THE LAST JEW

I don’t know if it is instinct, a genetic reason, or a plain and simple need, but every living species seemingly has an uncontrollable drive and urge to return to their birthplace.

The delicate monarch butterfly will travel thousands of miles from the vastness of  Canada, through all kinds of adverse conditions, to return to the Carmel area in California, or a particular wooded area in Mexico where it was hatched; there to mate, and to lay eggs in the exact place where it was born. 

The same is said about the great Gray whales that live in the ocean.  Every year they return from their rich feeding places in the waters of the Artic Circle to give birth to new generations in the same warm lagoons of Baja Mexico in which they were born.  The true home is where one was born.

The same deep desire and feeling must also be with humans.

Life in the shtetel was not easy, but this was the only life that they knew.  It flowed year in and year out with its normal rhythm; birth, growing up, marrying, having children, and eventually dying, and being buried in the old cemetery.

For 600-700 years, the Jewish people went on this way with their lives.  The old Shul, old neighborhoods, the Beth-Olim; everything was right in its place.  The four thousand Jews who lived in this old hamlet felt that this normality would go on for eternity - or perhaps until the real messiah would come and bring them back to the Promised Land in Israel.

Unfortunately history has shown us a different fate for the Jews, including those of Shebreshin.  Suddenly, in 1939, the great Wehrmacht of Germany, led by the Fascist hordes of the criminal forces of the Nazis, invaded and occupied Poland.

One of their declared master plans was to eliminate all the Jews living in this old land.

Germany, the nation once considered to be the most civilized country in Europe,  began the systematic slaughter of the innocents.  By 1942 there were no more Jewish people in my town, nor in any of the neighboring towns and villages.

The Jewish inhabitants of our shtetel were led to the old cemetery where they were forced to dig five pits which were to form their own mass graves.  Then, devoid of any human dignity, they were all killed, and buried without ceremony in the cold Polish earth.

The whole area became "Juden Rain" – clean of the Jews.  There were no Jewish witnesses left in our village to count the passing trains of cattle cars packed with other Jews on their way to the nearby Belzec.  There, soon after their arrival, they were gassed and burned in the horrible ovens, reducing them to ash that was scattered in the fields, and in the river.  "Neat, clean, hygienic, and orderly" according to the the "master race." (No capital letters for those bastards.)

Silence and obedience became the order throughout Poland and Germany.  After 1944, when the Nazis were clearly defeated, the citizens of Germany (and their friends) retired to their nice homes, blaming all that happened on others.  

"It was all the fault of the Nazis, and no one could stand up to them."

The shtetel, now purely Polish, had changed dramatically.  Poverty and destruction were everywhere.  A different town tried to cope with its past; tried to heal itself.  It was not an easy task.

When I started to write about my old shtetel, trying to describe a form of life that doesn’t exist anymore, I had no expectation that anyone would really be interested.  I wrote this for my family, so that they might know something about my childhood, and learn a bit about their ethnic and family roots.

I was wrong - very wrong.

My editor put my stories on the World Wide Web, and within days I began hearing from people from all over the world!  People actually wanted to know more about this hamlet, Szczebrzeszyn (or Shebreshin)!  Some descendents of family members that had lived in this small town wanted to know what I could recall of their family.  Some just wanted to hear about the life and the traditions of a town that goes back more than 700 years.

I answered all the correspondence, and then one day an e-mail from Poland about my little lost town arrived.  It seems that there is a man, born and raised there, but who lived in Warsaw at the time he sent me that seminal e-mail.  He now lives in the United States and has his own web site about Szczebrzeszyn.  His web site is on a Yahoo server located in the U.S.  His e-mail address is Shebreshin@Yahoo.com.  That gentleman, Mr. Tomasz Panczyk, and I have now been corresponding via e-mail and telephone for well over a year.  We send messages or talk to one another about three times a week.  We have finally met in person, and the contact has grown into a fine friendship. 

We started to compare stories.  I told Tomasz about a town that I left 75 years ago, when I was a mere child.  He, Tomasz, tells me about the town as it exists today.  He has mailed me many photos showing how the town has changed, and how it looks now.  Some of the buildings that I mentioned in other stories are still there.  We both love our birthplace.

A few months ago he told me a story about a Jew, Mr. Jankiel Grojser, who was born in our township in 1904.  He was a soldier in the Polish army at the time that the Nazis invaded Poland.  During the course of the war he was interned by the Russians, but he managed to escape and rejoin the Polish army.  He distinguished himself in the allied fight when we opened the Second Front in Italy, mainly in the bloody engagement on and around Monte Casino.  He was wounded.

After the war Jankiel returned to his old home town.  Although I am only five years younger, I can’t recall this man, but I remember the very large Groiser family, who like all the Jews of Shebreshin, were slaughtered by the cruel criminal Nazi bastards.

Jankiel came home, the only place he wanted to go, but there was no more home to come to.  All the Jews of our shtetel had either been murdered and buried in the mass graves, or had been sent to the nearby Belzec, or Auschwitz, to be gassed and burned in the ovens; their ashes scattered.

He found himself to be the only Jew in an all-Gentile town.  Yet it was home.  In all of Poland there remained only about 5000 co-religionists.  Before the war Shebreshin alone had about 4000 Jews.

Did he want to prove that Hitler did not win by eliminating all the Jews from Europe?

I have tried to put myself in his place.  The "homing" instinct is one of the strongest urges; basic, and powerful.

He chose his birthplace.  He lived among the ruins with his neighbors, and with the shadows of his ancestors who had resided in this part of the world for all these centuries.

Stories have been written describing that the shock of not finding anyone of his  family, Jewish friends from his past, or any Jews at all for that matter, affected his brain.  Over time he grew mad.  In his lucid moments he could be seen weeping as he sat in the village.

The butterfly had returned to its source, but not to mate and beget a new generation.

In 1970, he died at the age of sixty-six.  This created a major problem for the Polish people in Sczebrzerzyn (Shebreshin).

There were no Jews to give him a traditional Hebrew burial.  He was not a Christian, and besides, the old Jewish Cemetery was in such shambles that it would be insulting to bury anyone there.

The Polish citizens called a meeting.  They would honor this man, this Jew, this Jankiel Grojser, by giving him a dignified resting place in their sanctified, beautiful Catholic Cemetery.

They gave him a big plot.  They built a stone fence, and they erected a permanent marker, placing a big Star of David on the top so no one would mistake this as an ordinary grave site.

And the people of the village did not forget this lonely man.  I have received photos showing many bouquets of fresh flowers placed on his grave.  And as is traditional and customary for Jews,  people place pebbles and stones around the monument to indicate that he has had visitors.  It is as if they were leaving calling cards.  And I am told that some people even bring candles, and light them in his memory.

I look at the photos and I am proud of the people in my birth town – that they gave shelter and honor to this lonely man.

I am also very sad about this misplaced human being.  I see and feel the loneliness of his lost tribe.

Damn! Damn all those that called themselves "the most civilized people."