“And even if by some miracle I survive and escape death, the spectre of the past shall follow me everywhere like a shadow. Will I find balance, peace, and faith then? … I know all too well that I won’t… Only then will we feel the [full] burden and nightmare of the past days. Can I believe that even if there is a ‘fortunate’ ending to the war, hate will disappear from the midst of people, as by the touch of a magic wand… Perhaps the opposite will happen… The hate… and the desire for vengeance, rising in millions of
oppressed people, shall then explode in an all-consuming flame and set the world on fire.”
Anonymous Letter written in the Warsaw Ghetto to an old Polish friend after March 1942. On my trip to Warsaw, I stumbled across this quote in the Ringelblum Archive, a secret project initiated by Jewish activists in the Warsaw Ghetto to document daily life, resistance, and the atrocities of the Holocaust. Throughout our trip to Poland, we witnessed countless examples of resistance that varied from fighting back against the Nazis with weapons and fists to a defiant smirk in a mugshot taken at Auschwitz. There were stories of Polish citizens who protected their Jewish neighbors at great personal risk, and a brave man who sacrificed himself to walk alongside the orphans in his care as they faced death in the horror of Treblinka. I wonder if these resisters found peace as they committed their acts of defiance, or if even at the end, they were consumed by anger- driven to act courageously by a fire that burned deep within their souls.
I share this quote because I returned to it time and time again throughout our trip. We discussed the dilemmas faced by those whose lives were interrupted by the hatred of the Nazis as we traveled throughout Poland, and while we did not directly address this quote, it was the dilemma that I kept revisiting during our journey. Should we forgive the oppressor to prevent the fire? Or should we harness the fire and fight back for a better world? In a time where hate is ever-present, is it possible to find balance, peace, and faith? Can hate disappear when citizens are deprived of their rights and attacked by those tasked with their protection? How can we teach our students what happened here when the voices of the victims are silenced through book bans and censorship? Our world is on fire, and it is up to us whether we fight back. As educators, we depart from Poland with a mission- to resist and fight against the hate that we witnessed here through education, truth, and compassion.