Depicting a Dialogue
Between Jewish
Generations from One Polish
Town
Minna Packer’s
Documentary Back to Gombin
By MONICA
STRAUSS
Back to Gombin, a documentary made by Minna Packer
and screened in a rough cut for a selected audience at Columbia
University on Sunday, explores the need of the children of Holocaust
survivors to re-engage with their parents’ past on their own
terms.
Gombin, a small town in Central Poland was
home to more than two thousand Jews before the war. Of these, 212
survived. Many of these former “Gombiners,” stayed in touch and,
having lost most of the members of their extended families, became
family for each other. The next generation drew on the internet to
continue the tradition and linked 300 families from around the world
to form a Gombin Jewish Historical and Genealogical Society. In the
summer of 1999, fifty members undertook the return trip to the
Polish town that forms the centerpiece of the film.
Film clips from
an earlier visit
Another return had been
recorded on film sixty-three years earlier. In 1937, Sam Rafel, a
former Gombiner who had immigrated to the United States, returned to
his hometown for a visit with a 16mm camera and filmed a cheerful
population of old and young willing to serve as subjects of his
silent documentary. He also recorded the magnificent 300-year-old
wooden synagogue, admired throughout Poland. By interposing clips
from this earlier return at various points in her film, Packer not
only achieves a poignant contrast to the present-day town totally
devoid of Jews, but is also able to suggest the longing of
generations cut off from the culture that made them who they
are.
The trip to Poland is more than the visual focus of the
film—Packer depicts it as the catalyst that opened crucial areas of
discussion between young and old, parents and children, Jews and
Poles. Not all of the Gombiner “elders” agreed with the interest of
the next generation in re-connecting to the town, but for many of
the younger people it felt like such a necessity they decided to
proceed, nonetheless. The effort to return began with the
realization that the gravestones of Gombin’s Jewish cemetery had
been dispersed. When the former Gombiners contacted officials in the
Polish town, they found them willing to cooperate in an attempt at a
reconstruction of the cemetery. Money was then raised by the former
citizens through contributions and foundations, including the
Nussenbaum Foundation, which funds reclamations of Jewish cemeteries
in Poland.
Work began in 1997 and the highlight of the return
journey was to be the re-dedication. In addition, a monument was to
be unveiled at the site of the Chelmno concentration camp dedicated
to the many Gombiners who met their death there.
For each member
of the group who came to Gombin, there were revelations that made
their family history more real and palpable than ever before. For
one man, it was the discovery of the tombstone of an eight-year-old
brother, whose death had impelled the family to leave the
town at
the end of the the thirties and so, in essence, saved their lives.
For another, it was meeting a survivor who had known her father and
learning more about his escape than he had ever been able to tell
her. For Minna Packer, the revelation of the beauty of the
surrounding countryside, brought home to her how good life might
have been there.
One of the surprising results of the journey was
the second generations’s recognition of the Polish strain in Jewish
culture, a recognition too painful for the survivors to admit to “We
were there for hundreds of years,” Packer says. “We were a diverse
culture, religious and assimilated—how can it not have affected us.”
As another commentator puts it “We are more Polish than we like to
admit, and they are more Jewish than they like to
admit.”
Although, the trip was a positive experience for the
participants, it proceeded under the shadow of past suffering and
Packer makes sure to intersperse the events of the visit, with the
harrowing recollections of survivors back home. Talking to the
townspeople also led to some new disturbing revelations about the
Nazi occupation. And, among themselves, the Gombiners began to worry
that their newly constituted cemetery might be defaced, despite the
fact that the locals had been friendly and welcoming. But some took
the long view—having come so far was sufficient achievement in
itself.
A visit to Warsaw concluded the journey. Packer filmed
this side trip to bring out the Jewish life that, on a small but
growing scale, exists once more in Poland. Some of its more vital
manifestations can be seen in the capital city.
Film viewers are
treated to an eloquent speech by Gebert Kostek, an editor of the
Polish-Jewish periodical Midrasz, emphasizing that Sinai, and not
the Shoah must be the source of Jewish identity. The continuity of
that identity is confirmed by Helesi Lieberman, head of the
successful new Jewish school in Warsaw – the Marosha School –
sponsored by the Lauder Foundation.
Void when parents
refused to speak
The second and third
generations have the last word in the film. Many speak of the void
that persisted in their lives when parents refused to speak of the
past, a past they had already intimated from hidden documents and
photographs.
Others mention the eerie feelings that their parents
had identified too closely with their childhoods and teen-age years,
trying to make up for a youth they never had. In one particularly
touching moment, a young woman speaks of what she discovered about
her father in Gombin at the site of his grave in New Jersey. He
could not share his past with her, but she had found peace in
discovering it for herself.
A member of the third generation, the
nineteen-year old Columbia University student Noam Lupu, returned to
Gombin with both his grandmother, a survivor, and his mother. Young
as he is, he is as impelled as any of his elders to pursue his
history.
As editor of the Gombin newsletter, he wrote that the
film – for which he was instrumental in raising funds – is intended
to show “the forces and passions that drove second-and
third-generations to rebuild something they had never experienced,
but, somehow, nonetheless,needed.” Minna Packer, the daughter of a
Gombiner, herself, eloquently succeeds in this task. |
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