Poland Trip

**I APOLOGIZE IN ADVANCE FOR ANYTHING TOO GRAPHIC**

Wednesday January 12, 2011

Today is our first day in Poland. We left base at about 2:30. On the bus, I sat next to Gill and told her about my break. Things went pretty smoothly at the airport minus waiting in line for the first security check. We got on the plane and left for Warsaw. I fell asleep before take-off, woke up at breakfast, ate, then went back to sleep. At the airport in Warsaw, we all put on our warm clothes and headed to our first stop: the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw. This cemetery was huge (80 acres, with 250,000 graves) and it’s still functioning. It was the most unique cemetery I had ever been to. There were terrace type walls made from fragments of tombstones that had been destroyed during the war. This was to keep their memory. The writings on the tombstones were in Polish, Hebrew, and some Yiddish. The people buried there ranged from super religious Orthodox/Chassidic to secular Jews, and each tombstone showed it. You could tell who was a Cohen, who was a Levi, who the rabbis were, who had money, etc by the symbol carved into the tombstones. The Cohanim had the priestly hands, Levi’im had the handwashing symbol, rabbis had ohels (literally translated to tent, but it almost looks like a mausoleum), authors and scholars had books, charitable women had a hand giving צדקה, the rich people had whatever they wanted because they could afford it. Strangely enough, there were non-Jewish symbols in this Jewish cemetery like cherubs, angels, etc. There were communal graves for those who died in the Warsaw Ghetto. After the cemetery, we went to the Noyzak Synagogue for mincha (afternoon prayer) and a limud (study session). We left the synagogue and had lunch. Afterwards, we got on the bus and drove for 2.5 hours to Lublin. This was the only bus ride in which we were neither watching a movie nor listening to music. That night, we watched Escape from Sobibor.

Thursday January 13, 2011

Today we went to Majdanek. At first, we sat in a little room that Gill said looked like an old time theater. I had to agree with her. Jules Guten (our tour guide for Poland) began with the statistics (which are the same facts that many of us had learned before the trip). Then we actually went inside the camp. For another girl and me, this was the first time we had seen snow fall (or the first time I know of seeing snow falling, I’m sure my parents will tell me otherwise). It was very difficult to know what to feel because we wanted to be excited to see snow fall, but we had to be respectful because we were in a concentration camp. The first thing we saw (besides the snow) was the double barbed wire. For an uneducated person in regards to the Holocaust, it would almost seem like the people kept inside the barbed wire were feared by the people who stood outside the barbed wire when this camp was actually in use. The first building we went inside was the showers. These were real showers for people to get cleaned. Jules told us that this camp’s shower temperatures had different meanings. If a group of people received a cold water shower, they were going to live a little bit longer. If a group received a hot water shower, they were going straight to the gas chambers in the next room. Hot water was used to open up the pores in the skin so the gas produced from Zyklon B could get into their bodies faster and speed up the killing process. As we left the showers and gas chamber building, we were surprised not to see the crematorium immediately next to the gas chamber. The crematorium, in fact, was on the other side of the camp. Jules also told us that there were 18 watch towers. Such an ironic number for the watch towers. (The number 18 is made from the word חי which means life. This is an ironic statement because the guards in these 18 watch towers did not keep everyone alive). We walked into the next building (which was a former barrack for sorting people’s personal belongings) and saw a scale model of the camp. There seemed to be a lot of land and we learned that the Nazi soldiers wanted to add more barracks to the camp. This is where my emotions let go. I began to cry. We left that building and walked into the next one. It was a room full of shoes. (In case you were unaware, not too long ago, a building at Majdanek with many more shoes than we saw had burned down. In case you were wondering, there are still shoes at Majdanek, just not as many as before.) It was very hard to be in that room. I couldn’t find a pair of shoes among the many, but I found a white shoe on top of the dirty shoes. Many people said they saw the red shoe, but I didn’t see it. However, I still found it touching to see some color in a bunch of darkness. After we left the shoes, we walked over to the crematorium. We passed a memorial that was being built. It was an eagle flying away. We learned that the eagle is the symbol of Poland. This was such an ironic thing for me to see because many of the people who were sent here would never be flying free, unlike that eagle. We kept walking until we got to the crematorium. We stood outside the crematorium for another moment to learn a little bit more. On the ground, I saw a dead rat. This was the most ironic thing for me to see. A rat = what Nazi soldiers thought of the Jews. Dead = what they wanted and what they did. It was even more ironic that this rat was right outside the crematorium. With this irony and the rest of the camp, I knew I could not go inside the crematorium. I even told Yossi I couldn’t go in, but he told me I had to go in anyways to see what Jules was talking about. I went in, kept my eyes to the ground and couldn’t move. I didn’t want to see anything inside and I didn’t. I started to shake and told a different staff member to get me out of there. It was too much for me to bear. I got out of there and cried even more. Once everyone else made their way out, we went to the ditches where the people in the camp were punished for the revolt in a different camp called Sobibor. We then walked up a few steps to a memorial. It looked like dirt in the memorial, so I sat down on a little step looking into the memorial. Then, Jules told us that it was human ash. I stood up immediately and nearly threw up. We finally left the camp and got back on the bus. We were going to Krakow. That was a 5 hour bus ride. Along the way, we watched Schindler’s List. Surprisingly, that was the first time I had ever seen the movie. We finally got to Krakow, got to our rooms, and came down to dinner. After dinner, Gill and I were given a 15 minute warning to get our presentation together. It wasn’t enough mental preparation time, but it was fine when we did our presentation on the Jewish community and Jewish life in Krakow which dates back to the 10^th century.

