Celebration of LifeMy time in Poland is coming to an end. Tomorrow I leave for home and I'm excited to see my family. But I am incredibly blessed to have been on this journey this week. The week was full of emotional ups and downs and I still have so much to process and think over. There are a million things that I am eager to take back to my students and incorporate into my classroom. I am anxious to share with my friends, family, and community the lessons I have learned over this past week. Perhaps the greatest blessing on this trip is the incredible people who were strangers to me a week ago whom I now consider my friends. The time spent with them this week has shown me the good in people and has taught me an incredibly important lesson - we do not have to be divided. The Holocaust itself was meant to divide all people into specific categories based on the pseudoscience and the politics of hate. But this week the Holocaust actually assembled a group of amazing educators and students who are passionate about the future and we are going forward now together. Photo Credit Emmia Alaquiva We have spent the last two days of our trip celebrating life and the things that bring people together. Saturday night at a musical festival in Kracow, thousands of people from around the world gathered together in the square of the Old Jewish Quarter and danced together in the square. We were celebrating life. That moment became even more poignant when they announced the death of Ellie Wiesel, author of Night, Nobel Prize winner, and Holocaust survivor. It was surreal to be standing in Kracow (the movie Schindler's List is set in the city) and have a moment of remembrance for a man who did so much in his lifetime to bring about dialogue, peace and action. What we have done here in Poland is what I believe Wiesel, other survivors, and even those whose lives were brutally cut short would have wanted us to do. We will not forget. We will not be bystanders. We will stand up to injustice. In the words of Wiesel, "the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference" and we will not be indifferent. Now it is impossible. I have walked the same steps where a vibrant community was cut down and in those steps found incredible stories of horror, sadness, and terror but also strength, survival, and ultimately hope. Hope for continued tolerance and acceptance around the world and hope for the future. So in Kracow we celebrated life. And I will continue to celebrate - my life, the life of survivors like Howard Chandler, and the lives of my students who have the power to change the world. In the words of Roberto Clemente*, “Any time you have an opportunity to make a difference in this world and you don’t, then you are wasting your time on Earth.” I will not waste my time on Earth. Howard Chandler returned to his hometown and shared his story with the group.
*All credit to Chris Gual for introducing me to this Clemente quote. An Individual StorySuitcases and glasses left behind at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Photo Credit Auschwitz - Birkenau museum What would I pack if I could take one suitcase to hold my whole life? What would I choose as the things that were most important to me if I needed to prepare one bag to start my life over again in another place? How much could I carry? When Jews arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, they came bearing the luggage that they needed to start a "new life in the East". Germans promised that they were leaving the overcrowded ghettos for "resettlement" in the east, encouraged them to bring all of their money to buy a farm or a house when the arrived. Instead, the Nazis killed the majority of Jews who stepped off the trains at Auschwitz - BIrkenau, either through hard labor or work, and stole their most prized possessions, carefully sorted and sent to the Third Reich. What is left today is a large cross section of the many things that people carried with them and they tell us an inordinate amount about the people who brought them but they also leave us with endless questions. Among the Jews' belongings left behind at the camps by the Nazis as they fled the advancing Soviet Red Army in 1944 are glasses, shoes, clothing, prayer shawls, pots and pans, shoe polish kits, combs...the things that people felt they needed for their new life. Practical objects in dire times intended to help them start over again. And each of these objects were brought by a person, by a family. This was not just a pile of glasses but hundreds of thousands of individual pairs, each that sat perched on individual noses. I wonder about the men and women who wore them - were they young or were they old? Had they worn glasses long or were the pair they left behind at Auschwitz new? Were they in the habit of removing them and rubbing their eyes often or did they look over the top of them in a serious way? Each new thing I learn about the Holocaust makes me think of individuals - sometimes when we consistently talk about the number "Six Million" it is easy to forget that each of those was an individual who had a family, people who loved them, friends who knew them. At its heart the Holocaust is an individual story - hundreds of thousands of mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters who were killed for no reason. Entire families who were never "resettled in the East" but wiped out. This trip has exemplified the importance of the individual story and keeping alive the memory of those who died through the testimony of those who survived. Today I stood in a barrack in Birkenau with a survivor, tattoo visible on his arm, as he told us his story of survival in a horrific place - a childhood lost at 14 working for the Nazis, glimpsing his father one final time through the barbed wire, leaving the camp one last time on a death march through Poland and Germany. Soon it will be an impossible experience - survivors cannot live forever. But sitting there with Howard Chandler as he described his experiences, answered questions openly and honestly, and even stopped to talk with and invite other groups to join us as we walked with him made me realize the importance of Holocaust education. If he can open up those old wounds again and again because he believes the mission is important then I can certainly do my part to make sure that the next generation knows the horrors of the Holocaust. Holocaust survivor Howard Chandler telling his story of survival, Birkenau July 2, 2016. Photo credit Nanci Goldberg Teaching the Holocaust goes beyond teaching tolerance - it is about understanding that we all share in a human story. I read a terribly graphic page of that story today - of 1.5 million individual people killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, among them Jews, Poles, Roma, and Soviet POWs. It is our responsibility to write a better story on tomorrow's page.
