My Poland Experience

I've already spoken a good deal about my experience in Poland, but there is still so much to add. The trip to Poland captured many different emotions all at once. When learning about something like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, I couldn't help but feel sorry for all the horrible things that happened to the Jews in the ghettos, but at the same time I felt a sense of pride because of the strength that these people had to push through and never lose faith. Before coming to Poland, my opinion on the Holocaust was that there are positives that are more important to focus on than all the negatives. Now I have come to terms with the fact that it is impossible to ignore the atrocities that were committed by the Nazis. Yes, it is great to look on the bright side, but in order to fully understand the Holocaust we have to focus on each side equally.

To me, one of the hardest things to fathom was the number of Jews slaughtered. I have so much trouble trying to think of hundreds of thousands of people being lined up, and waiting for their turn to die. It is even more difficult to think about how the Nazis got rid of not just a hundred thousand, but six million bodies after all the killing was done. If I was going to get close to imagining the numbers, I had to start on a smaller scale first. The Warsaw Jewish Cemetery was the first stop my group and I made in Poland. The most interesting part of the cemetery was the memorial for children who died during the Holocaust. It was a poem by Jack Eisner which was part of the memorial that had a major influence on my trip as a whole :

Grandma Masha had twenty grandchildren,

Grandma Hana had eleven,

Only I survived.

In order to truly understand the vast number of deaths during the Holocaust, we must start first with the smaller numbers and work up from there.

It is terrifying to imagine what it would be like to watch millions of your people die, yet there are still positives from the Holocaust that deserve attention as well. Over the course of the trip, I wrote a lot in my journal. What I discovered while writing was that the Holocaust was a failure. Something we always ignore is the fact that the Nazis lost. Their mission was to not only wipe out all of the Jews, but first tear them apart from each other -- making them weak and hopeless. It is funny to think about that plan now that they have been defeated, and the Jewish people are thriving once again. On top of that, we came together as a people once again. The Nazis were never even close to separating us from our faith or our family. If anything, the Jews grew stronger and became closer with one another after the Holocaust -- we had to work together in order to survive. We did not go our separate ways, instead we worked together to rebuild what Hitler thought he could destroy (even though it was practically impossible). In my opinion, this is the most important thing from my trip that I learned.

There may have been death and destruction, but there was still faith. The Jews did band together as a people, yet there are still many Jews who will never have the chance to rebuild the Jewish community. For every positive, there is a negative. No point is more important than another. The harsh reality is that Jews died. But we cannot forget that the Jews also thrived. My trip to Poland was filled with sadness, pain, confusion, happiness, laughter, and pride. Something I will never forget is the strange feeling one gets when he/she experiences all of these emotions at once. It leaves him/her in silence -- in awe. As people living seventy years after the Holocaust, we will never completely understand what happened. Yet if we want to understand the most we possibly can, then we must look at both the good and bad.