Last Stork Summer (12 page)
Authors: Mary Brigid Surber
White storks have been coming to Poland for hundreds of years. Poland has over 52,000 pairs of storks that come to breed and nest. The storks form colonies while breeding and several pairs will nest near one another. Storks don’t mind nesting close to each other, and are not bothered by their stork neighbors. Storks form monogamous pairs for the entire length of the breeding season.
They do not migrate or overwinter together but some pairs have paired up again in successive years because of their strong attachment to their nesting site. The males are the ones who usually arrive to the nest site first. It is the male’s job to prepare the nest for the female. A male will greet the arriving female with a head-shaking, crouching display. If the male accepts the female as his mate, they will show they are bonded by an up-down display. When they perform this display, they hold their wings out away from their sides while pumping their heads up and down. This is usually accompanied by bill-clattering. If the birds perform a shorter courtship display it usually means they have been paired in previous years.
Their nests are huge, around six feet by ten feet. They are built of branches and sticks, and lined with twigs, grass, paper, rags, and leaves. They are often six to nine feet deep. The nests are reused year after year, but the breeding pair will add to the structure of the nest each season. They are particularly fond of building their nests on man-made structures like roofs, chimneys, towers, telephone poles, and haystacks. Nests can also be found in trees, cliff ledges and even on the ground.
The female usually lays three to five eggs, and the pair take turns constantly sitting on the egg. After thirty-three to thirty-four days of incubation, they hatch covered with white down and black bills. Both parents feed the chicks for about nine weeks
until they fledge. The young birds will not reach maturity until they are four years old. The storks can live and breed successfully for more than thirty years.
The Polish people are very fond of their storks, and have viewed them as a symbol of prosperity and good luck for hundreds of years. A Polish folk tale tells how frogs, lizards, snails and other pests were multiplying excessively, and became so numerous that they caused great problems. God gathered them all in a sack and told a man to empty the sack into the sea. Curiosity got the best of the poor human and he opened the sack! All escaped, so God changed the man into a stork to hunt them and gather them up.
No other European country can boast about as many nesting pairs of storks as Poland. They are the national symbol of Poland. Storks, being constantly present in Polish landscape, remain its vivid symbol and have found their place in their folktales, proverbial sayings, superstitions, church holidays and culture. For those reasons the stork is an inseparable symbol.
There are numerous accounts of how the Holocaust affected the Jewish community. There are very few accounts of how other groups of people – Poles, Slavs, and Gypsies, to name some, were also the target of Nazi policies of racial purity and genocide. The following two books were extremely helpful in writing this story.
Did The Children Cry? Hitler’s War against Jewish and Polish Children, 1939-45
by Richard C. Lukas (Hippocrene Books, Inc., 1994). Lucas concentrates on outlining the specific ways the Nazis established the most efficient killing factory in history and the history of genocide of Polish children. This book is based on eye-witness accounts, interviews, and research.
Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation 1939-1944
by Richard C. Lukas (Hippocrene Books, Inc., 1990). This book chronicles, with thorough documentation, Germany’s occupation and destruction of Poland’s culture and people.
In addition, some of the history behind the story was found online at these two sources:
The Jewish Virtual Library – an article titled “Stolen Children” by Gitta Sereny.
The Museum of Tolerance Online – an article titled “Non-Jewish Children in the Camps” by Sybil Milton.
Approximately 200,000 Polish children were taken from their homes between 1939 and 1945. Under the Nazi occupation, Poland was taken over, occupied and settled by German settlers causing forced resettlement of the original inhabitants. Poland was racially and geographically consolidated into Germany.
Eventually all Polish children between the ages of two and twelve were examined and segregated into two categories: “racially valuable or worthless,” as Himmler once wrote. Children found to be racially worthless were either sent home or, if old enough and capable, sent to Germany to work. Those with
racial potential were taken to one of three centers in the Warthegau, where further tests were conducted.
Forgotten Holocaust
, on page 25, cites Himmler: “I would consider it right if small children of Polish families who show especially good racial characteristics were apprehended and educated by us in special institutions and children’s homes which must not be too large.”
In December 1942, a camp for Polish children and youth known as Litzmannstadt was established in a separate area within the walls of the Lodz ghetto. The main gate to the camp was located on Przemyslowa Street; which is why it was often referred to as “The Camp on Przemyslowa Street.”
On November 28, 1942, the Main Security Office of the Reich explained that it would be a camp for adolescent Poles, those adolescents deemed to be criminals or uncared-for, “who, therefore, are a dangerous element both for the German children, and because of the fact that they could continue their criminal activity.”
The camp was made to look like an educational facility to rehabilitate juvenile offenders. In reality though, it was a concentration camp for children and youth up to the age of 16. The young inmates had numbers instead of names, wore gray prison clothes and clogs, and worked from morning to night. They were also subjected to routine beatings. The camp area was surrounded by a high fence made up of planks and patrolled by German sentries.
The camp prisoners primarily came from the areas incorporated into the Reich once they had conquered Poland. Some children were taken from orphanages; some were taken from parents who’d been arrested for their involvement in the resistance movement. Some were children who had been taken from their families for “Germinization” but had been unable to pass the exhaustive racial examinations.
By January 1945, an estimated 1,600 Polish children went
through this camp. The exact number of inmates is difficult to establish because many of the records are missing. When the war was over, there were about 900 prisoners in the camp.
The children worked just as their peers did in the ghetto, on the other side of a high wall. The children stitched clothes, made straw shoes, mended knapsacks and straightened out needles. Many of them died of starvation, cold and emaciation, especially during the typhus epidemic that broke out in late 1942 and early 1943. Records document 136 deaths.
The Polish children in this camp were completely isolated from the outside world and had no contact with the people from the other side of the wall. A branch of this camp also operated on a private estate in Dzierzana, 15 kilometers from Lodz.
Today, only the old camp administrative building at 34 Przemyslowa St. remains. For many years after the war, people did not know about this camp for Polish children and youth. In May 1971, the Broken Heart Monument was unveiled in Szarych Szeregow Park, a somber reminder of the young victims. The monument, designed by Jadwiga Janus and Ludwik Mackiewicz, is located just outside the old camp area. The inscription reads,
“They’ve taken your lives. Today we can offer you only memory.”
To that inscription I would add one thing: “Love leaves a memory no one can steal.”
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