{"id":26972,"date":"2026-09-14T13:50:25","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T11:50:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/muzeumtreblinka.eu\/2026\/09\/14\/life-and-memory-in-treblinka\/"},"modified":"2026-09-14T14:29:06","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T12:29:06","slug":"life-and-memory-in-treblinka","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/muzeumtreblinka.eu\/en\/2026\/09\/14\/life-and-memory-in-treblinka\/","title":{"rendered":"Life and Memory in Treblinka"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Life and Memory in Treblinka<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Albert Stankowski<\/p>\n

This text grew, somewhat unexpectedly, out of a discussion sparked by the Rosh Hashanah greetings published by the Treblinka Museum. The phrase ‘choose life’ prompted particularly strong reactions. Leaving aside the aggressive language that appeared in some comments, what surprised me more than the criticism itself was that words which, for me – as someone for whom Jewish tradition, its language and its festivals have always been a living part of family life – seemed almost self-evident and deeply rooted in the experience of Rosh Hashanah proved, for some readers, not merely difficult to understand but almost impossible to accept in relation to Treblinka. At first, I was inclined to see this as simply another dispute of the kind that so often arises on social media. During prayer, however, I began to wonder whether the intensity of the reaction pointed to a deeper problem: the loss of a shared language in which, for generations, people spoke about life and death, memory, judgement, guilt, hope and responsibility. What remains part of a living tradition for some has, for others, become a collection of words detached from their former context – or, perhaps more significantly, words whose meaning has shifted profoundly.<\/p>\n

This thought returned to me during the prayers of Rosh Hashanah. The festival is not simply the Jewish equivalent of the secular New Year. Rosh Hashanah opens the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah (the Ten Days of Repentance, return and spiritual self-examination), within the period known as the Yamim Noraim (‘Days of Awe’). They lead towards Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), when a person confronts the deepest reckoning with their own conduct – both before God and in relation to other human beings.<\/p>\n

It was during these prayers that I realised something that may be among the most enduring, though less often discussed, legacies of the Holocaust. With the murder of nearly six million European Jews, many of us lost more than grandparents and great-grandparents. In many families and communities, the Holocaust severed – and in others gravely weakened – the continuity through which religious experience had been transmitted: the kind of knowledge one acquires not from a textbook or lecture, but at the family table, in the synagogue, through gesture, melody, prayer and words repeated from childhood. Entire communities disappeared in which the language of Judaism had been understood almost instinctively. As a result, concepts and formulas that had formed a natural part of life for earlier generations could lose their original resonance for those who came after, be forgotten, or acquire entirely different meanings.<\/p>\n

This is not, of course, a new problem. Rabbi Isaac Cylkow, one of the most distinguished Polish-Jewish translators around the turn of the twentieth century, confronted the limits of translation in his monumental attempt to render the Hebrew liturgy into Polish. The first part of his Machzor, devoted to Rosh Hashanah, was published posthumously in 1910.[1] Cylkow understood how difficult it was to find Polish words capable of conveying the full content and nuance of Hebrew religious concepts. This was not merely a matter of vocabulary or phraseology. Religious language carries layers of memory, association, ritual, experience and emotion that cannot simply be transferred mechanically from one language to another.<\/p>\n

Several decades later, Shmuel Yosef Agnon responded to a similar need to make that world accessible to the reader. In 1938 he published Yamim Noraim – later known in English as Days of Awe – an extensive anthology of traditions, stories and commentaries concerning Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and the ten days between them.[2] Agnon drew on the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings, both Talmuds, midrashim (rabbinic interpretations and narratives expanding the biblical text), the Zohar and later rabbinic literature. He did not produce a handbook of dogma or a simple commentary on the prayer book. Rather, he sought to reconstruct the world of associations, images and stories within which these festivals had been experienced by successive generations.<\/p>\n

The fact that Yamim Noraim appeared in 1938 has a particular resonance from today’s perspective. A book intended to make the centuries-old language of Jewish tradition accessible to the modern reader was published on the eve of a catastrophe that, only a few years later, annihilated a large part of the community that was the natural heir to that language. This does not, of course, mean that Agnon wrote it as a response to the Holocaust. It does, however, reveal how fragile the cultural continuity that still seemed self-evident in the 1930s would prove to be.<\/p>\n