Friday January 14, 2011

Today we went to a few of the synagogues we mentioned in our presentation. We visited the Tempel Synagogue and the Remuh Synagogue. We were supposed to visit the Kupa Synagogue, but the person with the key never came. After the synagogues, we went to Schindler’s Factory. Unfortunately, my camera decided to stop turning on. I was able to put my sim card into someone else’s camera. I was surprised to see that the museum was barely about Schindler. It was mainly a museum of life in Krakow and it was located in his factory. We saw his office though. After the museum, we had free time before Shabbas.

Sunday January 16, 2011

Last night, we had some time to walk around in Old Krakow. Friday night, we went to the Isaak’s Synagogue for Kabbalat Shabbat. Saturday morning, we went to the Remuh Synagogue. After shul, we had time to chill out. Once Shabbat was over and we ate dinner, we went out to explore Krakow. It was a pretty nice city. Although, it was raining off and on, but it wasn’t too much of a pain. Today, we went to Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II (Birkenau). That was pretty hard. I couldn’t go into the room with all the hair because I knew that if I did, I would be sick to my stomach. After we left Auschwitz, we went to Birkenau which was empty for the most part. The gas chambers were destroyed, a few barracks were left, the train tracks were still there, but it was still empty. It was a lot of open land. At Birkenau, a couple people had prepared a small ceremony for this camp. Once we left Auschwitz-Birkenau and headed to Lodz in a hotel that Yossi said was haunted. I didn’t feel it’s supposed hauntedness, but everyone else on the trip did.

Monday January 17, 2011

Today we went to the Lodz cemetery. I didn’t think very much of it because there weren’t as many interesting tombstones, people, or tales of Lodz as there were in Warsaw. We left the cemetery and headed over to Warsaw. We got to Warsaw and saw our hotel and how nice it was. We stopped at the hotel for a pit stop then continued to the site of the last bit of the Warsaw Ghetto wall. It wasn’t what I expected at all. It almost reminded me of the Western Wall, but not as old. When we left the wall, we went to a memorial of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

Tuesday January 18, 2011

Today we went to a little town called Tykocin. It was like a stereotypical shtetl town (if you still don’t know what I’m talking about, think Fiddler on the Roof). After Tykocin, we went to the forest where some of the Jews fought before the Final Solution had been decided on. There was snow all around and before we entered the cemetery part of the forest, I had a mini snowball fight with a couple of my friends. Once we left the forest, we started heading to our (please forgive the wording here) final destination, Treblinka. It was probably the hardest place to visit. This was the one place that the Nazis actually did what they needed to do and hid all the evidence as they had planned. There was nothing left. Just stone memorials with nobody’s name mentioned, except for Janus Korchak’s. At Treblinka, we also had a ceremony dedicated to those who didn’t survive at Treblinka. It was too eerily quiet at Treblinka.