Last week, we went to Poland. As I'm sure you can imagine, it was horrifying and intensely emotional. We started off with a tour of Warsaw, beginning in their Jewish cemetery. It was a surprisingly uplifting experience, seeing two centuries of our ancestors laid out proudly with Jewish language (mostly Yiddish, although some was definitely Hebrew seeing as I understood it) displayed for all to see. After the cemetery, we took a tour of Warsaw which included the pieces of Warsaw that are relevant to the Holocaust, basically the ghetto and the .
The next day we went to Tykocin, which was very emotional for me. At first I wasn't sure why, but then I realised that it was because Tykocin was a shtetl very much like the fictional town of Anatevka (from Fiddler on the Roof), which was one of the first plays in which I found a real family in the cast. So going to trace the footsteps of a tragic community like that one made me think of them, and how I would feel if it were them in the shoes of the Tykocin Jews. During the Holocaust on the day of their death, they were all rounded up and made to either crowd into a truck or run behind said truck all the way to a nearby forest, where every single one of them was shot immediately, and nearly every single one died. We walked through that very woods, and I noticed that the upper halves of the trees were all slightly tinted red. It was definitely disturbing, and slightly freaky. We went up to the mass graves, and our madrichim did a ceremony in front of the main one with all the memorials. In the end, I lit a candle for them, and then walked out of that forest with my dignity intact, in a way that none of them were able to.
This week was a week of accomplishing feats like that. We also went to two concentration/death camps, and walked out of each of them with our heads held high.
The first camp we went to was Majdanek. It was horrible. Everything was left almost entirely intact. When we walked through the bath house/gas chamber in the front, I found myself stuck behind a line of people in this small dark room that was incredibly terrifying. I felt this rush of fear, as though I had to get out of there immediately. I knew at that moment that I was standing in a place where someone had died or was about to die, and it was horrifying. We walked through at least one example of every type of building in the camp, including the main gas chambers and crematorium. It was also awful. The worst part though, was at the end. We went up to this huge monument, and our teacher wouldn't tell us what we would see when we walked up the steps. Well, being the trusting fool that I am, I went up the steps.. Only to find myself face to face with a mound of human ashes the size of a small house. HUMAN ASHES. And those were only the ones that they didn’t have room to bury. After we had all recovered from that, we held another ceremony at the base of the monument. I participated in that one, along with around ten other students. Everyone read a poem, diary entry, or other writing from a survivor, except a few of my friends and me. We sang a song called Arim Roshi. It was impossibly emotional, and I don't think any of us made it through without crying.
In between Majdanek and the next camp, Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau, we visited Krakow. It was amazing. It was so beautiful. We visited this gigantic castle, which looked like a thing out of a fairy tale. (Unfortunately, I think I sprained my ankle on the way down. At any rate, I twisted it, and it's still very painful a week later. I still had fun roaming the city for two hours though. I just did it slowly.) After we had that free time, we toured the ancient synagogues in the area (and had an interesting debate about the use of the word "temple" in description of a Jewish place of worship), and then visited the Jewish Community Centre of Krakow. It was comforting to see such a familiar organisation in such a wildly different place. Our last stop of the day was a visit to the "umschlagplatz" of the Krakow Ghetto. An umschlagplatz is the place where they gathered and waited for the trains, which in their case took nearly all of them to their deaths at camps.
Rather fittingly, we started the next day with a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Auschwitz camp dedicated solely to killing people. It was terrible, although for some reason I was much less affected there. I have no clue why, because that's where all the Jews died, but I just didn't feel anything there. Maybe my emotions were all worn out, but even though my brain was comprehending all the horrors that occurred around me, my heart just wasn’t breaking the way it shattered at Majdanek. There was one thing that still affected me though. The story that we followed through the camp was the one of the Hungarian Jews, from whom I am descended. If my ancestors hadn’t made the decision to move to the US fifty (ish?) years before, I would not be alive today. My grandparents, who were just three at the time that the Hungarian Jews were brought to Auschwitz, would have died there. Even knowing this though, I still couldn’t bring myself to feel any strong emotions after we had been walking around for about fifteen minutes.
Please don’t judge me for any of this. Everyone reacts in different ways, and I can’t help how I did.
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