I Choose...Majdanek Honestly, this post has gone through a lot of revisions. I have struggled with what I wanted to say about Majdanek, the Nazi death camp where we spent most of our day today. Majadanek, established by the Nazis in 1941 as first a prison for Soviet POWS and then later, in 1942, a death camp for Jews, sits about 105 miles from Warsaw outside the city of Lublin near the Polish Ukrainian border. It is everything that movies and photographs have taught us that Nazi concentration camps should look like. It was liberated by the Soviet army who caught the Nazis by surprise, insuring that they didn't have time to destroy the camp. It is remarkably preserved, including barracks, gas chambers, and crematoriums. It is what our "pop culture' visions says camps should be - squat, dark buildings surrounded by barbed wire and emanating a sense of despair. So I struggled what to write about after coming back from Majdanek today. I considered "lecturing" on the sense of false inevitability that our 21st century eyes sometimes see the Holocaust through and detail the haphazard way in which the Nazis arrived at the "final solution" to the "Jewish question" but decided that it was better left for the classroom. I considered a retelling of the history of the place but decided that it had been done already and far better than I could. (USHMM link). I considered sharing stories of survivors and their struggle to live in a place that was constructed in order to bring about their death but decided that I would never convey their stories as well as they have in their memoirs. I even considered retelling stories of the sadism of guards and fellow prisoners against the inmates as an example of human depravity but decided that they do not deserve my time. Instead, I chose two themes that resonated with me as I walked through the former camp. I felt an overwhelming sense of myself and my own life. I wanted to walk alone through this place and stayed back to let the group dissipate before I began. Each step into each selection yard, barrack, gas chamber, and crematorium put me into a place where I asked "what would I have done?". I wonder how I would have handled a brusk and incomplete goodbye with my husband, how I would have comforted my children as we waited for death in the chambers, or, if they had died and I had lived, separated in the women's camp, I wondered if I would have been able to find the strength to live. To go on. To get up and not to give in. What I wish I would have felt in those places and in myself was an unwavering assurance that I would have been brave, soldiered on, found the will to live...that I would have SURVIVED. But I felt a certain emptiness that was far from reassuring. I can't know what I would have done if I had held my children in the gas chamber before our deaths or been given mere moments to say goodbye to my husband with whom I have shared more than ten years of my life. I cannot know, I cannot fathom, what I would have done alone, having lost the things I hold most dear. Left: Entrance to the gas chamber at Majdanek/Right: intact crematoriums at Majdanek Yet, even though I may not know what I would have done and cannot fathom the choices I would have had to make, I do know what choices I have now in these far less extreme circumstances. As a group of teachers on this trip, we have struggled with the how....how could a person treat another person this way, how did people reconcile their evil deeds with their conscience? There is an overly simplistic Holocaust narrative that identifies hatred as the underlying cause and follows through to the death of 6 million Jews as the inevitable culmination of that hatred. Yet I believe that the answer is far more complex and that it is about choice. We can choose who we want to be. Nazi leadership chose the "Final Solution", SS officers chose to torture the camp inmates beyond what was required of them. Some have been tried in criminal courts while others have faced no worldly punishments. Outside the camp walls, the Poles who lived in the nearby city or who passed by the camp easily visible from the main thoroughfare out of the city towards Ukraine chose silence for many reasons - their own difficult existence in Nazi-occupied Poland, an ambivalence to the prisoners in the camp, or a variety of other reasons. While the Nazi perpetrators deserve the most severe judgment we can render, I think it is much more difficult to judge the bystanders to these crimes. We say we know what we would do - we would be the Righteous Gentile, benevolent kapo, resistance fighter - but in truth we can never know what we would have done to protect our selves or our families. We can never know the impossible choices that people faced in such extreme circumstances of fear, hunger, disease, death, and despair. Barbed wire and cremetorium at Majdanek But today we CAN choose - we get to choose what we do with what we know about the Holocaust, about other genocides in our time, such as Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s, or Syria today. We choose who we are in our communities - both locally and globally. We can choose to live our lives in a way that make the world a better place, to be a light in the world. We can choose to stand up to injustice when we see it and be advocates for tolerance and empathy. We can make choices that can change the world.
