First, a thank you to Pope Benedict XVI for visiting Auschwitz.  It means a lot more to me than when Oprah visits. (OK, I would like to find a torrent of the show somewhere.)



Here's the report of the German-born Pope's arrival at a mass given for 900,000 people.

Benedict made a triumphant entrance in his popemobile, riding through a sea of flags — red and white for Poland, yellow and white for the Vatican — with the choir singing the refrain, “Poland welcomes you, Poland thanks you.”

Well, one thing's for sure, it's better being the Pope than the Chief Rabbi.

Poland's chief rabbi, (American-born) Michael Schudrich, was attacked in a central Warsaw street on Saturday in what the Interior Ministry said was probably a provocation meant to portray Poland as an anti-Semitic country.

"While I was walking in Warsaw, someone yelled 'Poland is for Poles'...I went back and asked him why he said that and then he hit me and sprayed me with something like pepper gas."

Is there a word in Polish for "ironic"?

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In a related note, I recently finished "The Wall" by John Hersey, the author of Hiroshima who wrote most of his best work in the 1940s and 1950s.  It's a fictional story based on the true account of a solitary Jewish man who lived in the Warsaw ghetto and kept an archive of everything that happened to him and his acquaintences throughout the deportations, uprising and ultimate liquidation of the ghetto.  There are love stories, births, deaths (of course) and the day-to-day moral issues of what happens to people who know that their every action, even facial expressions, can result in life or death.  Even though this is "just" a work of fiction, I am amazed that I'm only discovering it now as I think it can add so much to everyone's understanding of what it must have been like to be Jewish in Poland during WWII.  I highly recommend it to anyone.