Week 8.5 | October 21-October 28, 2014

Me and friends on the tracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau

Poland. I don't even know where to start or how to describe the last week, so I guess I'll start from the beginning, with a brief overview. Obviously, due to my myriad of travel issues, I missed the first day, which my school spent touring Prague (a city I have been told I must go back to). When I met up with my school, they had just finished visiting a town called Ticozkin, in which one of our teacher's father's family was rounded up and killed. He was spared, but sent to Auschwitz. I met up with the group, exhausted from my night and still unwinding from all the anxiety, and went straight to Treblinka. Treblinka was a death camp (i.e. no one was sent to work, they were immediately gassed), so the Nazis burnt it down once they had eliminated the Jews of Poland. In its place is a massive monument of tombstones, each marked with a community, town, village or city from which Jews were sent to Treblinka. There were 17,000 stones, for more than 900,000 victims. Almost as many victims as Auschwitz, but with almost no survivors and no remaining camp, it is hardly discussed. We then drove back to Warsaw, where we visited the sight of the former Warsaw ghetto (which was leveled, along with the rest of Warsaw, by the allies in 1945) and the place where the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto uprising lived and died. We then walked along Heroism Street, a street dedicated to the righteous gentiles of the holocaust, singing songs in the freezing night as we trudged down the street, exhausted and hungry.  

In Treblinka

Wednesday morning we awoke at our usual time (5AM), and went the Warsaw cemetery. I actually enjoyed the cemeteries a lot-in contrast to the death and concentration camps, they represented the course of natural human life, and of the hundreds of years of Polish Jewry that existed long before Nazism. We visited the tombs of many famous Rabbis whose teachings we have studied, and in each spot, a different student was assigned to speak about their life, their beliefs, and any stories or notable things about them. It was interesting, and reminded us that there was truly so much life in Poland before the war-so much of our Judaism today has been influenced by Jewish life in Poland, as it was truly the epicenter of Jewish life before World War II. We also stopped at the graves of famous gentiles or regular Jews who became heroes during the holocaust-including Janusz Korczak, who ran an orphanage and refused to leave his orphans, even as they were escorted to their certain deaths in Treblinka and he was offered an escape by the Nazis. 

We then made our way to Majdanek, a death and work camp (most people were sent to work, some were killed immediately). Majdanek was, there is no other word to describe it, so truly harrowing. It was the first camp I had ever seen. It is situated right in the center of a city, I kid you not, there are apartment buildings beginning half a kilometer away. The Nazis put it right near Lublin as a warning the Poles to stay in line or suffer the same fate. As this was early on in the trip, every step I took felt so meaningful, every experience so raw, that I could hardly bear to keep my eyes open. Walking into the gas chambers in a silent line, I could hear the sobs of my friends who had already exited-some of whom had family who had perished in Majdanek in the very room in which we stood. I can't describe what it was like to stand in that dark cement room. I can't explain what it was to know that everywhere I looked was the last place thousands of my people had lived. I don't remember what I was thinking, or if I was thinking at all. It was so surreal to touch the same walls they touched, to open the same door that still bore the fingernail scratches of thousands of people who had tried in vain to escape once they realized what was happening to them. I wanted to cry but I couldn't. Then, as I was exited, I passed the S.S. room. Inside, there were 2 cartons of gas, a pipe in which to load the gas, and a small window which looked into the gas chamber. It was probably no more than 1'x1', and was barred on both sides, but still, I could clearly see into the gas chamber from this side. It took me a second to understand what this was. The S.S. would look through the window, watching the people die. Only when they were sure everyone was dead would they open the door, pulling the bodies out. I was asked to speak in front of my school on the day we returned about the Poland trip. Out of all the things I saw and experienced, here is all I could think of to say:  

I realize now that it is impossible to come back from Poland without questions. My questions are not God questions, but people questions. When I think about that window in Majdanek, I realize it was just a window, like any other window. To me, nothing is more telling of human nature than the fact that the windows in our Beit Midrash* at school, the windows that spill light onto the backs of hundreds of girls as we learn Torah together in Jerusalem, go by the same name as that little piece of barred-up glass in Majdanek.  

