Trip Reflection | Update written by Michael G.
The entire trip this past week was a whirlwind of emotions and returning home is no different. Yet regardless of all that happened the one thing each and every one of us wanted to do was just to come home and give everyone in the family a big hug. A greater appreciation of family, an appreciation for the uniqueness of our religion, and pride in the strength of those building communities even in places such as Dublin, Ireland are just a few of the things we learned throughout this experience. While we all want to share our experiences with everyone and all of you will want to hear all about it, there are many parts and emotions that just can't be explained. However while we may not be able to explain those emotions and memories it is those exact things that will stay with us from this trip for eternity.
Each individual had his or her own special moment or connection at some point during the trip. Whether it be singing a song during a ceremony, seeing the crematoriums or joining a thriving Jewish community in a place where many of us did not know Jews existed, there was a moment for everyone to serve as inspiration for the future. For some that will be a stronger connection to Zionism, others a stronger connection to their religion and for some it will be appreciating the lives we live today and the ability to live comfortably with all of our family. Therefore for this once in a lifetime experience we each owe a tremendous amount of gratitude to Mr. Berger, Mrs. and Mr. Blank, Rabbi Jacob and Mr. and Mrs. Zuckerman for helping make this trip the extraordinary trip that it was. Each Voice Counts. Each Life Counts. It is with certainty that not a single one of the thirteen of us will ever forget that.
Update No. 7 | Written by Eliana G. and Zack L.
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| Dublin Castle |
All in all, it was a meaningful and exciting Shabbat, an excellent conclusion to our trip, spent with a welcoming and thriving Jewish community in a foreign community.
Update No. 6 | Written by Rachel H.
As I watched the big white puffy clouds pass by, I could not help but feel relieved. We were out of Poland. I never expected Poland to be as emotional as it was, nor did I expect how I would feel once I left the place where millions of people were innocently murdered.
On the flight from Krakow to Dublin, I was fortunate enough to sit next to one of my fellow classmates, and another young woman. Even when we were no longer in Poland, we could not resist asking even more questions about what we saw and what we learned. This woman began to explain to us for the majority of our two-hour flight her personal views of the Holocaust from a non-Jewish perspective. Just to hear from someone I had never seen or met that my feelings were equally the same to her feelings was a breath of fresh air.
As we gathered our belongings and said our goodbyes, I finally realized for the first time this week that there IS good in the world. Throughout the trip I was constantly stumped as to how people could still be religious...how people could still believe in Hashem ... how people could still continue with their yiddishkeit. Although I still struggle to conclude with an answer to this question, at least I now have a better understanding after this unique encounter with a total stranger.
The transition from Poland to Ireland proved to be more important that I originally thought. I honestly do not know how I would have handled myself if I was just simply dropped back into America. After having the most meaningful and difficult experience of my life thus far, we all deserve to have some fun. Visiting Ireland will definitely help distract us, but it is not possible that any one of us will ever forget what we witnessed firsthand.
Update No. 5 | Written by Andrew M.
Looking through the window, granting the land a final farewell, we are spending these last moments introspecting and reflecting on our emotions that are now stalemated between mounds of laughter and mounds of tears: a salmagandi of good and evil culminated into a small seed which has been planted in our emotions. Sitting on the plane leaving a land where 60 years ago the inhabitants encountered insurmountable obstacles trying to escape, I am both nonplussed and disturbed by the simplicity of modern-day departure. A passport and multiple swipes of a credit card granted me something that 60 years ago people would be willing to bear the reprehensible title of "murder to achieve.
Following the brutal and somber atmosphere Auschwitz hovered upon our group, we were privileged to hear an inspiring story of a righteous gentile, Paulina, whose presence functioned as a respite from the previous days. She and her family lived in a town occupied by S.S. men, and the Jews in the town were stripped of food and shelter and subject to abuse. The S.S. established a moratorium, forbidding the distribution of food to Jews, and the punishment was death. Despite the life threatening consequence, Paulina and her family managed to feed and shelter sixteen Jews while avoiding suspicion from the S.S.
Her story flickered a glimpse of light upon the atrocities that encompassed our minds. We were so disillusioned by the devastation the Nazi soldiers committed against our nation that hearing from a hero was decompressing for us all. We hope that the poignant trip follows us to America and from there let the seed sprout into a full blossomed flower.