Today the problem seems to me even more complex. It concerns not only translation from Hebrew into Polish. It also concerns the way in which we speak to one another. Reading the comments that accompanied the discussion made me realise how easily the language of religion, memory and history can be replaced by the language of suspicion, accusation, irony or simple aggression. In such a language, it becomes increasingly difficult to explain a concept that cannot be contained in a single sentence, and harder still to admit the possibility that the same word may carry a meaning different from the one we assign to it in a contemporary dispute.<\/p>\n

That is why, instead of replying to individual comments, I decided to do something different: to return to the sources and ask what ‘life’ actually means in Jewish tradition; why the word chayim (‘life’) returns so insistently during Rosh Hashanah; what the Torah’s injunction u-vacharta ba-chayim (‘choose life’) means; what place memory occupies; and how all these words sound in a place such as Treblinka.<\/p>\n

The purpose is not to prove that one side or the other was right. The question is more difficult: can we still hear these words as generations before us understood them? And if the Holocaust interrupted the natural transmission of this tradition in so many families and communities, perhaps one of our responsibilities is patiently to rebuild the language through which it can once again be understood.<\/p>\n

That is the reason for this text. It is an attempt – as best I can – to explore the meanings of life, memory and judgement in Rosh Hashanah, and to read these concepts in the light of the experience of Treblinka and the testimonies of those who found themselves there during the Holocaust. Perhaps only then can we responsibly ask whether, in Treblinka, one may say: ‘choose life’.<\/p>\n

Rosh Hashanah is commonly described as the Jewish New Year. The description is correct, but necessarily simplified. The first day of the month of Tishrei (the month of the Hebrew calendar in which the autumn festivals fall) marks more than the beginning of another year. In Jewish tradition, it is a time of particular reflection on the individual: on one’s deeds, responsibility, memory and life.<\/p>\n

The tractate Rosh Hashanah – in both the Mishnah and the Talmudic discussion that develops it – shows that, already in the earliest rabbinic tradition, the day was understood as more than the beginning of a calendar year. The Mishnah presents an image of all the inhabitants of the world passing before God ki-vnei maron – one by one.[3] The Talmud develops this enigmatic image, comparing people, among other things, to sheep passing individually before a shepherd, to those ascending a narrow mountain path, or to soldiers passing in review.[4] The same motif returns in each interpretation: the individual does not disappear into the crowd. Each person is seen separately.<\/p>\n

In relation to the German Nazi extermination camp Treblinka II, this image acquires a particular, almost painful clarity. The machinery of the Holocaust operated in precisely the opposite direction: it stripped people of their names, biographies, family ties and individuality, reducing them to transports, numbers and categories marked for annihilation. Jewish tradition, by contrast, returns consistently to the value of an individual life. The Mishnah in tractate Sanhedrin, despite variants preserved in the textual tradition, compares the destruction of a single life to the destruction of an entire world.[5]<\/p>\n

Treblinka was therefore not only a place of mass murder. It was a place in which separate worlds were destroyed. Every person who was murdered had a name, a family, a language, memories, habits, fears and hopes, as well as a future they were denied. Statistics remain necessary because they reveal the scale of the crime, but statistics alone are not yet memory. The task of a memorial site should be to move in precisely the opposite direction from that taken by the perpetrators: to recover the human being from the number, the family from the transport, and a particular life from anonymous death.<\/p>\n

One of the most important words for understanding Rosh Hashanah is \u05d7\u05d9\u05d9\u05dd – chayim (‘life’). The Torah says: ‘I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life’ – \u05d5\u05bc\u05d1\u05b8\u05d7\u05b7\u05e8\u05b0\u05ea\u05b8\u05bc \u05d1\u05b7\u05bc\u05d7\u05b7\u05d9\u05b4\u05bc\u05d9\u05dd, u-vacharta ba-chayim.[6] Importantly, the injunction does not end with the words ‘choose life’. The Torah adds, ‘so that you and your descendants may live’, and then links life with loving God, listening to His voice and holding fast to Him. ‘Choosing life’ is therefore neither a slogan nor a simple command to survive biologically; it forms part of a broader injunction concerning how a person is to live the life entrusted to them.<\/p>\n