*big room in which the Bible and other Jewish works are studied

"Toilets" 

I could talk all day about Majdanek, but I think you get the idea. We saw many other things-barracks, a room of shoes, a memorial full of Jewish ashes, the crematorium, a mass grave, but nothing was like that small window. 

Thursday was a rainy day, and just as freezing cold as every other day in Poland. As with every morning, we davened in a shul that was once full of Polish Jews and is now an empty memorial to an entire way of life that was extinguished in 3 years. We then made our way to Sobibor, another death camp. Like Treblinka, it was burnt to the ground, and only now, through excavations, are they beginning to find relics from it-abandoned engagement rings and jewelry, articles from murdered Jews that are all we have left of them. The Nazis, despite their obsession with documentation, did not document the death camps (to name a few-Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Chelmno). In fact, it was forbidden to take pictures, and all orders regarding the camp were communicated through word of mouth. Still, an S.S. guard, Kurt Franz, a known sadist, secretly documented the death of the Jews in Treblinka and Sobibor in an album he entitled My Beautiful Years. So yeah. No comment on that.  

At Belzec

We then drove to Belzec, where we visited the death camp (again, burnt down in an effort to hide the 500,000 murders committed there). We then went inside the Belzec museum and had a fascinating discussion about human nature in the holocaust.We talked about the perpetrators, both the head honchos, the S.S. guards and other lay men working for the Nazis, and the regular citizens who either collaborated with the Nazis or watched passively as they murdered millions of innocents. We read their testimonies, listened to their inteviews, and discussed how horribly complicated it is to be human-humans are capable of doing such horrible things to each other, but at the same time, during the worst times, humans do amazing things for one another. We heard and saw so many examples of both that it's hard to come out with a clear picture of what humanity is like after Poland. But maybe that's the point. Humans-like all other things in life, I've realized, are not generally black and white, but shades of gray. We can do so much good and so much bad. A particularly interesting testimony was that of Franz Stangl, head of the extermination camps Treblinka and Sobibor, who is responsible for the death of a million Jews. Unlike many of his colleagues, Stangl wasn't a sadist or a conscience-less person. Not to say he wasn't a horrible person capable of terrible evil, but from his testimonies, it seems he wasn't sick. He knew what he was doing was wrong and describes drinking himself into oblivion and hiding in his barrack so he didn't had to witness the goings-on in the camp. Almost none of the prisoners to pass through his camps ever laid eyes on him. His testimonies, which can be read in the book Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience, are so interesting to read, from a psychological perspective. In the book, an interview between Stangl and Gita Sereny, the following conversation is recorded:

"When I was on a trip once, years later in Brazil... my train stopped next to a slaughterhouse. The cattle in the pens, hearing the noise of the train, trotted up to the fence and stared at the train. They were very close to my window, one crowding the other, looking at me through the fence. I thought then, “look at this; this reminds me of Poland; that’s just how the people looked, trustingly, just before they were put in tins...I couldn’t eat tinned meat after that. Those big eyes... which looked at me... not knowing that in no time at all they’d all be dead... My conscience is clear about what I did, myself," he said, in the same stiffly tone he had used countless times at his trial, and in the past weeks, when we had always come back to this subject, over and over again. But this time I said nothing. He paused and waited, but the room remained silent. "I have never intentionally hurt anyone, myself," he said, with a different, less incisive emphasis, and waited again - for a long time. For the first time, in all these many days, I had given him no help. There was no more time. He gripped the table with both hands as if he was holding on to it. "But I was there," he said then, in a curiously dry and tired tone of resignation. These few sentences had taken almost half an hour to pronounce. "So yes," he said finally, very quietly, "in reality I share the guilt. . . . Because my guilt . . . my guilt . . . only now in these talks . . . now that I have talked about it all for the first time. . . ." He stopped." 