Update No. 4 | Written by Andrew Z. and Hannah
We began the day singing the niggun of Rebbe Elimelech in the Krakow Ghetto Square. From there, we learned about the smuggling that occurred in the Krakow apothecary ran by the righteous gentile, Tadius Pinalevich. We then made our way to Auschwitz -Birkenau. From the train tracks we silently walked to the entrance of Birkenau, waving an Israeli flag and holding a Torah with pride above our heads. We saw and heard the train run down the tracks, reverting our memories back to the horrors our ancestors experienced. We walked into Birkenau and imagined one's suitcase and the clothes one one's back. The fear, the hope, the confusion clearly visible in one's eyes. The loss of one's identity, something we take for granted.
Auschwitz. A planet of its own. A planet with its own unjust rules and its own soulless rulers. The banal details and nuances that attributed to such an unimaginable time period in history. The suffering one endured; the humility. To the Germans they all looked the same after they shaved and branded them. But, they were all different. Their shoes, their hair, their pots, their pans, tell each of their individual stories. Over one million individuals murdered. Single persons forced to live in an unimaginable, indescribable world.
We were able to turn our heads from the hair. We were able to turn our heads from the shoes. We were able to turn our heads from the pots, the pans, the prosthetics, the clothes, the Taleisim ... the evidence that survived. Survival was an anomaly at Auschwitz.
We were not forced to listen. We were not forced to hear the horrors. We were not forced to touch. We were not forced to feel. We were not forced to smell. We were not forced. We were not enslaved and slaughtered. We went into Auschwitz, and we came out alive.
It is our responsibility to share our knowledge and the stories. We are the living rarities.
"The one that does not remember history is bound to live through it again"
~ George Santayana
NOTE: This update was written late Thursday night. All participants have just landed safely in Dublin, Ireland.
Update No. 3 | Written by Lior and Josh A.
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| The memorial at Majdanek. |
Seeing the miles of land that were surrounded by double barb wire fence, the guard towers and the few bunkers that remained, was a horrifying sight.
Our first extremely emotional experience was walking into the first bunker where the men, women and children were separated for the showers. Those who deny the Holocaust say that if the Jews were gassed, there would have been blue/green stains on the walls of the showers, however this was not the case because these were regular showers. As we continued on through the bunker, we entered the gas chambers and immediately became witnesses to the stained walls and to the atrocities of the Holocaust.
We made our way to the warehouses where the possessions of the Jews were stored. We saw the prisoner uniforms, dolls that were taken from children, the hair that was shaven from their heads, the hundreds of thousands of shoes and even a siddur and torah. We walked past the sleeping barracks and even felt what it would have been like to sleep in the camp. At the end we all came to the dome that was built around the pile of ashes of 100,000 Jewish bodies. The top of the stone dome said the following (translated into English) "Let Our Fate Be a Warning to You." After looking into the dome, we went to the last "L" shaped building, the Crematory. We made a little ceremony while standing at the ovens. We started with two perakim of Tehillim and three of our faculty members spoke. Then one of the students led everyone in Esah Einai (Tehillim) and Vehi She'amda (from the Haggadah).
We had a completely different experience when we went to the grave of Rav Noam Elimelech of Lizhensk, a Chassiddic Rebbe. He encouraged people to become closer to HaShem by singing and dancing. When we arrived at his grave, we partook in his legacy through singing nigguns and dancing. We all wrote personal prayers and placed them on his grave before we left.
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| The Izaac Synagogue in Krakow |
After leaving the forest we visited Schindler's Factory where we learned about righteous gentiles and heard from the Zuckerman's themselves about how Oskar Schindler saved Andrew's grandfather, Abraham Zuckerman.
We ended off our evening with dinner and davening in the Izaac Synagogue in Krakow, built in 1638.
Update No. 2 | Written by Renee and Alivia
After a long day of traveling yesterday, by 8 a.m. we were on our way out of Warsaw. The way that the Heritage program is structured is that the places we visit are progressive in the sense that they become more and more difficult to see. With that in mind, we left a modernized Warsaw to the old shtetl of Tykocin. The first thing that one notices about Tykocin is how starkly different it is from the blooming city of Warsaw; unlike Warsaw, the buildings and streets of Tykocin had character that comes along with age - the fissures and chips in the stone houses only aged the town further. Tykocin was special in the fact that it was reminiscent of prewar Poland and it seemed as though, by just entering the town, we had just been transported back in time.
