Describing the journey I have just taken as an experience would definitely be an understatement. EIE's Pilgrimage to Poland has been an emotional roller-coaster, with the exhilarating turns; the high points of European Jewry and the flourishing Jewish families of Polish society; all countered by the loop-de-loops and sharp, sudden drops of Nazi regime, failed Jewish rebellion, and the mass graves of Tikochin, Maidaneck, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. I was left speechless, breathless, numb - stunned by every sight and fact as I walked among the places where Jews faced discrimination, extermination, and hatred; a hatred I hope to never witness ever again for the rest of my days.
Our trip was based on two concepts - life and death. We witnessed and discussed the remnants of Polish Jewry: the synagogues of Krakow and Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter of the magical Lublin, and the memorial walk dedicated to Jews of the Warsaw ghetto who fought against the Nazi murderers, determined to continue their Judaism regardless of anything their opposers said. We learned of the Iberleben; the forms of resistance Jews used to fight the Nazis literally and figuratively. To think something so trivial and usual as remembering your name could be so powerful against those that forced you to lack a persona and an identity - this thought hit me the hardest. The inhumanity of the Nazis to treat not only Jews but also Poles, Soviets, gypsies, and infirm as animals; as someone or something subhuman - it didn't seem real before.
But it became real. It was real. It was like something out of this world. Something I could never imagine - a group treating another as nothing.
Our visits to Maidaneck and Auschwitz will forever be burnt in my mind as horrible factory-like camps that killed millions and millions of Jews and others through the vile, sick, nightmare ways of random executions and gas chambers. To sit in front of the collected ashes where victims of these terrible places were dumped, not buried, after their improper sped-up cremations angered me to the point of numbness.
I want to share one thought that came to me as I departed Birkenau, fists clenched but body numb. As I made my way past the train tracks, I remembered how thousands of Jews went through the selection process in the exact spot I stood. There, SS officers decided who shall "live" and work for the time being and who shall be immediately stripped of their clothes and belongings, sent to the gas chambers and turned into piles of ashes. I was reminded of a quote from the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services that we say each year: "On Rosh Hashanah [the Book of Life] is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed." This of course refers to God, but where was such a god at a time like the Shoah? What gave the Nazis the right or the power to decide the fate of millions and millions of people? How come for those victims, it was written as they boarded the trains from Hungary, Poland, and Austria, while it was sealed as they were herded into the gas chambers, as if they were animals?
Why does something so terrible as this happen?
How does this even become a possibility in society?
How can someone be treated as nothing, as a worthless piece of flesh?
How! Why!
Questions continue to run my mind ragged. At this point, my strongest answers come from what I've witnessed. I will never forget what I have seen on this pilgrimage and I will make sure to keep the lives of the six million who perished forever in my heart and in my mind. This can never happen again. I insist that every single Jew of ability visit Poland to witness the horror and to ensure that it will never, ever happen again, but more importantly to make sure that we never forget this horrid event.
לזכור ולא לשכוח
To remember and not to forget.
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