blanche, told me that Shimon became increasingly introspective, less spontaneous, and less optimistic about what the future would hold.
After the war and continuing through today, virtually no Jews reside in Krosno or all of southwestern Poland.
I recently looked up the word “holocaust” in the dictionary. Among the listings was the definition: “genocidal slaughter.” As I read this, the same nagging questions came to me as they did that first day Shimon told me about your death — questions concerning the very nature of human aggression, our ability for compassion, and, to those generations following World War II, our capacity to prevent similar tragedies in the future.
I fear the world is repeating many of the mistakes of the past. With the continuing rise of fascist nationalist movements throughout the world, viral forms of racism persist. “Ethnic cleansing,” spurred by religious extremism in many forms, has become the sanitized term for hatred, forced expulsions, relocations, invasions, and murder.
As you know, I am by no means a very religious person, though I strive to become more spiritual and connected to you. Since Shimon first talked about his family to me many years ago, I knew that before the end of my days, for me to be able to say that I had truly accomplished all I needed to accomplish in this world, I needed to travel back to Krosno.
I wanted to walk upon the soil that you once walked upon, to witness the hallowed ground on which you prayed, and to feel the Polish sun nurturing me as it once nurtured and illuminated you — that same sun which they eclipsed from you all too soon.
So in summer 2008 I traveled to Krosno. I took with me a DVD version of the film Shimon and Eva took of you back in 1929. Upon approaching the town from the bus I took from Krakow, I felt as though I were returning home, even though I had never been.
Then I saw it, and as I did, tears came to my eyes. I was at the entrance of Market Square, the same square Shimon filmed in 1929, as happy family members and other residents of Krosno shopped in the open air surrounded by horse-drawn carts and vendors’ kiosks selling fresh produce and kosher meats.
I didn’t see any outdoor vendors this time, but I sat down on a small bench and took in the sweet fragrances of flowers and vibrant pines and the delightful foods from cafes wafting around me. The beautiful old buildings transported me back to a happy time when you walked peacefully and unencumbered on these same plaza grounds. I reached down beside me and picked up a small stone, a remembrance of you to take with me wherever I go.
I have returned several times to Krosno. My good friend, Katarzyna (Kasia) Krepulec-Nowak from the Muzeum Podkarpackie w Krosnie (Subcarpathian Museum of Krosno) has invited me back to provide a narrated viewing of our family film to museum audiences and local high school assemblies.
Echoes from the past
I believe that the world has entered an era where we can make direct and inextricably linked connections between European fascism of the 1920s through the 1940s and U.S., Middle Eastern, and European fascism in the 20th century through the current age.
German nationalism, for example, which resulted in the Second World War, was constructed by a party and its leader who manipulated a fearful and angry population to scapegoat others – primarily Jews, but also homosexuals and Roma – for the nation’s severe economic problems.
Donald Trump’s march to the White House in 2016 and subsequent attempts to recapture the presidency centered on promoting a form of extreme nationalism (jingoism, chauvinism) intent on exciting xenophobic and racist fears and ideologies.
During Donald Trump’s three runs for the presidency, he attempted to appease his base of supporters, especially conservative white Christian nationalists, by continually attacking Muslims and scapegoating immigrants of color coming from the southern border and from so-called “sh*thole countries,” calling them “vermin” who are “polluting the blood of our country.”
In the closing days of his third run for the White House, Trump argued for locking up the “enemies from within,” which means anyone who opposed him. He specifically singled out Senate Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, former Speaker of the House and current Speaker Emerita.
Donald J. Trump scores extraordinarily high on the fascism scale originated by political scientist Lawrence Britt, who enumerates 14 tenets of fascism.
His longest-serving chief staff during his first term, General John Kelly, said that he meets the definition of a fascist.
Retired Army general and former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, Mark Milley, told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is “fascist to the core.”
Adolf Hitler, along with Herman Göring, Ernst Röhm, Erich Ludendorff and other Kampfbund leaders, staged the so-called “Beer Hall Putch,” a coup d’état in Munich, Germany between November 8 and 9, 1923
The insurrectionists arrested members of the Munich City Council, and 600 paramilitary SA (Sturmabteilung) members occupied army headquarters. Others rampaged through Munich, targeting Jewish property.