Stangl died 19 of heart failure hours after confessing to his guilt, alone in his prison cell.   

Moving on, Friday morning we went to the children's forest. This, for me, was one of the hardest parts of the trip. In the children's forest, we stood in a mass grave of 800 children taken from a nearby orphanage. For the Holocaust, 800, tragically, is nothing. What is 800 compared to 6 million? But it was here I realized that it is not about numbers. In Jewish law, we are taught that you cannot chose one life over another, or even over many others (except under very very specific conditions, and even so, this is not universally agreed upon), because each life is of infinite value, as is each second of life. The infinite preciousness of every morsel of human life cannot be discounted.  So maybe 800 is nothing, but 800 is everything. 800 infinities is as great as 6 million infinities. Our mourning for the lost children of the holocaust was one of the most poignant parts of the trip. We each were given a biography of a child (mine was named Jaqueline Morganstern, she was killed in Auschwitz under Dr. Joseph Mengele's experiments), and sang songs in their memory. It is impossible to mourn for the loss of even one child. It is even more impossible when you're speaking about millions of them. There are no words. 

Standing in the mass grave of the children of Tarnow

After the children's forest, we took a break from the Holocaust for shabbat. We traveled to Krakow, a beautiful and ancient city, and explored the Jewish quarter. We went to a cemetery and continued with our presentations about the rabbis who lived and died there, along with the millions of regular Jews for whom Poland was home long before the Holocaust. We had a beautiful Friday night davening in a shul from the 16th century and a delicious dinner. Shabbat was lovely. It was the only day we saw the sun, and although it was cold, it felt so great to walk around Krakow, laughing and enjoying life, feeling grateful and joyous. It was really a special shabbos. Saturday night we went to the birthplace of the Beis Yakov schools-of which today there are hundreds. They were the first formal Jewish schools for women, established in Poland less than 100 years ago.  

^^^the sign above the seat of the Ramah in his shul, a famous Ashkenaz Jewish Rabbi whose writings strongly impacts Jewish life to this day

Sunday morning we woke up bright and early, 3:30AM (they changed the clocks in Poland that night, so it actually felt like 4:30, which did not help us feel less exhausted). We davened in a shul outside of Auschwitz, then marched silent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Birkenau, the concentration/death camp built for the Jews, is the place where almost every Jew was sent. Auschwitz I, with its infamous Arbeit Macht Frei sign, only ever held 400,000 people all together, and mostly Poles. It was only a work camp, and was established in old army barracks, so living conditions were significantly better than in Birkenau. Birkenau was surreal. We were the first ones there, so it was silent. I know so many survivors, and have heard so many stories about it, that it didn't feel real to be there, standing and walking exactly where they stood and walked, standing in front of their barracks, looking at their toilets, touching the formidable barbed wire that haunted them. It was our coldest day in Poland, a mere 28 degrees in the morning, with the heaviest fog I have ever seen. We were outside the entire day, from 5AM to 7PM, so my toes were numb and I was so cold I actually stopped feeling cold after a while.  

 

^^^people searching for family names in the Auschwitz I museum

 

^barracks, Birkenau

 

^when I said Auschwitz I kind of looked like a college campus, I wasn't kidding

 

^Birkenau

 

^browsing through the list of names

 

