This editor had the privilege of joining 20+ other members of the National Education Union on a tour of Poland on May 25-30, organised jointly with Stand up to Racism – the first of what will hopefully become a series of such trips.
Under the expert guidance of David Rosenberg and Julia Bard from the Jewish Socialists’ Group, we followed the route taken by 300,000 Jews from Warsaw to the Umschlagplatz (railway loading station) from which they were deported to Nazi extermination camps; paid our respects at sites memorialising the resistance of Jewish ghetto fighters in April 1943; visited Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter in Krakow from the 14th Century until 1939; and toured the huge Auschwitz/Birkenau complex where 1.1 million people were killed between 1940 and 1945, approximately 90 percent of them Jews.
In my report below, I grapple with the lessons of that enormity for those of us determined that “Never Again” should mean what it says, for everyone, everywhere.
Unless otherwise stated, photos are taken by me or other members of the delegation.
Last December my friend and comrade Diana Neslen, an observant Jew in her eighties, wrote in her Channukah reflections that her life “has been bookended by two genocides, the first committed by the Nazis against my own Jewish people; the second committed by Jewish people against a subject people, the Palestinians.”
This horrible truth troubled me deeply as I contemplated travelling to Poland, to places where the first of those genocides had been carried out.
Like millions around the world, my emotions had already been shredded by 20 months of barbarity perpetrated by Israel against Palestinian men, women and children, besieged and harried from place to place by a heavily armed, merciless occupier who regarded them as human animals. It has been devastating for me, as for very many Jews (as expressed by Rabbi Brant Rosen in a characteristically eloquent post), to see daily atrocities committed by the forces of a state which claims to represent us.
Now I was going to be confronted with direct evidence of the terrible suffering inflicted upon millions of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, in the name of an ideology which required their annihilation in order to purify the Aryan race. I seriously doubted my ability to avoid emotional collapse, and said as much to others in our delegation when we assembled for introductions on our first night in Warsaw.
In the event, thanks to their kindness and support, and to the meticulous thought and planning with which the historical, cultural and political context was presented by our guides, collapse was avoided. Inspiring stories of ordinary people’s lives, fascinating histories of communities surviving and flourishing through centuries despite adversity, remarkable accounts of humane, heroic and often quite incredible acts of solidarity and resistance, kept despair at bay. In its place came clarity about the lessons that have to be learned.
Image from a book published in 1958 called Der Bund in Bilder – the Bund in pictures. The Yiddish heading says “Yugnt Shtime” – “Youth Voice”. The Polish text above the clasped hands is a call for international solidarity. With thanks to David Rosenberg.
Echoes of the past
On his return to the UK, David Rosenberg explained on Facebook the approach he and Julia Bard had taken in constructing a study tour intended to “open up new ways of understanding and relating to a horrific but inspiring past, enabling it to live in the present where echoes of that past are heard all too loudly in many places.”
Everyone on the delegation knew the statistics, had heard stories and seen films about the Holocaust. Still it was impossible to remain unmoved by corridors lined with photos of the men, women and children worked to death, starved, beaten, shot or gassed in Auschwitz/Birkenau; to see the heaps of hair shaved from heads and bodies; immense piles of pots and pans brought from homes their owners would never see again; stacks of suitcases inscribed with family names and addresses; pairs of dainty red women’s shoes among mountains of footwear; and in one display case, a colourful child’s waistcoat, lovingly repaired with fine hand-stitching.
People transported to Auschwitz/Birkenau and other death camps believed they were being sent away to work. Hence the personal belongings and household objects like these pots and pans they carried with them. They were deceived right up to the moment of their deaths, handed bars of soap and told to remember where they had left their clothes before being herded, naked, into the gas chambers.
It was impossible, too, to avoid the parallels that are becoming more irresistible by the day, with the deadly attacks, mass displacement, dispossession and dehumanisation that Palestinians are suffering now. Israelis’ attempts to justify their genocidal war by evoking the memory of the Nazi Holocaust, accusing humanitarians and journalists of supporting antisemitic terror, are met with incredulity and contempt. Can they not see why people appalled by Israel’s actions increasingly equate them with those of the Nazis?