Life also becomes a category of responsibility. A person chooses life through the way they respond to another human being: by safeguarding that person’s dignity and resisting violence, humiliation and dehumanisation. In Jewish law, the value placed on protecting life finds an exceptionally concrete expression in the principle of pikuach nefesh (the duty to save a life in danger): where life is at risk, the obligation to save it takes precedence even over the prohibitions of Shabbat.[7]<\/p>\n

It is no coincidence that the motif of life returns with such intensity in the prayers from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur. The blessing Shehecheyanu already presents the very fact of having reached this moment as a gift: God has kept us alive, sustained us and enabled us to reach this time. The theme is even more explicit in the Amidah. In the additions for the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah, the worshipper says Zochreinu le-chayim – ‘Remember us for life’; calls God Melech chafetz ba-chayim – ‘King who desires life’; and asks to be inscribed in the Sefer Chayim – the Book of Life. A few sentences later, God is the One who sustains the living with kindness and, in the traditional wording of the Amidah, ‘revives the dead’ and mercifully remembers His creatures for life. In Modim, He is described as ‘the Rock of our life’, while the worshipper gives thanks for life entrusted to God’s hand and asks to be inscribed ‘for a good life’. The concluding blessing for peace brings together peace, goodness, blessing, life, grace, kindness and mercy; it also speaks of Torat chayim – the ‘Torah of life’ – and again of the Book of life, blessing and peace.[8] Perhaps it is here that one sees most clearly that memory and life do not stand on opposite sides. In prayer, after all, we say: Zochreinu le-chayim – ‘Remember us for life’.<\/p>\n

In Unetaneh Tokef, one of the most moving liturgical poems of Ashkenazi Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the question is asked: mi yichyeh u-mi yamut – ‘who shall live and who shall die’.[9] Tractate Rosh Hashanah also invokes the image of three books opened on Rosh Hashanah, an image belonging to the rabbinic language of divine judgement.[10] I invoke these images here solely to show how closely the themes of life, death, memory and responsibility are intertwined in the tradition of Rosh Hashanah. They are not intended to explain or interpret the fate of the victims of Treblinka. Treblinka was a place of crime committed by human beings against other human beings, and it is within this historical order that it must be discussed. Here, the religious language of Rosh Hashanah remains a language of prayer and reflection for the living, not a commentary on the deaths of those who were murdered.<\/p>\n

The ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are therefore not merely a time of waiting for judgement. They are a time of teshuvah – repentance, return and transformation – in which a person can still change something. Agnon is particularly helpful here. Yamim Noraim arranges hundreds of scattered traditions into a path leading from preparation for Rosh Hashanah, through the Day of Judgement and the Ten Days of Repentance, to Yom Kippur and Ne’ilah – the final prayer of Yom Kippur, symbolically associated with the ‘closing of the gates’.[11] In his anthology, life, memory, judgement, repentance and forgiveness do not stand as separate ideas. They form a shared structure of experience. Perhaps the difficulty begins precisely when a single word is torn from that wider world. ‘Life’ on its own may then sound banal, ‘judgement’ merciless, and ‘memory’ may turn into an empty ritual. Yet in the tradition of Rosh Hashanah these concepts do not exist separately.<\/p>\n

Alongside life, memory therefore occupies a central place. The Musaf (the additional service recited on festivals and Shabbat) of Rosh Hashanah contains three extensive sections: Malchuyot (the Kingship of God), Zichronot (divine remembrance) and Shofarot (the motif of the shofar, the ritual horn).[12] Zichronot refers above all to God’s remembrance – the God who remembers creation, the covenant and the human being. Zichronot and the biblical zachor (‘remember’) are not the same term, but they derive from the same Hebrew root \u05d6\u05be\u05db\u05be\u05e8 (z-k-r), associated with remembering and memory. They therefore belong to the same semantic field, in which memory means more than preserving information about the past. It is a relationship, an obligation and a form of responsibility.<\/p>\n

Only against this background can the testimonies from Treblinka be heard in their full force. Of particular importance here is Martyna Rusiniak-Karwat’s study Faith in the Shadow of Death: The Treblinka II Extermination Camp. The author does not attempt to construct a theology of Treblinka or answer the question of where God was. Instead, she draws on the memoirs of ten former prisoners: Abraham Jakub Krzepicki, Eddie Weinstein, Jankiel Wiernik, Jerzy Rajgrodzki, Tanhem Grinberg, Eliasz Rozenberg, Oskar Strawczy\u0144ski, Jechiel Rajchman, Richard Glazar and Samuel Willenberg.[13] What emerges is not one answer but an entire spectrum of experience: prayer and doubt, attachment to ritual and rebellion against God, the search for hope and the complete loss of faith.<\/p>\n

