Poland Reflections

Hi all!

If you didn’t know, we spent the previous week (March 23-27) in Poland. We studied the pre-Holocaust Jewish life in Eastern Europe, the extermination of the Jews and other minorities, and the current state of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. As you could assume, the trip stirred many emotions throughout the group. I had three main thoughts run through my head throughout the experience: 6,000,000, an almost guilt, and hope.

To understand the significance of 6 million, I had to look at it in smaller quantities. At Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Museum and Memorial, I read an account of 70 Jews being killed in a sudden uproar in Germany. That’s all of the students on EIE Spring 2014…plus four of our counselors. Can you imagine, nowadays, if an entire group of American students studying abroad were massacred. It would be all over the news. I thought of each of the parents I met, and siblings, grieving over my new friends. It would truly be a tragedy. But that’s only 70 people!!

Another 50 children were shot one by one in the head with hand guns. That’s my entire CDS (middle school) class…twice. It’s all of the girls (or guys) in one unit at camp. It’s Pittsburgh Diller, Karmiel Diller, and Toronto Diller. It’s too many people!!! 50 is simply too many. 6 million is just unfathomable. During my experience, I focused on comprehending the severity of 6 million. I still don’t get it. But there is an exhibit at Majdanek that has cages of 430,000 shoes. So many shoes. If you put 1 person per shoe, you would have a good image of Jews in camps. Dirty, bent, unidentifiable, and locked up. It made me sick.

Leaving the Majdanek and Birkenau also made my stomach twist in pain. As we were leaving, I looked back past the barbed wire at the barracks. I looked back at the place where around 360,000 people died.  I didn’t exactly feel guilty, but I just kept muttering “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry”. Every time I turned back, I was looking at welcome home for death. A place where my people, Jews, were whipped, beaten, tortured, and eventually killed. I was looking at a hell. But I only had to be there for 3 hours, they were there for years. It was disgusting.

When walking through Majdanek and Birkenau, some of our group wrapped Israeli flags around themselves. It’s common for Jews to do when visiting concentration and extermination camps. We would also sing Hatikva, the Israeli National Anthem, at almost any significant memorial or site. Both of these annoyed me in the beginning. To me, they went along the ideology that God “gave” us the Holocaust in order to receive Israel. I hate that so much. 6,000,000 Jews shouldn’t have had to die in order to receive a Jewish State. I love Israel now that it’s here, but at the time it wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t worth the death.

However, then I thought about the song Hatikva. It means hope. It speaks of hope for the Jewish people, how the hope is not lost yet, and the existence of the Jewish soul. That, I liked. We still have hope for the Jewish people, and we’re still here.  And the kids walking around the camps with the Israeli flag were flaunting that to the Nazi’s. We were saying “Ha! We’re still here!” I loved that. I loved letting the ghosts of the camps know that the Nazi’s failed, and that the Jewish people were still alive and thriving.

Once this hit me, I had the sudden urge for other people to know too. I began drawing the Star of David into the dirt at Auschwitz I. Every place with good, visible dirt I would draw the Jewish star to let everyone visiting the camps know that we are strong, and that, if they are Jewish, they aren’t alone. One other student stopped and stared at one of the stars. Watching her take it in was inspiring and gave me hope.

I don’t know if I’ll go back to Poland again, and I definitely didn’t love the country, but I did learn so much from it.

Hope everyone has a great Shabbat!

Shoshana