Visiting What Cannot Be Seen

Warsaw 2025

A beautiful hotel
rises where the small Warsaw Ghetto once stood.

Beneath us—a graveyard.
Six hundred thousand dead from World War II,
their bones sometimes unearthed
as foundations are laid for the new.

People vanishing.
People vanished.

The Umschlagplatz—
a memorial to 300,000 souls
deported to death camps, to gas chambers,
to death.
And we whisper prayers for eternal life.
Names carved in stone—
Polish, Hebrew, Yiddish.

Mila 18—
ghetto fighters waging a bitter battle
to the final breath,
choosing death on their terms
over the Nazi’s grip.
Echoes of Masada—
another stand, another time.

Stones remain—
some walked upon by ancestors,
some reduced to rubble.
Stones of memory.
Stones we place in remembrance.

And hearts of stone—
those who shattered the cornerstone
of Jewish life in Poland:
the Jewish people themselves.