Religious practice was present even on the way to death. In the testimonies cited, people locked inside railway wagons began to recite Kaddish (a prayer praising God, associated above all with mourning for the dead) when they realised that they were being taken to destruction. Other accounts describe Jews driven towards the gas chambers reciting Shema Yisrael (‘Hear, O Israel’ – the fundamental Jewish declaration of faith). Jechiel Rajchman remembered the cry of Shema Yisrael coming from inside the chambers and people being led to their deaths with these words on their lips.[14]<\/p>\n

It is difficult to reduce such scenes to the category of ‘religious practice’. Prayer became the last language through which a person could still define themselves within a system designed precisely to strip them of all subjectivity.<\/p>\n

In the study cited above, prayers in the barracks are described as an attempt to create a ‘semblance of the lost world’.[15] The phrase goes to the heart of the camp experience. After a day of labour amid corpses, violence and the constant awareness of their own impending death, some prisoners recited Mincha (the afternoon prayer) and Ma’ariv (the evening prayer), Kaddish for loved ones, psalms and religious songs. Some put on tefillin (small leather boxes containing passages from the Torah, worn during the morning prayer). Prayer did not remove the reality of the camp, but for a moment it allowed a fragment of the world before Treblinka to be reconstructed: the rhythm of the day, community, family habits, language and a sense of continuity.<\/p>\n

In this sense, prayer also became a way of preserving one’s humanity and, in certain circumstances, a form of resistance to total subjugation. According to Jerzy Rajgrodzki’s account, loud evening prayers may even have provided cover for whispered conversations about preparations for the uprising of 2 August 1943.[16] In Treblinka, prayer could therefore also become a form of resistance – an attempt to preserve one’s identity.<\/p>\n

There were also people in the camp who became informal guides to religious life. Among those mentioned is Meir Grinberg, the son of a sofer (a religious scribe who, among other things, copies Torah scrolls), who in the evenings recited El Male Rachamim (the prayer for the souls of the dead), psalms, Mincha and Ma’ariv and, together with other prisoners, Kaddish for those who had been murdered.[17]<\/p>\n

In a world in which the dead were denied burial, graves, mourning rituals and sometimes even their names, the very possibility of saying a prayer for someone who had been murdered acquired particular significance. It restored something of the individuality that had been taken away. It meant that this person still belonged to someone, that someone mourned them and someone remembered them.<\/p>\n

Yet in precisely the same space, prayer could also become a language of rebellion against God. One of the most powerful passages in this analysis comes from the testimony of Jechiel Rajchman. On his first night in the barracks, he hears prisoners reciting Mincha, Ma’ariv and Kaddish. Instead of finding consolation in their prayer, he responds with anger. He asks whom they are actually praying to after losing sisters, brothers, fathers and mothers, and he cannot reconcile the existence of God with the murder of innocent children.[18]<\/p>\n

This testimony is particularly important because it shows that the boundary between faith and unbelief did not always run between different people. Significantly, despite this crisis, Rajchman later continued to describe religious practices and to seek hope in them. Faith in Treblinka could therefore be understood not as a fixed state but as a process: a struggle, a protest, an oscillation between prayer and rejection.<\/p>\n

The testimony most directly connected with Rosh Hashanah is that of Eliasz Rozenberg.[19] He came from an Orthodox family and lost those closest to him in Treblinka. In his memoir he describes the evening of 11 September 1942, marking the beginning of Rosh Hashanah 5703.[20] A minyan – in traditional halakhic practice, the quorum of ten adult Jewish men required for certain communal prayers – gathered in the barracks; the festive Ma’ariv and Kaddish were recited, followed by El Male Rachamim for those being murdered each day. Rozenberg asked that his mother and sister also be included in the prayer, and he broke down in tears.<\/p>\n

In this single image almost all the essential motifs of Rosh Hashanah come together: life, memory, judgement and death. The prayers of a festival whose liturgy repeatedly asks for life were recited in a place created for killing. The memory of particular people was invoked within a system whose aim was not only to annihilate them, but also to erase every trace of them.<\/p>\n

