“Go back to Poland” will be a familiar phrase to some. Since the October 7, 2023, attacks, it has been screamed at Jews across the West, intended to warn them that they do not belong—that their true homeland is the place where their ancestors were exterminated 80 years ago. Last week, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed held a roundtable with an activist who has echoed that very phrase, calling for Israeli Jews to be sent “back to Poland.”
Omar Mohammed first heard of this phrase when it was chanted at Columbia University’s campus after October 7. And it struck him deeply. An Iraqi historian, Omar was living in Mosul when ISIS seized control of the city. In the aftermath, he did not flee. Instead, he sat in a room one thin wall away from a senior ISIS leader, and he wrote—using his anonymous blog, Mosul Eye, to bring the terrorist group’s atrocities to millions. (To hear him tell his full story, watch our interview with him here.)
But Omar’s work as a historian did not end when he escaped Iraq in 2017. A few weeks ago, he reached out to tell us that after years of hearing calls for Jews to go back to Poland, he had decided to visit the concentration camps himself. He wanted to write, he said, about being “a historian from Mosul who documented one genocide, standing for the first time at the site of another.” The piece that resulted is something remarkable. We’re proud to bring it to you today. —Jillian Lederman
On August 24, I landed in Warsaw at night. I have long held that a city reveals its identity after dark, so I took the 175 bus from the airport into the center to get a better sense of it.
Something in that ride unsettled me. I have sat in my hometown of Mosul, Iraq, a city under ISIS occupation, and known exactly what I feared. On that bus, there was nothing I could point to, and yet my body reacted as if there were. I said afterward that I had smelled the ash of the dead—literally, still in the ground 80 years on.
I had never been to Poland. I first learned of the Holocaust in Mosul, in 2004 or 2005, when satellite dishes became easy to get after the fall of Saddam Hussein. I watched documentaries on the Second World War, one after another, recording each of them—because in those years we still lived with the expectation that anything could disappear at any moment.
Around the same time, I found out that the school I had attended stood on the ruins of the Jewish school of Mosul, which Saddam had demolished in 2000. From then on, I carried the hope that I would one day stand in the camps and see them for myself. What made me go, finally, was hearing about an incident in the wake of the October 7 attacks on Israel, when a particular chant was screamed at Jews on Columbia University’s campus: “Go back to Poland.”
Walter Reich, my friend and mentor, was appalled when he heard about the incident. Walter is the Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Professor of International Affairs, Ethics, and Human Behavior and a professor of psychiatry at The George Washington University, where I also work, and was the director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum from 1995 to 1998. Most of what I know about how societies erase their Jews I’ve learned from him. He told me that after he heard the call for Jews to go back to Poland, he decided to do just that: take his children and grandchildren to the death camp at Bełżec, where much of his family was murdered. He wanted to recite the kaddish there, the Jewish prayer for mourning.
What remains of Walter’s family amounts to a field. His uncles, aunts, and cousins were gassed, their bodies dumped into pits, later exhumed and burned, the ash dumped back in. He has been going to that field to say kaddish since the 1980s.
In August, I wrote to tell him that I was going to Auschwitz later that month, and within two hours he wrote back, “Have courage, Omar.” I asked him to teach me the kaddish so that I could say it there too.