Hungarian Jews arrive in Auschwitz, ignorant of their fate despite superhuman efforts by escapees like Rudi Vrba who endured unimaginable hardship to warn Jewish political leaders of the truth.
Clashing ideologies
The five-day tour schedule was packed with walks, talks, interactive presentations and museum visits, interspersed with opportunities for reflection and some free time for personal exploration. There was a running theme looking at how clashing ideologies and politics colour the way events have been memorialised.
We saw how some monuments celebrated the anti-fascist resistance in and around the Warsaw ghetto with inscriptions in Polish, Yiddish and Hebrew, reflecting the heroism exhibited by Jews and non-Jews of different political persuasions, communist and socialist, Zionist and Bundist. Others, however, were in Polish and Hebrew only, focusing on the nationalist strands that were very much present then and are evident again today.
A chilling exhibition in the Polin museum of Jewish History, built on the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, showed how some of the few surviving Polish Jews attempting to return after the war were greeted with enduring hatred and contempt. It should surprise no one that many chose to build new lives in Israel. Fear of a resurgence of deep-seated antisemitic hatred explains the adherence of many Jews to Zionism. Attempts by Polish society to sanitise its role in facilitating the Nazi’s “Final Solution” continue in the present. Note that a right-wing populist President has just been elected, appealing to those who voted for explicitly far-right candidates in the first round, mirroring a trend we are seeing in many parts of the world.
70 sculpted chairs stand in Zgody Square in Krakow to represent 70,000 Jews who had lived in the city in 1939. Very few survived. Many were expelled by the Nazis in late 1940/early 1941 to the often hostile environment of the countryside. The remainder were forcibly moved in March 1941 to a walled ghetto in Podgórze, leaving the Kazimierz Jewish quarter relatively unscathed, as it had been earmarked for German occupation.
The tour programme included a session on progressive educational initiatives in Poland in the 1920s and ‘30s, of particular interest to our group of educators. We learned about creative, cultural resistance in many forms, including the building of caches of documents and artefacts preserved for posterity during the worst times in the ghettos.
Two sessions led by local activists Andy Zybrowski and Zuzanna Hertzberg gave us an insight into the political landscape in Poland today and women’s acts of resistance, both before WWII as fighters in the Spanish Civil War, and during the Holocaust.
Women resistance fighters from the General Polish rising in 1944, commemorated in bronze in Warsaw. Some Jewish survivors of the 1943 Ghetto Uprising took part, but numbers were small as so many Jews had been killed or deported.
The Holocaust was not inevitable
Each delegation member was asked to write a summary of one aspect of the tour. I chose a presentation by Jewish anti-fascist activist and historian Donny Gluckstein on Understanding the Holocaust. Here are my notes:
There is nothing in history that compares with the deliberately engineered deaths between 1940 and 1945 of 10 million human beings including 6 million Jews.
It is the benchmark for judging the horror that far-right racist politics can lead to, if we do not learn about it and learn the lessons from it.
We have to stand against those who:
Deny, minimise, or refuse to accept their own historic responsibility for it.
Claim that because it happened, Israel is entitled to inflict its own genocide on Palestinians
Assert that supporters of Palestine have no need to learn lessons from the Holocaust because of the way it is weaponised.
The Holocaust did not happen because Germans were antisemitic.
Jews suffered persecution for centuries across Christian Europe because of religious Judeo-phobia.
Pre-1930s Jews were safer and better assimilated in Germany than in Russia, Poland and Austria/Hungary. Hitler’s success depended on crushing mass trade union, socialist and communist movements demanding democracy after WWI. These were divided among themselves. Hitler’s stormtroopers were backed by the military and industrial powers in society. The first concentration camps were setup to imprison German leftists, including Jews.
Nazis harnessed pseudo-scientific, antisemitic ideas developed in the mid/late-1800s to portray Jews as infecting pure Aryan states. They were seen as both part of a shadowy Bolshevik conspiracy and as a rich and powerful clique running the world. (The latter view is still prevalent and becoming more so as Israel, claiming to act on behalf of all Jews, is allowed to carry out evident breaches of international law without facing any serious consequences.)