At this point, the Talmudic image of the three books acquires a particular resonance, though one that demands caution. In the tradition of Rosh Hashanah, the Book of Life belongs to the language of divine judgement, repentance and hope. In Treblinka, by contrast, human beings created a system in which they claimed for themselves absolute power over the life and death of others. These two orders must not be equated. Yet one may perceive a terrifying contrast: the religious image of judgement leaves the human being with agency, responsibility and the possibility of transformation; the Nazi system stripped them of all three.<\/p>\n

The testimonies gathered in the study also show that Rosh Hashanah was not an isolated case. Prisoners attempted to observe Pesach (the festival commemorating the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt), recited daily prayers and Kaddish, put on tefillin, and sang psalms and songs. Singing – both religious and secular – also had a communicative role for Jews from different countries who spoke different languages. Jerzy Rajgrodzki recalled that shared songs sustained the prisoners’ spirits and encouraged them to think about rescue.[21] This gives the word chayim a very concrete meaning: religion did not merely speak about life. Sometimes it simply helped people survive another day.<\/p>\n

The prisoners’ religious life, however, cannot be viewed solely through the lens of consolation and spiritual support. An important theme of this analysis is the way the German camp staff used Jewish religion against the prisoners themselves. At times the Germans tolerated religious practices; at other times they imposed rituals for their own amusement, forced people to enact ceremonies, or organised a wedding or a ritual funeral under their supervision. During Pesach they even allowed matzah (unleavened bread eaten during the festival) to be prepared and a seder (the ritual meal that opens Pesach) to be held, which the author cautiously interprets as potentially another form of mockery and manipulation.[22]<\/p>\n

The use of Jewish religious symbolism in connection with the new gas chambers had an especially macabre significance. Rusiniak-Karwat describes the building’s design as evoking a synagogue.[23] The perpetrators therefore did not stop at taking life. They also attempted to appropriate the language, ritual, memory and sacred sphere of their victims.<\/p>\n

This aspect is fundamental to reflection on Rosh Hashanah. The Holocaust was not only the physical annihilation of human beings. It was also an attempt to deprive them of the right to define themselves. The testimonies cited show that the German perpetrators, by exercising arbitrary power over life and death, asserted an almost absolute power over the prisoners.[24] Against this background, the words u-vacharta ba-chayim acquire an even more radical meaning in Treblinka. The point is not to construct an easy opposition between life and death, but to consider a human being exposed to a system that arrogated to itself the right to decide whether that person’s life had any value at all.<\/p>\n

Not everyone responded by holding fast to faith. A powerful counterpoint is Samuel Willenberg, who after the war said without qualification: ‘I stopped believing. Completely.'[25] In a conversation with Pawe\u0142 \u015apiewak, he explained his atheism above all by his inability to reconcile the existence of God with the murder of the innocent, especially children. Asked about the famous statement that ‘God died in Auschwitz’, he replied: ‘No. He was already dead in Treblinka.'[26]<\/p>\n

This voice must not be ‘corrected’ by later theology. It is as much a testimony from Treblinka as Rozenberg’s prayer. Some found support in faith; others found that Treblinka left them unable to continue believing. One of the great strengths of the study is that it does not attempt to resolve this tension. It shows that, in the same place, people turned towards God and turned away from God.[27]<\/p>\n

Post-Holocaust theology should therefore be approached not as an answer given to the victims, but as a later attempt to grapple with the questions left by their experience. The order matters here: first Rozenberg, Rajchman, Willenberg, Glazar, Wiernik, Krzepicki and the others. Only then can we ask whether theological language is adequate to what they experienced.<\/p>\n

Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the rabbi of Piaseczno, occupies a particular place here because his wartime sermons are not a post-war commentary on the Holocaust. A substantial part of this body of sermons, together with later annotations, was written in the Warsaw Ghetto while the Holocaust was unfolding. His sermons reveal a telling evolution in the way he tried to describe the catastrophe taking place around him. As late as Hanukkah 1941, Shapira held that contemporary suffering could not be regarded as wholly unprecedented; he invoked the destruction of the Temple, as well as the fall of Betar and the massacre of its Jewish defenders after the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century CE. Yet in an annotation dated 27 November 1942, he stated that the suffering and the methods of killing that had appeared since the middle of that year had, to the best of his knowledge of Jewish history and rabbinic literature, no precedent.[28]<\/p>\n