So that is what I choose. I choose love, tolerance, hope, and to carry the responsibility of what I have seen, what I have heard, and what I know was done, back to my own community. This is a mentally, physically, and emotionally challenging trip and I am having trouble processing my thoughts today. So instead I'l share with you the link for the official Classrooms Without Borders blog and a few photos and resources from the trip that have been shared with me by others. Thank you for check in. Members of the group placed stones on the marker for Holocaust survivor Howard Chandler's village Staranowic at the Treblinka memorial. Photo credit Nanci Goldberg. Go to Treblinka by Holocaust survivor Halina Birenbaum Go to Treblinka keep your eyes wide open sharpen your hearing stop your breathing and listen to the voices which emerge from every grain of that earth – Go to Treblinka They are waiting there for you They long to the voice of your life to the sign of your existence, to the pace of your feet to human look understanding and remembering to caress of love over their ashes – Go to Treblinka go by your own free will go by the power of pain over the horror which has happened from the depth of understanding and the aching heart which has not accepted – listen to Them there with all your senses! Go to Treblinka there the green silence, golden or white which embrace Them each season of the year will tell you stories of the stories about life which became forbidden and impossible – Go to Treblinka watch how time has stoped there listen to the standing time, to the dead thundering silence and to the human stones weeping there in silence Go to Treblinka to feel it even for just one second – Go to Treblinka grow a flower by a hot tear, by human breath against one stone – memory of a whole community on earth which is their flesh and ashes. They are waiting there in Treblinka for you to come and listen to Them cry within the silence and in total mute identification, unifying bring Them each time the story of life which continues and of reviving love. Go to Treblinka for generations to generations Do not leave Them alone - Barracks and barbed wire at Majdanek. Photo credit Nanci Goldberg. Sounds of a guilty silence by survivor Halina Birenbaum
She was waiting there she was waiting there for me at the end of the road knowing well that I will be back one of these days feeling again with all my senses my ever young and beautiful Mother she was waiting there near the road to Majdanek across from the barrack called: "Disinfection" at the crematorium's oven door and I came back from afar after forty years in spite of her death she was still standing there just like than, on that separation day: not too tall, black-haired one long curl dangling over her forehead rosy complexioned, wide-eyed from exhaustion her teeth white as pearls which were showing the most wonderful smile Mother's smile attempting to reassure her child at the gas chamber's gate... a plaid broad coat was covering her frame she wrapped my small body in it trying to calm me down at that last moment with a ray of consolation and a human word in this place where there was only one exit: as a chimney smoke! I have arrived here again as a grown woman from a different land far away but at the same time still the same little girl of those days loved and cared by her Mother now entering the gravel path I have felt her presence I started to run toward her breathlessly when suddenly - I have stopped insane from helplessness and from hurting understanding and knowing clearly that I will never have her again because they took her from me forever! Majdanek, now a sleepy deadly kingdom we came together than now I am standing here alone still touching and hugging her in my thoughts drowning my horrible heartache in my tears small and helpless just like then across from the crematorium and the gas chamber extinguished for me much too late free now, but as helpless... I have dropped to the ground where I was standing burying my head in my hands crying aloud uncontrollably lamenting my great loss - without shame trying to hug the shadow of my beloved Mother holding with all my might the illusion wanting to take it home with me overseas even though I would rather stay here with my tears I don't remember how I managed to get back while she was left there alone in that deadly stillness I felt completely numb my body was shaking with convulsive sobs when a museum worker passed me by asking: "Tell me, who was killed here that you are despairing so?" and not getting a reply - he left he was speaking to me in a language of the living but I was still with my Mother's vision her shadow in a vacuum mourning her death here, in Majdanek - and maybe also my own Warsaw's JewsA piece of the ghetto wall that remains in Warsaw today. It was a long day but I'm not complaining. We spent today in Warsaw exploring Jewish life during the war both inside the city and at an extermination camp about 50 miles outside of the city called Treblinka. The walk through what was the Warsaw ghetto is difficult to describe. What was