When Ukrainian refugees first disembark into the train station in Przemysl, Poland, the first thing they see is a huge sign that reads:
WELCOME. YOU ARE SAFE HERE.
The sign is meant to be a comforting gesture of goodwill. And for the time being it most certainly is. But if the tragic history of Europe in the last century is any indication, safety will surely ebb and flow like the tides.
When my father was in medical school in the Polish city of Vilna, the rising specter of a Nazi-fied Germany was troubling but not an immediate threat. Then in 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland and WWII could no longer be wished away, an unexpected thing happened to Vilna.
It found itself suddenly the capitol of the newly independent neutral country of Lithuania. A kind of a trade off had occurred. Lithuania would be given its sovereignty and Hitler would be allowed to plow through the rest of Poland with impunity.
And suddenly Vilnius (as it was referred to in Lithuanian) found itself welcoming wave after wave of panicked Jews from Poland. They flooded into Lithuania because Lithuanian neutrality would protect them from Hitler's brutality. And they came to Vilnius referring to it as Vilna (its Polish name), perhaps also clinging to its informal nickname as "The Jerusalem of Lithuania."
In 2007 I had the rare opportunity to live and work in Vilnius for 3 months while assisting Edward Zwick in the production of the film adaptation of my mother's book, Defiance: The Story of the Largest Armed Rescue of Jews by Jews during WWII. My parents and sister Leora came to visit the set for a weekend. On my day off, Dad gave us a tour of the parts of the city that were still recognizable 70 years after he had volunteered as a waiter in the pop-up soup kitchen of the Jewish Relief Agency.
Among the sites we visited was the main medical school classroom building where along with the other four Jewish students in his class he had stood in the back of the lecture hall to protest the requirement that Jews stay seated in a special roped off section of the room. There's a long pathway leading up to the unassuming building lined with trees. At the time, members of the NK, the extreme right-wing pro-Nazi party on campus waited one night along this path with baseball bats to attack the Jewish students as they spilled out of the building at the end of the day. My father had been spared this beating by the janitor who warned him of the impending attack. And so the two stayed late drinking tea in the janitor's office late into the night until the coast was clear and Dad could safely walk home unharmed.
Dad spoke of his time playing the part of a waiter in the soup kitchen as a time of great joy. Of course it being a soup kitchen there was only ever one thing on the menu but he enjoyed pretending to take orders from his "customers," many of whom were young and just starting out in life and full of hope and optimism and determination. There were often unexpected reunions during this time. Jews in Poland at that time lived a mostly insular life. As a result many of them had vacationed as children at the same Black Sea resorts. (Think upstate NY and the borscht belt) So with Polish Jews having come from all over Poland into this small city, people were bumping into people they maybe hadn't seen in years.
There was an atmosphere of giddy freedom. Romantic entanglements came a bit more easily in this place where everyone felt the sudden relief of having reached neutral territory and none of the usual constraints that come with living in a place where everyone knows your name, your parents and all your cousins.
They were free. And safe.
Until they weren't.
By 1941 Vilnius (or Vilna) had turned into one of the bloodiest Jewish killing centers in Europe as Lithuanian police and Nazi Einzatsgruppen loaded Jews into buses bound for the forests of Panerei where some abandoned fuel storage pits in the woods would serve as mass graves.
Yesterday I heard a Ukrainian woman being interviewed by the BBC.
"Where can we go? Where will we be safe?"
I'm afraid to even speculate.