This annotation was written only two months after the end of the Great Deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka, carried out from 22 July to 21 September 1942. It is therefore not the product of calm post-war reflection. It was born within the catastrophe itself.<\/p>\n

A different, much later development can be seen in the thought of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe (the seventh leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement). Daniel Reiser shows that, in his earlier statements, Schneerson attempted to place the Holocaust within traditional categories of suffering and tikkun (spiritual repair or the restoration of proper order). In the final phase of his teaching, however, he firmly rejected presenting the Holocaust as punishment for the sins of the Jews and described it as an event without parallel in previous generations.[29]<\/p>\n

Both examples raise the question of the limits of theodicy – of how one may speak of a good and just God in a world marked by evil and suffering. In relation to the Holocaust, however, any theological interpretation of the victims’ experience requires particular caution. There is a danger that later interpretations may place their experience within theological frameworks that those who were murdered did not themselves articulate and that we should not impose upon them retrospectively.<\/p>\n

Treblinka therefore calls for an especially careful language – one that does not confine the experience of the Holocaust within a single religious interpretation, but leaves room for different human responses to an extreme experience.<\/p>\n

Emil Fackenheim redirected the question: how is one to live after Auschwitz? From his reflections emerged the metaphorical idea of the ‘614th commandment’ – an injunction not to allow Hitler a posthumous victory through the disappearance of Jewish life, memory and identity.[30] This is not a commandment in the halakhic sense of the word, but a philosophical formulation of the responsibility of survivors and later generations.<\/p>\n

In Treblinka, this idea acquires particular force. The place was created so that Jews would disappear. Today successive generations come here – Jews from Israel and the diaspora, young people, school groups, rabbis, families, people from many countries, including participants in the March of the Living.<\/strong><\/p>\n

We should not speak of a ‘victory of life over death’. That would be too easy and, in the face of the enormity of the crime, inappropriate. Nothing can undo what happened in Treblinka II. The presence of the living, however, means that the plan to erase Jewish life and memory completely was not fulfilled.<\/p>\n

In this context, it is worth recalling the traditional designation of a Jewish cemetery as Beit ha-Chayim (‘House of Life’), used alongside Beit Olam (‘House of Eternity’).[31] This does not, of course, mean that Treblinka should be called Beit ha-Chayim. It should not. The site of the former extermination camp, its mass graves and the ashes of the victims require a language of their own, and one of particular care. Yet this old designation for a cemetery contains an important intuition: a person’s death does not erase their biography.<\/p>\n

The victims of Treblinka should not be remembered only as people being led to the gas chambers. Before they became victims, they were children and parents, teachers and workers, doctors, merchants, rabbis, believers and non-believers. They loved, argued, worked, prayed and planned the next day. They had ambitions, weaknesses, a sense of humour, fears and hopes. The perpetrators took their lives. Memory should not allow the manner of their deaths to become the entire description of their existence.<\/p>\n

And this is precisely why the words \u05d5\u05bc\u05d1\u05b8\u05d7\u05b7\u05e8\u05b0\u05ea\u05b8\u05bc \u05d1\u05b7\u05bc\u05d7\u05b7\u05d9\u05b4\u05bc\u05d9\u05dd – u-vacharta ba-chayim, ‘choose life’ – sound different in Treblinka. They belong to the language of our faith and tradition: ‘I call heaven and earth to witness against you today: I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, listening to His voice and holding fast to Him, for He is your life and the length of your days, so that you may dwell on the land that the Lord swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.’ Deut. 30:19-20.<\/strong><\/p>\n

They are not a promise that good will always prevail. The history of this place leaves no room for such easy consolation. Nor do they set the lives of those who were murdered against their deaths, or seek to place their fate within an interpretation they themselves did not express.<\/p>\n

They place an obligation on the living.<\/p>\n

Rosh Hashanah does not ask only what the coming year will bring. It poses a more difficult question: what will you do with the life that has been entrusted to you?<\/p>\n

How will you use your freedom? How will you treat another human being? Will you see in that person not a representative of a group, category or nation, but a world in their own right? Will the memory of those who were deprived of the possibility of making further choices affect the choices you make yourself?<\/p>\n