once the ghetto sits in the middle of the downtown of vibrant city and is in the heart of businesses and homes. There are a few remnants of the wall that kept over half a million people inside the roughly 2 1/2 square miles that the Nazis carved out as the ghetto. These are in the midst of homes and we had to speak quietly so as not to disturb residents. We traced the outline of parts of the ghetto, walked significant portions of the ghetto, and talked about life in the ghetto from smuggling to starvation to the Jewish resistance movement. Much of what we know about life in the Warsaw Ghetto comes from the meticulously archived and organized files of Dr. Emmanuel Ringelblum, a historian by trade who documented and asked others to document ghetto life by gathering any artifacts and information that they could. When it became clear to Ringleblum and those working with him that the ghetto was going to soon be liquidated, they hid the carefully arvhided documents in iron boxes and milk canister buried underground. Dr. Ringelblum and his wife went into hiding with non- Jewish Poles outside the ghetto but were betrayed to the Nazis. Although Dr. Ringelblum and his wife did not survive - they were interrogated and executed but Nazis - the records did. After the war, two people who worked with Ringleblum cam back to what had been the ghetto and found all but two of the records they had left behind, giving us over 17,000 documents that outline the life of Warsaw ghetto, the largest in Europe during the Holocaust, and sharing the stories that most of the ghetto inhabitants are no longer around to share. This was a kind of resistance to the Nazis within the ghetto. But there was other more active resistance as well. A marker on top of a mound at what was once the house at 18 Mila St. in Warsaw. Mila 18 was the address of a home on Mila street in the Warsaw Ghetto. It served as the base of operations for Mordechai Anielewicz and other Jewish resistance fighters who worked to smuggle arms and munitions into the ghetto to stage an uprising against the Nazis. Anielewicz was young, only 26 years old, and he had no military experience but began to organize the uprising after large scale deportation in the spring and summer of 1942 took nearly 75% of the population of the Warsaw Ghetto. Anielewicz and other resistance fighters were left behind in the Warsaw Ghetto with approximately 55,000 Jews. When the Nazis move into the liquidated the ghetto and finish the transports to an extermination camp called Treblinka as a "birthday gift" to Hitler in April of 1943, Anielewicz and his fighters use a guerrilla style warfare to drive back the Nazis. They are able to hold out for nearly a week before the movement inevitably runs out of weapons and ammunition. Some ghetto fighters flee and join the Polish resistance fighters in the forests who were staging their own rebellions against the Nazis. Anielewicz and others stay. When the Nazis came to collect them for transport at their headquarters at Mila 18, Anielewicz detonated explosives from inside to take out as many Nazis as he could, even though that meant his own death as well. The marker is on the mound that was once the house at Mila 18 and commemorates the Jewish resistance fighters of the famous Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Stones marking the train tracks that led to Treblinka. The most significant stop of the day was a trip about an hour and half outside the city to what was once the extermination camp Treblinka. Opened in 1942 as part of Operation Reinhard, the camp excited solely as a killing center for European Jews, many of them from Warsaw but thousands of Jews from all over Poland and the rest of Europe. It is estimated that more than 900,000 Jews were killed at Treblinka, the second highest casualty rate of any camp in the Nazi system besides Auschwitz. Yet we often don't mention Treblinka when we think of Holocaust sites. That was by Nazi design. After murdering nearly one million Jews by 1944 the Nazis not only closed Treblinka but they also dismantled and plowed the camp under. The buildings were all destroyed, any bodies that had been buried in mass graves (in the early stages of camp operations before they were cremated) were dug up and burned, and the Nazis planted trees over the site of what had been one of the most devastating and horrific camps in the Reich. It is significant to note that this work was done mostly by remaining Jewish prisoners before their own execution and the process of dismantling the camp was extensively documented by the Nazis. After they were finished, it was like nothing had ever existed there. Today, stone memorials that mimic the train tracks that ran into Treblinka mark the spot where thousands of Jews were brought to their deaths and 17,000 stones mark the towns and villages throughout Poland and other parts of Europe where Jews came from to be killed by the Nazis. These are the only places that survivors and relatives have to mourn their dead. Some of the 17,000 stones that mark the villages throughout Europe who's Jews died at