On the night of Jan. 27 each year, a streetcar makes its way around Warsaw, the Polish capital.

They say it is a cold, dark, silent and circuitous ride in a unique vehicle. The tram is marked front and the back by Stars of David, symbols of the Jewish people, recognizable shapes the world over.

To the casual observer (how could there be casual observers here?), the streetcar carries only the conductor. Internal lights illuminate the empty seats and dangling hand straps that identify streetcars everywhere. For the Jews of Warsaw (the World Jewish Congress reports less than 5,000 living there today, a tiny fraction of the thousands who called it home before the Second World War), the streetcar must evoke the memory of loss, tears of remembrance.

For the observer of history, the streetcar is full, bursting at its seams.

It overflows with the ghosts of nearly half a million Jews killed in the Warsaw Ghetto, their fate assured by Nazi evil. They were brutalized, starved to death or shot. In the majority of cases, they were removed from the ghetto, forced into boxcars, driven to death camps, gassed and incinerated. This final process — a sliver of the final solution — was called the Grossaktion, the Nazi term for the forced deportation in cattle cars and execution in gas chambers. This was the fate of hundreds of thousands of Warsaw’s Jews in the summer and early fall of 1942.

What was the problem that led to this solution? That Jews existed at all, a fact anathema to Nazi sensibilities. If you ever need to search for an example of genocide, here it is.

You do, however, have to search for the remains of the ghetto today, virtually obliterated in the Nazi assault on it in the spring of 1943. Historical plaques mark a few buildings sitting at the edge of the ghetto. At the street level, pedestrians step over brass signage that reads “MUR GHETTA/GHETTO WALL 1942,” marking a few metres of the walls’ gerrymandered path.

The area hosts an impressive museum called Polin, displaying the 1,000-year history of Jews in the country. Its Finnish architects have created an inspired and evocative architectural masterpiece. Hidden away near the former site of the Great Synagogue, there is an even-more-inspiring institution, less notable for its architecture and more for what it contains. The Emanuel Ringelblum Historical Institute holds the written product of the Jews’ captivity behind the ghetto walls — the calendars and love letters, the photos and essays, and thousands of other documents — of those who perished.

I haven’t observed it personally, but the streetcar must carry sounds on its Jan. 27 journey — the ringing of a bell as the streetcar passes by, the rumble and rattle of the car’s wheels on the streetcar tracks. Perhaps, if they listen closely, witnesses can hear the ghosts, the cries of children ripped from their mothers, the shouts of men watching their wives raped and brutalized, the pounding on the doors from the inside of those overpacked, obscene cattle cars.

Perhaps it’s this that pulls at me: long after the end of the second great war, antisemitism has begun its rise again, its slither just below our hearing, as it crawls on its belly across the world, across North America, even into Hamilton, thousands of miles from Warsaw. And, perhaps especially in this January, ever since Oct. 7.

Since that attack on Israeli citizens, and the subsequent response, I’ve been searching for something that would capture how the world sees the Hamas-Israel conflict — a painting, a photograph, a musical piece — anything to move us toward peace.

Perhaps, I think, something like the photograph of the clothes-less little girl, running from napalm, the picture that is credited with bringing home the brutality of the Vietnam War. Perhaps a painting, like Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” a sudden, soundless plunge into insanity. Perhaps music, I think. There are hundreds of pieces that might serve the cause: Mozart’s “Requiem,” Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” especially Peter’s aria: “Have mercy my God, for the sake of my tears.”

Brilliant and sad as these images and sounds are, perhaps it is the streetcar that captures the current sadness best. On its circular journey that meets its end as it meets its beginning, carrying nothing more than memory and hope. Ultimately going nowhere. Ultimately very sad. Ultimately hopeful, however: after its nighttime journey finishes, the streetcar is greeted by daybreak.

Saturday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Remember.