When spoken in Treblinka, Shana Tova (‘a good year’) also ceases to be merely a festive formula. A good year is not simply a year of prosperity. It is also a year in which memory gives rise to responsibility, and awareness of life’s fragility leads not to indifference but to greater care for another human being.<\/p>\n

Perhaps this is precisely why the words ‘choose life’, which became the starting point of this discussion, do not seem inappropriate to me in Treblinka. On the contrary – read in their Jewish, biblical, rabbinic and liturgical context, they belong among the most serious questions that can be put to the living in this place.<\/p>\n

Not to the victims.<\/p>\n

To us.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Albert Stankowski<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n

[1] I. Cylkow, Machzor, czyli modlitwy Izraelit\u00f3w na wszystkie \u015bwi\u0119ta, cz. I: Rosz ha-Szana [Machzor, or the Prayers of the Israelites for All Festivals, Part I: Rosh Hashanah], Warsaw 1910. The translation was published after the author’s death in 1908.<\/p>\n

[2] S.J. Agnon, Yamim Noraim, Schocken, 1938; English ed.: S.Y. Agnon, Days of Awe: Being a Treasury of Traditions, Legends and Learned Commentaries Concerning Rosh ha-Shanah, Yom Kippur and the Days Between, ed. N.N. Glatzer, trans. M.T. Galpert and J. Sloan, New York: Schocken Books, 1948.<\/p>\n

[3] Mishnah, Rosh Hashanah 1:2.<\/p>\n

[4] Babylonian Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 18a; explanations of the expression ki-vnei maron.<\/p>\n

[5] Mishnah, Sanhedrin 4:5; Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 37a. The textual tradition preserves variants referring to ‘one soul’ and ‘one soul from Israel’.<\/p>\n

[6] Deut. 30:19-20.<\/p>\n

[7] Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 85b.<\/p>\n

[8] Machzor Companion for Rosh Hashanah, Kehot Publication Society, Brooklyn-New York 2020, pp. 1, 10-15; see especially the formulas Shehecheyanu, Zochreinu le-chayim, Melech chafetz ba-chayim, be-Sefer ha-Chayim, mechalkel chayim be-chesed, zocher yetzurav le-chayim be-rachamim, u-chtov le-chayim tovim, Torat chayim and be-Sefer chayim.<\/p>\n

[9] Unetaneh Tokef, in: Machzor Companion for Rosh Hashanah, Kehot Publication Society, Brooklyn-New York 2020, p. 35; Ashkenazi liturgy for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.<\/p>\n

[10] Babylonian Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 16b: the tradition of Rabbi Kruspedai in the name of Rabbi Yochanan concerning three books opened on Rosh Hashanah. This is a rabbinic image of divine judgement belonging to the religious language of Rosh Hashanah. It must in no way be read as a historical explanation of the fate of the victims of the Holocaust, or as suggesting that a person’s death demonstrates guilt, wickedness or a divine sentence. In relation to Treblinka, such an interpretation would completely reverse the meaning in which the image is invoked here.<\/p>\n

[11] S.J. Agnon, Yamim Noraim; see the English edition Days of Awe, New York 1948.<\/p>\n

[12] Mishnah, Rosh Hashanah 4:5-6.<\/p>\n

[13] M. Rusiniak-Karwat, ‘Wiara w cieniu \u015bmierci. Ob\u00f3z zag\u0142ady Treblinka II’ [Faith in the Shadow of Death: The Treblinka II Extermination Camp], Biografistyka Pedagogiczna 8 (2023), no. 1, pp. 393-420, DOI: 10.36578\/BP.2023.08.23.<\/p>\n

[14] Ibid., pp. 401-402; see J. Rajchman, Ocala\u0142em z Treblinki [I Survived Treblinka], Warsaw 2011, pp. 35, 69.<\/p>\n

[15] M. Rusiniak-Karwat, op. cit., pp. 402-403.<\/p>\n

[16] Ibid., pp. 402-403; J. Rajgrodzki, ‘Jedena\u015bcie miesi\u0119cy w obozie zag\u0142ady’ [Eleven Months in an Extermination Camp], in Treblinka, ed. M. Berezowski, Warsaw 1947, p. 113.<\/p>\n

[17] M. Rusiniak-Karwat, op. cit., p. 404; Archiwum \u017bydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego [Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute], Zbi\u00f3r pami\u0119tnik\u00f3w \u017byd\u00f3w Ocala\u0142ych z Zag\u0142ady [Collection of Memoirs of Jews Who Survived the Holocaust], ref. 302\/153, memoir of T. Grinberg, fols. 91-92.<\/p>\n