The first stop we made in Tykocin was the synagogue. Built in 1642, it was a magnificent structure with tefillot written on the walls. The walls and ceilings were intricately done, decorated in orange and yellow colors. The bima in the middle of the shul, which now serves as a museum, was interwoven into the very infrastructure of the building. There were large windows high up that brought in enough light to illuminate the shul. Unfortunately, during the war, the Nazis took control of Tykocin and defaced the shul. They used it as a warehouse. After the war, the synagogue was restored to the state it is in today. Additionally, there was an old-photography exhibit in the shul that was particularly fascinating. It was really special to see these old, prewar, pictures of European Jewish people who once lived there.
Next, we traveled to the main square across from the church. It was here that the trip began to feel more somber. We learned that in this exact spot, the Nazis rounded up all of the Jews of Tykocin -- all men, women, and children -- and marched them to the forest nearby. We visited that forest too, in silence, and walked down the path that they once walked down. I distinctly remember the trees as they were ominously tall and bare. They covered the entirety of this forest. After walking a short while, we came upon the memorial. Here, three sections were fenced off -- signifying the mass graves of the men, women and children who were murdered there. It was estimated that the Eintzgruppen, a mobile killing unit, shot and killed over two thousand Jews in this forest right outside of Tykocin in 1941. In its place, three monuments stand to commemorate the lives lost here. We learned that while the Jews arrived in Tycocin in the 1600s, there hasn't been a Jews living in Tykocin since this mass murder occurred.
We then traveled to the death camp Treblinka. Even though they warned us of what to expect at Treblinka, it was still shocking to see that literally nothing of the original camp is left. All that remains are the monuments erected to remind the world of what occurred there. Treblinka was only in operation for about a year (1942-43) but in that time, about 800,000 people were killed. This station served only as an extermination camp and therefore selection was very rare - practically ever train that arrived at Treblinka was entirely wiped out. The killing process at Treblinka could take about a half hour, because they used carbon monoxide poisoning instead of Zyclon B, and then they burned the corpses without a crematorium. Treblinka was one of the most effective camps that the Nazis/Ukrainians ran.
Because there is nothing left of Treblinka, there were many monuments in its place. The first monument was a symbolic railroad track that ran up to a "platform." The artist's rendering of this scene was particularly interesting because it gave the grounds an eerie feeling as one walked towards the rest of the "camp." Around the stone train tracks, big stones were placed to represent the guards that stood watch as the trains approached the station.
The third set of monuments were these large stones with inscriptions of the countries from where the people killed in Treblinka came from. There were also more than 17,000 smaller stones all across the Treblinka grounds representing the victims of this death camp; some of the stones had names of communities which were entirely wiped out. Lastly, the largest monument stood where one of the thirteen gas chambers once stood, also representing the innocent men, women and children whose lives were cut short at Treblinka's gates.
It was at the latter monument that we stopped and had a ceremony in commemoration of the victims of Treblinka. I had the opportunity to read a poem at this memorial, entitled "Treblinka" by David Graham, and it was a very moving and surreal experience. Everyone there felt the gravity and weight of the situation. In the poem I read, there was a line that said,
"...but listen close, and you will hear the sound / Of Treblinka's faint heartbeat, below the yellow ground..."There was a certain presence in the air as we left that camp, one that transcended every person, through and through.
Lastly, we traveled to Lublin to visit the Yeshiva of Chachmei Lublin -- the "Harvard" of Yeshivas in Poland. We heard a d'var torah from Rabbi Jacob and learned a little in the beit midrash there.
When we got back to the hotel, we had a processing session where we all had a chance to express our feelings about the day and process the sights we had seen. In just a short amount of time, this trip has truly been transformative experience.
Update No. 1 | Written by Chana and Aviv
On Monday, we got to the airport in Warsaw at noon and loaded our bags onto the bus. We met the staff from Heritage including Michael Berl, the director, and Dr. David Bernstein, our guide/historian. To start off the day we went to the Nozyk Synagogue, the only currently functioning synagogue in Warsaw in which there are three minyanim a day. There we learned about the life of Jews before the war and how they were very dominant in the larger community, being involved in culture, commerce, and politics.
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| Rappaport Memorial |
Finally we went to dinner where we had the opportunity to speak with three young Polish Jews who told us what it is like to live as a Jew in Poland. We went back to our hotel to get some rest before the upcoming eventful day.