Treblinka. Our group located one particular stone for one particular village while we were at Treblinka. There is a survivor traveling with us and later this week we will go to his village to retrace his footsteps from his home in Poland to Auschwitz. But today we mourned his mother, brother, and sister who were all deported to Treblinka and killed. He told us about the day that he and his father were separated from his family and how that, when he is at Treblinka, he thinks about his mother and what she must have done to try and comfort his siblings. He spoke about his walk through the site of Treblinka and thinking of his family as much harder than speaking about his time at Auschwitz because of the violent and tragic way in which he lost them and the unknowns about their death. He showed tremendous courage in sharing his story and his loss with us. Toward the end of our time together at Treblinka today, he said something that echoed a poem we had read. We were going to leave Treblinka. We had come, we had remembered, and we had mourned but we would be able to leave and that we had a great responsibility to share what we had learned there because thousands of Jews were never able to leave Treblinka.
So today was long and today was hard, but I am not complaining. Instead I am grateful for the many blessings in my life and the opportunity to learn about and share these places, to honor the memory of those who died and to carry out the promise of "Never Again". The Same But DifferentItems from my 2003 trip, the March of Remembrance and Hope I have been here before.
In 2003 I sat in the airport in Newark, New Jersey anxiously awaiting my flight to Warsaw Poland. I was with a group of my friends and classmates from Seton Hill University accompanied by professors that I had gotten to know well in my two years there. My best friend was with me and we were nervous but excited. It was my first trip to Europe and I was ready to go. We finally left; New Jersey’s late night became a Polish afternoon and we were off an incredible life changing journey to sties throughout Poland. So yes, I have been here before But this is all different. Today, I am in an airport in Chicago and while I am again anxiously awaiting my flight to Warsaw Poland, this is not a group I know well. We are made up of teachers and others who work with students and we don’t know each other well yet but I know that this intense and emotional experience will bring us close together quickly this week and we’ll lean heavily on one another. I am much more nervous and much less excited - the responsibility of this trip, knowing what is about to come, and the fact that I have done some living since 2003 makes me a little more hesitant than I was ten plus years ago. So tonight when we take off and a Chicago night becomes a Polish afternoon, this trip will be different. The world is different now. I didn’t own a digital camera in 2003 - my photographs are in print and I had trouble locating them in the days leading up to this trip. My videos were all taken on a camcorder that recorded to mini VHS tapes that I wouldn’t know how to play if I wanted to. Last time, I came armed with international calling cards so i could call home often (although my Mom would probably tell you that I hardly called at all). This time, I am typing this on my laptop on airport wifi with my phone that takes better pictures and videos than any camera I owned in 2003 next to me, loaded with an app that I’ve been using to practice my Polish the last few weeks. While I’m gone I’ll be able to FaceTime my family to help keep the inevitable homesickness away. The world is different. Most importantly, I am different. In 2003 I was single, unmarried, no kids, and few responsibilities that awaited me at home. I had very little experience with the “real world” then. But now, I have a wonderful family and lots of responsibilities waiting at home in the “real world”. And that will profoundly shape my experience. I know I will see my son in the faces of the children in photographs and hear my daughters in the stories of survivors whose parents made unthinkable sacrifices to save their lives. I will wonder what my husband and I would have done or could have done to save our own family. In the stories of Righteous Gentiles, non Jews who risked their lives to save their Jewish neighbors and even strangers, I will hope that that is who I would have been and that I would have risked my life to save my students, my neighbors, etc. So I know that I am different and I will see the sites and hear incredible stories and they will teach me different lessons than they did in 2003. Because I am different now. So I have been there before but I have never been here before - this person in this moment in this group with all the unique lessons that there will be for me to take to my students, a mission that I am incredibly excited about. Why The Holocaust?Photograph of the train tracks leading into Auschwitz-Birkenau When my students learn that I study the Holocaust and teach a class about it and other genocides, they have questions.