At the start of WWII in 1939 there were only 500,000 Jews in Germany. The Nazis planned to transfer them to Palestine or elsewhere to “purify” the Reich. As occupation spread across Europe, including Czechoslovakia and Poland, the numbers of Jews under Nazi control grew to 11 million. Extermination in death camps accelerated from June 1941, when Hitler went to war with the Soviet Union.
The death toll in Auschwitz itemised in a display at the death camp.
Mass deaths were not inevitable. US, UK and other allied states blocked entry of Jewish refugees and refused to take military action to stop the killing. (Britain’s RAF flew bombing raids against industrial targets in occupied Poland, photographing Auschwitz/Birkenau from the air but taking no action to disrupt its deadly operations.) After the war those governments kept fascists in power in Spain and Portugal. They had been fighting to defend Empire, not to defeat fascism. Some leaders of the Zionist movement prioritised emigration to Palestine over working to save Jewish lives.
There was resistance then and it needs to happen again.
Jews were forced into hundreds of ghettos, large and small, across Nazi-occupied Europe. There was heroic resistance organised together with non-Jewish anti-fascist resistance fighters. After WWII workers’ movements made huge gains and destroyed fascism for a generation (eg voting in Labour in the UK in 1945 and winning the Welfare State). Today’s fascists deny the label and call themselves “populists”. But they use the same racist scapegoating to divide and rule, and their dangerous views are once again being enabled by centrist politicians. It’s up to trade unionists and anti-fascists to come together in a united movement fighting for a better world.
Postscript
We’re told repeatedly, and rightly, “We must learn the lessons of the Holocaust.” This trip taught us some crucial lessons for today. Once you realise that Nazis regarded their victims as sub-human, none of their diabolical cruelty comes as a surprise. We felt the presence of ghosts in the gas chambers, but they were not the shades of nameless, passive victims. The lengths to which the Nazis went to suppress resistance – the cunning and deceit alongside the vicious brutality – just showed how immensely strong the spirit of human resistance is, even right there amidst the horrors of the death camps and ghettos.
It’s that resistance we must build now, against dehumanisation of any human beings anywhere, from Palestine to Peterborough. It means standing up against racist rhetoric from the far right, the so-called centre, and from within our own movement. It means mobilising so that there can be no more genocide ever again, for anyone, anywhere.
A detail from a large bronze monument in Warsaw commemorating the solidarity and heroism exhibited by those who rose up against the Nazi occupation of Poland in 1944, including some Jewish survivors of the Ghetto. A few hundred Jews remained in hiding in Warsaw till the end of the war. Some had fled to the forests after the ghetto uprising was crushed in April 1943 and formed or joined partisan groups. But many Jewish partisans were later killed by Poles who were both anti-German and antisemitic.
Well written Naomi,
It must have been quite a somber trip and overwhelming to witness the scale of the holocaust. Your integrity, sincerity and drive for justice is a testament to all Jews of the world- the believing Jews and jts time that zionism is rooted out so lasting peace may prevail. Jews, Muslims and Christians have lived in harmony for over a millennia, and they can do so again.
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For too long we have heard the objection that Zionism bears no comparison to Nazism. The basis of that view would seem to be that while Hitler wanted to destroy the Jews, the Zionists want to defend Jews from the likes of Hitler: what the Nazis did the Israelis do not do. This simple quarter-truth ignores one single philosophical idea: misery is not divisible. The Zionists count up only the misery of Hitler’s Holocaust victims, they do not count the misery of Israel’s Palestinian victims. They fail to consider the simple truth that a people who are witness to the destruction of their homeland, whose every movement is dictated by constant bombardment and whose lives are accordingly informed by endless fear and grief, face a hardly bearable suffering which puts them on a level with any other people suffering any other form of extreme persecution. There is no competition here, no question of whose suffering is the greater? That surely cannot be measured in any rational way, and any attempt to say that it can is simply a moral evasion. There are two lessons to be learnt from Auschwitz and the ‘Final Solution’, and they are mutually exclusive. Israel has learnt one of those lessons and has spent almost eighty years acting on it, while those of us who believe in the value of all human life and not just our own Jewish lives, the other.
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Beautifully written article, Naomi, that describes the depths of inhumanity based on ideologies that sadly continue to find expression in several countries in 2025. Through your emphasis on resilience and resistance it speaks to the ways that we can challenge murderous racism and fascism in our world today. Thank you.
