Beyond the Horror – Gardens, Ghettos and Georgina

Jacquelynne Willcox is Senior Vice President at Weber Shandwick and the author of a PhD thesis on “Gardens & Ghettos”. The study in Willcox’s thesis covers the incredible phenomena of gardens established in the Jewish ghettos under Nazi occupation. Says Willcox, “The garden narrative appears to have faded from (recent) survivor recollections. This fading from memory may have increased with the distance of time from the events that made up the period commonly known as ‘the Holocaust’. Over the years, memory and discussion has become focused on more extreme – and incredible – feats each survivor endured.” Joining Gabriella Kovac for a discussion of survival under repression in twentieth century Europe, Jacquelynne Willcox addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 8 April 2014.

NOTE: 19 April marked the 71^st anniversary of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising  – when the world acknowledges the extraordinary Jewish resistance against the Nazi occupiers. 

FROM EDEN TO GOMORRAH: GHETTO GARDENS, GARDENERS AND THEIR REPRESENTATION IN HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS, MEMOIR AND LITERATURE.

JACQUELYNNE WILLCOX

Historians have posited that Jewish resistance during the Holocaust occurred more than has been conventionally accepted: That is – as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising reminds us – “They did not go as lambs to the slaughter.” Included in the pantheon of Holocaust resistance – and transformation – should rest the “Adams and Eves” (or Israels and Saras) who produced their own food and even flowers in makeshift gardens scratched out in the ghetto wastelands like Warsaw and Lodz.

Nature, garden and agriculture language frequently form metaphors for ghetto life in memoir, diary entries and other literature that have emerged from the Holocaust.

Let me share with you the observations of a Jewish doctor at the Warsaw ghetto hospital, who watched a column of ghetto Jews lumbering their way along the well-worn path to the Umschlagplatz – from where they would be transported to the Treblinka extermination site. Above this wretched trail, on the non-Jewish side of the divided street, a woman dressed in a floral housecoat watered a window box of flowers. The doctor studied the woman’s insouciance to the Jews in the street beneath her. She wrote:

She must have seen the procession below, but she carried on watering her flowers. And, on this side, they kept going past. They kept going past and there seemed to be no end.[i]

For the purposes of this research, the cameo serves to illustrate the pathos of the garden narrative in illuminating the stories of the ghetto. According to the Jewish doctor, the woman’s view from the window on that infernal world stopped at the flowers. But what of the actual gardeners in the ghetto?

We know from scant documents and even photographs that individual and communal garden projects were undertaken, with varying degrees of success.  Ghetto gardeners were inventive. As this description by short story writer and holocaust survivor, Rachmil Bryks reveals, the ghetto Jews went to extraordinary lengths to plant gardens:

On the empty plots of ground between the crowded buildings, on bits of soil which the sun never reached, Jews planted gardens. Soil? – it was composed of coaldust, bits of broken bricks, stones, glass – soil such as that could never have thirsted to become fruitful…

Still – Jews put such pain and drudging toil into their gardening. Jews dug up the cobblestone pavement to get a bit of earth.  Some of them even strewed earth over the pavement.[ii]

In the larger ghettoes, administrations were set aside to organise the plantings, supervise cultivation and even train gardeners with special courses in agriculture. Indeed, the Jewish holocaust experience of transforming barren lands in the Nazi-designed ghettos of Eastern Europe into fertile gardens and crops begins with the biblical narrative of the power of the garden to transform and produce life.

It is in the Bible that we first learn of captured Jews herded into desolate, overcrowded lands where they are forced to survive without the necessities that sustain life.  In Ezekiel we read:

And the desolate land shall be tilled, whereas it lay desolate in the sight of all that passed by.

And they shall say, This land that was desolate is become like the garden of Eden; and the waste and desolate ruined cities are become fenced, and are inhabited. (Ezekiel; 36: 34-35)

In Jeremiah, we learn of God’s entreaty to captured Jews (“Whom I have caused to be carried away”) that they should plant gardens, eat the food they produce and not submit to false prophets – rather, to keep alive faith and hope.

These Bibilical quotations give a cultural and social reference to the history of Jewish struggle to survive under capture and expulsion; what has now become mythologised as the Jewish ‘tradition’ of coping against hostile surroundings.   Teenage ghetto diarist, Dawid Sierakowiak told us much about what tending plants meant to him in just two lines. While noting his mother’s work in a community garden in the Lodz ghetto, he wrote that if he had that job he would eat his fill of beet seeds[iii].