"Doesn't it make you sad?" "Is it because you're Jewish?" "Why would you want to learn about the Holocaust?" I do my best to answer the questions in the moment - yes, it makes me sad but its important. And no, I'm not Jewish (This surprises many student who assume that I would only be passionate about Holocaust education if I was). The last question is the one that I struggle with most because there is SO MUCH I want to say in my response. I want to tell them that Holocaust education is perhaps more important now than ever before. That the survivor population is fading and we have to learn all that we can from them. That there is too much hate in the world and the Holocaust teaches us what happens when we allow that hate to be codified as law and preached as the truth. That we must learn the history of the Holocaust and apply the lessons to our world today to prevent future genocides. As high school juniors and seniors, most of my students have had limited Holocaust education. They have read Anne Frank and done some general background study. Most students think that the Holocaust was sudden - that one day all was right in the world and then Hitler overthrew the government and rounded up all the Jews - in the blink of an eye the world was falling apart. They are genuinely shocked to know that Hitler legitimately rose to power and that the laws and restrictions on Jews were a gradual buildup over six+ years that reflected the kinds of antisemitism that European Jewry had faced for centuries. We grapple with complex questions: "Why didn't Jews just leave?" (Emigration and immigration requirements made it difficult to leave, although thousands of Jews did). "Why didn't Jews just refuse to wear their stars/register/change their passport/surrender their assets/go to ghettoes and camps?" (Many Jews did resist but Jews throughout Europe had come to accept living with a certain level of antisemitism; they did their best to survive and hoped that it would pass). And perhaps the most difficult question, "What did their neighbors do when Jews were forced into ghettos and camps?" Average people responded in many ways - some chose to risk their lives by hiding Jews or smuggling food. The entire nation of Denmark stood up to Nazism to save the majority of their Jewish population. Some looked the other way and didn't get involved because of indifference, prejudice, or fear for their own families and lives. Some actively participated for their own sets of reasons that we still struggle to understand. Each semester it leads us to the ultimate question - what would we do? I believe this is the key take away in Holocaust education today. I want my students to know that they can and do make a difference. That they have the power to make the world a better place by standing up to hate when they see it in their schools, in their communities, and in the world. I am embarking on this study trip to Poland to learn as much as I can, visit as many Holocaust sites as I can, talk with as many survivors as I can, to take home to my students all the information and experiences that I can. To share with them not only the history of the Holocaust but also the lessons that the Holocaust holds for all of us; to be better equipped to answer their questions. "Doesn't it make you sad?" Yes, studying the Holocaust makes me sad; it also makes me angry and unsure. I might cry when I describe my feelings walking through Majdanek or showing you pictures of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. And I will share with you that I while I know how I hope I would respond, I don't know how I would respond and I think about that a lot. "Is it because you're Jewish?" No, I'm not Jewish but I am human. Jews, Roma, political dissenters, and other groups targeted by the Nazis were too and we all share in that human story. There are lessons that we can all learn about the Holocaust irrespective of our faith traditions and that is the most important lesson. "Why would you want to learn about the Holocaust?" There is so much to say and I am hoping to bring home pictures and artifacts that help me say it all. |
About the Trip
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