Auschwitz I, the work camp, we did only at the end of the day. As previously mentioned, their prisoners were sent to work, and were housed in nicer brick buildings, so aside from the barbed wire and the gas chambers, it honestly looked like a college campus. They have since converted all but two of the barracks into museums, so it didn't feel as authentic as Birkenau or Majdanek. By the time we got to Auschwitz I, we were so tired and sick of talking about the holocaust that nothing they said on our tour really penetrated. Tourists were all over the place, taking pictures and posing in front of signs (so weird). The only things that hit me at the time were the pots and pans collected (from people who were told they were simply being "relocated" and brought household items in order to establish new lives), and the hair room. The hair room. It's literally a room full of the hair of 50,000 women and young girls. The Nazis sold most of the Jewish hair, but some was saved. We entered a room of it. Behind a sheet of glass, a huge huge pile of hair. This was the only part of the entire trip to Poland that I found truly disturbing. In the huge pile of indistinguishable hair were fully formed braids-some over a foot long. Perfectly plaited hair, braided in these women's final moments. For these women, the only thing they left behind is a braid, a lock of hair, a ponytail. Worst of all was the children's hair. Children's hair has a certain unmissable look-the perfect blonde tendrils with their soft curls at the bottom. Mixed in with the masses of brown hair, the hair of the children stood out to me. I still cannot shake the image. 

Monday morning, we woke up early, visited the former Lodz ghetto (the only ghetto in which you can see part of the ghetto wall), and the train station where the Jews were sent to camps. You can enter the cattle cars, the same cattle cars where thousands of people sat, stood, breathed and cried on the way to their deaths. But by this point, I wasn't shocked or even all that sad. I was mostly just so, so tired. We then drove to Chelmno, the first death camp. Chelmno is a big plot of land in the middle of the forest with squares outlined in stones, for each of the mass graves. We were told that if we were to dig about 2-3 inches under the soil in any mass grave, we would find bones. Obviously, I did not partake in this, as I think it is both creepy and so disrespectful to those for whom this is their only grave, but it was still eery to sit beside those graves with that knowledge. We lit a candle beside each grave, and we walked away. As always, the hardest part was walking away, knowing all the people who were there never got that chance. 

And then we drove. We drove all the way to Prague, for 9 hours straight. As with all things on the trip, if you weren't crying, you were laughing hysterically. No one can handle so much mourning and so much death. When we were in our off time, we laughed and laughed.  The ride to Prague was long, but it was nice to know we were leaving. We boarded a red-eye flight home, and landed in Jerusalem at 4:30AM. We drove straight to the Kotel (Western Wall) for morning prayers, and then we went home, showered, and went to sleep. I woke up 7 hours later. 

What's the take away? I don't really know. I'm so happy I got to go, so grateful that I got the experience, but what now? I haven't figured it out yet. To appreciate Judaism more, to promise to appreciate my blessings more and cherish my life more, to try to be a better person and a better Jew, it doesn't feel like enough. Then again, I don't know what could feel like enough, or if there's even a such thing. If I figure it out, I'll let you know. All I know is that I am so happy to be home. Landing in Israel was an amazing experience. To know that so many of those who died would have given anything to be here, to know that most of the survivors did everything they could to be here, made me feel both ridiculously blessed and absurdly guilty that I don't appreciate more how amazing this country is. In DP camps, survivors were asked to rate their #1 choice for resettlement once the camps were closed. Most wrote Palestine. As second choice, hundreds of people wrote "crematorium". They would rather die than be anywhere but here. Israel is our only true home, something that seems undeniable after having been in Poland. The Polish Jews felt the same way about their countries as we do about America, and yet, it turned on them in a second. It wasn't their true home. Israel will always be the place where Jews belong, and even if we don't make it here permanently, it is amazing to know that we have it, and hopefully always will. In the last week, there have been 2 terrorist attacks in Jerusalem. One, a random act of terror that claimed the life of a 3 month old baby and a women in the process of converting, the other, an assassination attempt on the life of a Jewish politician whose life still hangs in the balance as I write this.  Minutes ago, we got a text from my principal telling us not to go into the Old City tonight because there are safety concerns. This place is supposed to be our home, the one place that is ours. After having been in Poland for 8 days, it felt so good to be in our home, our place, with our people. When this stuff happens, it's scary and unsettling. I know I will be okay, but I want my city and my people to be okay. There are a lot of tensions right now, and they are palpable. I am praying for peace and safety, and I hope that wherever you are on the globe, you do the same. Israel and the Jewish people need your prayers. 

עם ישראל חי