Bernard Gotfryd recalled that the garden of his tiny house in the Warsaw ghetto held his last memories of his mother before she was transported to Treblinka.  Like Sierakowiak, Gotfryd did not describe the garden nor its place in his family’s struggle for survival.  Rather, it was where his devastated mother sat on a bench by a lilac tree and cried. In the Bialystok ghetto, Jakub Goldberg was concerned that the Nazi order for the ghetto to be reduced by a third would mean the loss of his vegetable garden.[iv]  That is all we know of Jakub’s concern for the directive, and of his garden.

Similarly, the garden appears to have withered from formal ghetto history through lack of nourishing detail. While ghetto garden plots and communal agricultural projects are briefly detailed in some memoirs and historical records, the actual garden experience and its relationship with the people of the ghetto is rarely fully developed.

Those who have spoken to me about their ghetto experiences, including in the larger ghettoes of Lodz and Warsaw – paradoxically, ghettoes with the most organised and officially chronicled gardening departments – often denied, or minimalised the existence of gardens. Some were offended at the subject and believed it irrelevant to Holocaust history; the ghetto was no place for such a seemingly anodyne occupation as gardening or agriculture.

Sheva Glas-Weiner provides a counterpoint. She records that the small garden cultivated from “forlorn ground” by children in the Lodz ghetto orphanage gave hope. However, their despair at the news they were to be transported prompted them to lash out violently and destroy it:

…it had failed them.  They had loved it, nurtured it and watched over it and it had not heeded them or responded to their loving care.[v]

Her words reveal the importance of the garden to the ghetto prisoner, not just for the food it might produce, which was often minimal, but for its capacity to give hope and transform. (Albeit, briefly.)

The collection of literature and memoir ensures that the noble task of building a ghetto garden is included in the pantheon of Jewish acts of resistance, ingenuity and belief in the transformative effect of nature.

As I hope to develop, the work of ghetto poets and fiction writers is as similarly revelatory as that of the memoirists and diary writers. It provides a symbolic counterpart to the literal; filling gaps in knowledge created by a lack of evidence. It gives life to and often confirms that information which is found in the archives of some of the larger ghettoes. In part it provides what archivists cannot; an insight into the ghetto Jews’ emotional suffering at the denial of nature and beauty.

Chava Rosenfarb’s fictional trilogy, Tree of Life, written soon after her own liberation from the Lodz ghetto is rich with garden detail. It includes colourful information about agriculture projects undertaken by different political groups and kibbutzim, including details of organised practical garden courses and lectures. She writes of the transformation of pebbled streets into garden plots and the assembling of window box and balcony gardens. Her observations are echoed by other fiction writers, and confirmed in official ghetto chronicles and Judenrat records.

Lithuanian poet Avrom Sutzkever was in the Vilna ghetto where he wrote many poems, including Flower  in 1943.  The poem describes the physical punishment a man in the ghetto endured just to see a flower. The black and blue marks of his punishment for such a crime were for Sutzkever, analogous with the indicators of the changing seasons found in nature.

Short story writer, Isaiah Speigel – who was in the Lodz ghetto – used nature as a metaphor for Jewish despair and isolation. Speigel wrote of the paradox that was the deathly land of the ghetto proper and the fertile land that was the Jewish cemetery. It was only the cemetery, where the dead were buried, that showed signs of life.

In his popular memoir of life in the Warsaw ghetto, The Pianist, Wladsilaw Szpilman used imagery from nature to depict the period of calm that followed a brutal round-up of Jews for transportation to their deaths.  Szpilman wrote that the month after the viciousness passed peacefully.

To underscore that peace, he described the flowers and blossoms that had emerged somewhat incongruently during the bloody aftermath.   It was as though the plants had memorised the tempo of nature and pushed through the violence and horror.  Like the buds that were about to follow their preternatural cycle and blossom into blooms – “even in the ghetto”, a world that followed no norms – so too the Germans “remembered’” their murderous mission and sprouted into action. The two deeds contrast as natural to each genus. That is, flora that blooms and Nazis who kill.

It was May, and even in the ghetto lilac blossomed here and there….  Just as the flowers were about to come out fully the Germans remembered us.[vi]

It is the language of spring associated as it is with the end of cold and dark winter and the beginning of new life that is most often used by ghetto memoirists to contrast their existences. They describe how, unlike the sparse strips of nature and scrappy gardens scattered throughout the ghetto, their lives would not be so renewed.