[18] M. Rusiniak-Karwat, op. cit., pp. 404-405; J. Rajchman, Ocala\u0142em z Treblinki [I Survived Treblinka].<\/p>\n

[19] M. Rusiniak-Karwat, op. cit., p. 407; E. Rozenberg, ‘Wspomnienia z Treblinki i partyzantki \/ Treblinke – partizantke’ [Memoirs from Treblinka and the Partisans \/ Treblinke – partizantke], Bleter far Geszichte 28 (1990), pp. 61-114, especially pp. 75, 82-83.<\/p>\n

[20] See M. Rusiniak-Karwat, op. cit., p. 407, n. 54, where 10 September 1942 is given together with the information that Rosh Hashanah fell on 11 September. According to the Hebrew calendar, 11 September 1942 was Erev Rosh Hashanah; the festival began after sunset, while 1 Tishrei 5703 fell on 12 September 1942. See Hebcal, Jewish Calendar 1942 Diaspora.<\/p>\n

[21] M. Rusiniak-Karwat, op. cit., pp. 409-410; J. Rajgrodzki, op. cit., pp. 108-109.<\/p>\n

[22] M. Rusiniak-Karwat, op. cit., pp. 407-411.<\/p>\n

[23] Ibid., pp. 413-414; see P. Jag\u0142a, ‘Religijne elementy Zag\u0142ady w Treblince. Pr\u00f3ba analizy zagadnienia’ [Religious Elements of the Holocaust in Treblinka: An Attempt at Analysis], in Treblinka ostrzega i przypomina! W 80. rocznic\u0119 utworzenia Karnego Obozu Pracy Treblinka I [Treblinka Warns and Remembers! On the 80th Anniversary of the Establishment of the Treblinka I Penal Labour Camp], ed. E. Kop\u00f3wka, Treblinka 2022, pp. 299-337.<\/p>\n

[24] M. Rusiniak-Karwat, op. cit., pp. 413-417.<\/p>\n

[25] Ibid., p. 396; interview by J. Kr\u00f3l with S. Willenberg, 24 April 2014.<\/p>\n

[26] S. Willenberg, Bunt w Treblince [Revolt in Treblinka], Warsaw 2004, p. 207; conversation with Pawe\u0142 \u015apiewak.<\/p>\n

[27] M. Rusiniak-Karwat, op. cit., p. 417.<\/p>\n

[28] K.K. Shapira, Sermons from the Years of Rage, ed. D. Reiser, Jerusalem 2017, vol. 1, p. 242; see J.A. Diamond, ‘Raging Hasidic Sermons: R. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira’s Halting Retreat from Theodicy’, Yad Vashem Studies 49 (2021), no. 1.<\/p>\n

[29] D. Reiser, ‘The Holocaust as an (Un)Exceptional Phenomenon: Development and Change in the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s Outlook’, Modern Judaism 44 (2024), no. 1, pp. 40-59, especially pp. 44-51, DOI: 10.1093\/mj\/kjae003; see M.M. Schneerson, Sefer HaSichot 5751, Vayechi, Brooklyn 2003, p. 233.<\/p>\n

[30] E.L. Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections, New York 1970; see also idem, To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought, New York 1982.<\/p>\n

[31] See Encyclopaedia Judaica, entry ‘Cemetery’; traditional designations Beit Olam and Beit ha-Chayim.<\/p>\n

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[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text css=””] Life and Memory in Treblinka Albert Stankowski This text grew, somewhat unexpectedly, out of a discussion sparked by the Rosh Hashanah greetings published by the Treblinka Museum. The phrase ‘choose life’ prompted particularly strong reactions. Leaving aside the aggressive language that appeared in some comments, what surprised me more than the criticism itself […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":26372,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/muzeumtreblinka.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/muzeumtreblinka.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/muzeumtreblinka.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/muzeumtreblinka.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/muzeumtreblinka.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26972"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/muzeumtreblinka.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26972\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26978,"href":"https:\/\/muzeumtreblinka.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26972\/revisions\/26978"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/muzeumtreblinka.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/muzeumtreblinka.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/muzeumtreblinka.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/muzeumtreblinka.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}