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Thank YOU David, and Julia, for making the trip such a formative experience.
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“There is nothing in history that compares with the deliberately engineered deaths between 1940 and 1945 of 10 million human beings including 6 million Jews.”
From becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire, until the wars of the Reformation >1000 years later, the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian Churches exterminated every dissenting religious group except the Jews of Europe. This covered every pre-existing native religion of Europe, and every alternative sect of Christianity. See the Albiginian Crusade against the Cathars, the Hussite wars, the wars against pagan Saxons, the extermination of the Knights Templar, …. The list is enormous.
Other groups have done similar things, see the Holdomor, the Bolshevic purges, The Gulag system, Stalin’s post WWII purge of crippled veterans of the Red Army. Look at the crimes of the Imperial Japanese Army in Korea, China, the Philippines, and The Young Turks genocides against Armenians and Assyrians.
These are all premeditated, acts organized by governments, to eliminate political, ethnic or religious groups by systematic mass murder.
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It sounds like an immensely powerful experience and I thank you for bringing out he parallels and stating the learning for us so clearly.
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Very moving interesting insight thankyou for your writing
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As a Jew many of my family perished in concentration camps under the Nazi regime, and the text you posted is a clear and universal message we must always treasure if the human race is to survive.
Well written Naomi,
It must have been quite a somber trip and overwhelming to witness the scale of the holocaust. Your integrity, sincerity and drive for justice is a testament to all Jews of the world- the believing Jews and jts time that zionism is rooted out so lasting peace may prevail. Jews, Muslims and Christians have lived in harmony for over a millennia, and they can do so again.
For too long we have heard the objection that Zionism bears no comparison to Nazism. The basis of that view would seem to be that while Hitler wanted to destroy the Jews, the Zionists want to defend Jews from the likes of Hitler: what the Nazis did the Israelis do not do. This simple quarter-truth ignores one single philosophical idea: misery is not divisible. The Zionists count up only the misery of Hitler’s Holocaust victims, they do not count the misery of Israel’s Palestinian victims. They fail to consider the simple truth that a people who are witness to the destruction of their homeland, whose every movement is dictated by constant bombardment and whose lives are accordingly informed by endless fear and grief, face a hardly bearable suffering which puts them on a level with any other people suffering any other form of extreme persecution. There is no competition here, no question of whose suffering is the greater? That surely cannot be measured in any rational way, and any attempt to say that it can is simply a moral evasion. There are two lessons to be learnt from Auschwitz and the ‘Final Solution’, and they are mutually exclusive. Israel has learnt one of those lessons and has spent almost eighty years acting on it, while those of us who believe in the value of all human life and not just our own Jewish lives, the other.
Beautifully written article, Naomi, that describes the depths of inhumanity based on ideologies that sadly continue to find expression in several countries in 2025. Through your emphasis on resilience and resistance it speaks to the ways that we can challenge murderous racism and fascism in our world today. Thank you.
Thank YOU David, and Julia, for making the trip such a formative experience.
“There is nothing in history that compares with the deliberately engineered deaths between 1940 and 1945 of 10 million human beings including 6 million Jews.”
From becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire, until the wars of the Reformation >1000 years later, the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian Churches exterminated every dissenting religious group except the Jews of Europe. This covered every pre-existing native religion of Europe, and every alternative sect of Christianity. See the Albiginian Crusade against the Cathars, the Hussite wars, the wars against pagan Saxons, the extermination of the Knights Templar, …. The list is enormous.
Other groups have done similar things, see the Holdomor, the Bolshevic purges, The Gulag system, Stalin’s post WWII purge of crippled veterans of the Red Army. Look at the crimes of the Imperial Japanese Army in Korea, China, the Philippines, and The Young Turks genocides against Armenians and Assyrians.
These are all premeditated, acts organized by governments, to eliminate political, ethnic or religious groups by systematic mass murder.
It sounds like an immensely powerful experience and I thank you for bringing out he parallels and stating the learning for us so clearly.
Very moving interesting insight thankyou for your writing
As a Jew many of my family perished in concentration camps under the Nazi regime, and the text you posted is a clear and universal message we must always treasure if the human race is to survive.