The physical and metaphorical winter – the darkness and gloom – of their unbearable lives would not be punctuated with symbols of its ending.  Spring, in turn, did not provide them with nature’s optimistic signposts of new life and hope. The cycle of life had bypassed them. 

Ghetto diarist, Chaim Kaplan wrote that Jews had been robbed of every tree and every flower. In doing so, Kaplan invokes Jewish tradition that places the tree as the symbol for growth, responsibility, and stability. Trees are lifelines, as exhibited in Genesis’s tree of knowledge and tree of life, and in God’s instruction in Leviticus for Jews to plant fruit-bearing trees, And so it is in such ghetto literature that we find confirmation of the importance and pathos of the nature narrative in telling the stories of suffering and existence. It is more than a narrative or theme, however.

Nature provides the root language to describe what is absent and has been denied; growth, rejuvenation, the cycle of life. Indeed, references to nature in times of severe persecution have a long history in Jewish story-telling.

As I have mentioned, the Bible speaks to Jews of such transformative properties. As well, ghetto poets like Sutskever write of those so transformed after sneaking a flower into their miserable, barren ghetto homes that the consequent violent punishment was almost worth it. In longing references to the gardens and nature experiences denied them, the Jewish ghetto writers highlight its importance by invoking its absence. This is particularly so for ghetto children.

Twelve year old Sara Zyskind made it her duty to teach nature and gardens to children in her care in the Lodz ghetto.  She recalled that they had never seen a flower and had no understanding of nature.

In one of the earliest survivor memoirs, David Wdowinski wrote of ghetto children seeing nature for the first time; on the way to their deaths. In the stiflingly, crowded trains to Treblinka and Auschwitz, they were able to glimpse the countryside as adults held them up to the boxcar windows for air:

In this way thousands of Jewish children on their first and last trip in their lives, saw a tree or a flower for the first time.  These were five-and six-year-olds who grew up in the Ghetto.  The Ghetto had everything, but it had no trees nor flowers.[vii]    

Januscz Korczak, the founder of Warsaw ghetto’s most famous orphanage, wrote of his orphans’ desire to “become acquainted and make friends with nature”.  In a letter to the local priest, whose church with its beautiful garden remained within the boundaries of the ghetto, the children wrote:

We long for a little air and greenery.  It is stuffy and crowded where we are.  We want to become acquainted and make friends with nature.

We shall not damage the plants.

Please don’t refuse us.[viii]

Historian Yehuda Bauer ascribed the Hebrew term Amidah, which literally means “standing up against”, for those acts which preserved dignity and prolonged life.  He included obtaining food and other morale building activities [ix] in the grouping that could be labelled Amidah.  I am inclined toward the teenage diarist, Yitskhok Rudashevski’s view when he included the gardeners in the Vilna ghetto in his list of those who passively resisted the Nazis and provided a symbol of the, Jews enduring faith in the redemptive power of the spirit.[x]

This redemptive power is illustrated in the Biblical words of Isaiah, and often used as comfort to exiled Jews.  For the purposes of this paper, the exiled Jews were those imprisoned in the ghettoes of Eastern Europe.

For the Lord shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places: and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like Eden, and her desert of the garden of the Lord:.  (Isaiah 51:3)

In the ghettoes, gardens – no matter how primitive – nurtured, sustained and reflected the cycle of the ghettoes and their prisoners. Rosenfarb described this effectively when her fictional Lodz Jews took their last look at their gardens as they boarded trains to the camps.

The smell of pears, apples and cherries filled their nostrils.  They felt as if they themselves were fruit filling the open snouts of the empty hungry box cars.[xi]

From the ashes of the ghetto gardens tended in the Nazi created Gomorrah, we have memorial gardens to honour the dead and those who managed to survive.  The gardens of Thereisenstadt, Auschwitz and other former prison and ghetto sites now provide memorials to those who perished and endured.

The symbolism of renewal, peace and returning to nature (or God) so inherent in these gardens has its genesis in the Biblical depiction of the Garden of Eden as the birthplace of civilization.

The antithesis of birth is death, and so it is apposite that the end of being is neatly bookended in gardens that serve to memorialize the lifeless, who as Jeremiah says, will not sorrow anymore.

ENDNOTES