The coup attempt failed, some Nazis were killed, and Hitler was shot in the left arm. SA leader Ernst Röhm was jailed briefly, though soon paroled. Hitler was sentenced to one year in Landsberg Prison and served eight months. There he wrote his manifesto, Mein Kampf (My Struggle).
Donald Trump, along with Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), and lawyer Rudy Giuliani, incited a coup d’état at the Capitol Building in Washington, DC. on January 6, 2021, to try to keep Trump in power.
Waving American flags, battle flags of the Confederacy, and “Don’t Tread on Me” Gadsden flags, these domestic terrorists smashed windows and entered the building in large numbers, calling for Vice President Mike Pence and House Leader Nancy Pelosi to be hung. They desecrated Congressional offices, stole computers with highly classified information, and forced representatives, senators, and their staffs into dangerous lockdowns.
One Capitol Hill police officer was murdered with a fire extinguisher to his head while several others suffered injuries, including one who cried out for his life as the mob held him wedged between a doorway. One terrorist was shot and killed, and three others suffered health-related fatalities.
Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) was a state-sponsored action against Jews, a pogrom planned and executed by SA paramilitary forces and civilians throughout Nazi Germany on November 9 and 10, 1938. Most German law enforcement officials looked on without intervening.
Kristallnachmittag (The Afternoon of Broken Glass) was a government-sponsored action against the United States Constitution and the legal transition of power. It was planned at the highest ranks of the U.S. government and executed by cult-following insurrectionists at the Capitol in Washington, DC.
Legislative headquarters
Exactly four weeks after Hitler’s swearing-in as Chancellor of Germany, the German Reichstag (Parliament) building was torched in an arson attack. The Nazi government blamed it on a conspiracy by communist agitators.
Many historians, however, assert that the German Nazi paramilitary force, the SA, intentionally set the fire to create further backlash toward the communists and shore up Nazi control and domination, thereby suspending most civil liberties and public opposition.
Likewise, Donald Trump and many American right-wing commentators, media hosts (like Fox News’ Lou Dobbs and Laura Ingraham), and Republican legislators (like Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL)), put forth with no evidence that the mob was infiltrated by left-wing Antifa protestors who instigated the riot and property destruction rather than the Trump sycophants.
Like the Nazis who blamed communists for what seems likely its own acts of destruction on the Reichstag, some ultra-conservative Republicans attempted to assuage blame for the reckless and unconscionable violence of their own supporters.
Trump learned well from Nazi chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, who advised: “Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty.”
So yes, these are again perilous times, great-grandparents. I feel like a partisan in Nazi-occupied Poland. Rather than carrying loaded rifles, my comrades and I are armed with ideas and ideals in our attempt to rid ourselves of the evil around us. No, this is not hyperbole, for we in the United States stand at an existential moment in our history.
Back when Shimon first told me about you and his Polish home, a calm voice called me, a voice grew ever louder and more confident as I grew older. I have answered that call you sent me to fulfill the promise of “never again.”
The knowledge of what happened to you in Poland circulates around my consciousness and soul like blood circulates through my body. The positive actions I and other progressive people are taking to counter the recurrence of the past feels cleansing, healing, and invigorating to my soul.
And I am certain we will succeed.
I have learned many lessons in my studies of genocides perpetrated through the ages. Strong leaders whip up sentiments by employing dehumanizing terminology and images. They stereotype and scapegoat entire groups while other citizens or entire nations look on, often refusing to intervene.
Democracy demands an educated electorate. Democracy demands responsibility on the part of the electorate to critically examine their politicians and the issues of the day so they can make truly informed decisions. Democracy demands us never to relinquish our freedom and authority for some promise of a comfortable security by returning to a fairytale past.
Patriarchal Christian white supremacy is a major threat to democracy, and democracy is the primary cure for patriarchal white supremacy.
I have returned now on eight separate occasions to study and to present your story to the people of Poland in my effort to understand and work for the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam, to heal and repair the world.
With love forever,
Warren
To see my family’s 1929 film of Krosno, Poland’s Jewish community at the U.S. Holocaust Museum and Memorial website, CLICK HERE.
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