Shnat

The actual trip.
Being in Poland was a little strange. Strange to feel so much a tourist, not knowing the land or language, being the first time for myself in Europe, not knowing anything really about what it is to live in the country. The Zloty buys a lot, which was cool. We spent some time in the trip learning about Polish history, which was a really incredible part. Seeing the Wavel Palace and the cathedral with it, seeing real European history, it was really amazing. Everything explained also had it's tie to World War Two, to the Nazi occupation, or it's tie to the Jewish community's settlement and development there.
The first day we went to Lodz. We saw the Jewish cemetery there. I was in complete awe. The cemetery was huge, endless, hundreds of thousands of graves, hundreds of year of history in this city. I was looking at another world. On and on. And the tombstones, so many in Hebrew, so old, really a part of the earth there, surrounded with trees and moss growing on them. Such an incredible visual representation of a strong, solid and founded community, of proportions I can't imagine. So rich. So grand. It was beautiful, it was so beautiful I was overwhelmed. I walked on and looked and looked, I couldn't believe it, I couldn't imagine it, it was unreal, and still so real, such concrete historical evidence. Then we went on, we walked down the line, and feeling overcome with having seen such beauty we began to see WWII memorial graves along the path. Moments later the path came to more of a field, with plaques and small tombstones, a huge field, thousands, tens of thousands, so tightly together, all from the Lodz ghetto. Many, many were blank. The section was set up by the Israeli Defense Force because there were no more Jews left in Lodz to do it for themselves. I can't explain how that feels. You just walk through and watch history, watch this incredible world die, see the answer to why this old cemetery is a view of another world. Even if I already knew and mourned that tragic answer well before setting my eyes on that epic memorial to grandeur, and even if that sense of awe still rang through me, the graves of those beautiful people who died, mostly just from the torturous conditions of living in the ghetto, were so deeply upsetting to see. In this cemetery I began to feel something I always knew but never had this chance to feel, something I continued to feel throughout the trip, that I was learning about and looking at the places and the history of my people.
After that we went to the Lodz Ghetto memorial. The memorial is set like a train station with a chimney at the end. At the platform end is a building from the real platform, and a real train car. I felt unprepared. They told us we could walk to the train car and walk in, take pictures. I couldn't, I walked towards it and then away. Eventually I felt it right not to ignore it, to pay respect to the people who spent such grave moments in that car. I was looking to feel and show respect as it was deserved, and I found how difficult it may be, to really look at a place that was real for people, not a tourist attraction but a real, severe and horrific part of people's life, and even to know what respect is deserved.

The second day we went to where was the Krakow Jewish Quarter and Ghetto. It felt so bizarre to me, to stand in the ghetto square. Just to come and stand there. The Jewish quarter was, again, an incredible place to be. The main synagogue, specially designed also a safe house for Jews against pogroms, with thick walls and low positioning, was as a museum inside. All the relics of the old community there let me see where our communities now come from. The velvet tapestries and podium covers, exactly the style of those at the synagogues at home, and exactly the style of the Torah dressings and my grandfather's tallit case. A display with Kiddush cups, small decorated cups, just like ones my father has at home. So much, so much simply visual in our connection, our continuation, was there. I also took great joy in the paintings of children learning and celebrations in the temple. Really, really, this was a wonderful place to be.

The next day had very little for me. The tour went to Auschwitz-Birckenau all day. In the morning at Auschwitz I stayed on the bus. We drove by the train tracks, I could see the barracks from where I sat in the parked bus, and for a moment I had to get off the bus to ask the driver if it was okay that I stayed on the bus, really fearful that he would say no, and when he said yes I was left sobbing in to my pillow with deep emotions I had no explanation for, only an inkling of a feeling that I was unprepared. I wrote in my journal, I prayed Shacharit for Shabbat and Chol Hamoed Pesach- the first time all year I've taken out my Siddur and prayed on my own- and I slept. After what I had seen in the days before, and even more because of where I was at that moment, it meant something real to me to be able to pray, to be able to continue that tradition of my people and to have the freedom to do it. Tradition has always been one of the larger parts of value for me in prayer, because the bulk of what I say, I don't really understand, not in a way that the words mean something to me, but the value still holds in that I know I am continuing the tradition of my people, that I am a part of our collective, living history, and that has an incredible amount of meaning for me.
When I woke up from my nap, I had to pee. I asked, the bathrooms were inside the camp. I had been sitting, writing, praying, thinking, all the while looking out the window and really thinking about what I was seeing. To be there and not even try to show my respect- this is all a challenge, in every moment and in so many directions. The easy way out just as much as anything else has no place. I prepared myself and I went, I looked, I knew where I was as much as one can know really where they are in Auschwitz. It wasn't easy, I thought seriously and really and felt respect as much as I could, and I knew what I had in me was not enough, and I left. At Birckenau, we ate lunch. I can't tell you how bizarre it is to sit on the grass in the sun- this day was definitely nice- and eat your lunch, enjoy yourself with friends and sing your songs before a meal, and the barracks of Birckenau are on the other side of a fence a hundred yards behind you. To show love and feel love and joy, yes, it absolutely has its rightful place, but to do these without recognition of where you are, it acts too much as a product of distance.
This night we talked in our group, all the people I live with now on shnat plus the Australian kvutza who began their shnat in January. I had always taken what understanding I could in the fact that people all come from different places, experiences, and on and on to mean that really we are all just different people with different brains, a beautiful thing, and that this all means a real lot in the way we each take in things like touring Jewish/Holocaust Poland, but this conversation really brought that in to a lot more light. It turned my general assumptions of "we are all different" in to notions I could have of what it means for each of these different people, many of whom are very new to me, to take in what they walk through these days in Poland.

Then was my birthday. It was a pretty good day. No death camps. Actually, the day was centered much around something I could really take joy in learning of and standing in- shtetls. All day we watched Fiddler on the Roof on the bus, which was great and very relevant. We went to Tarnov, where we could see the bima of an old shul, the rest having been burnt down in World War II. We learned about the discussion Shomrim had there before the war, about how to live out the movement ideology, and we talked about how we can do that today. The conversations then and now were in similar strains, and it is very much one we have again and again. I feel something we lack generally, and I think it's largely generational, is commitment. We always want everything catered to us. I think there is really something to learn from taking in Jewish tradition, or any tradition, and it is how to commit, how to say "I want to get something out of this, I want to make this meaningful", to have faith in what you're given and in yourself, and then do it, look, ask questions really difficult and really deep and make something from yourself. If we all want to chose our own everything, and never say we will do something for any duration of time because it takes away our freedom, we give in to the sneaky thief of freedom in the other influences around us, we don't get to choose a guide but to play in the ignorant notion that we alone master our choices. We have a lot still to grow and learn about when it comes to faith and commitment, and I feel well to have some notion of the two from my religious experience and education.
After we went to the mass grave, in the forest near the town. That was really hard. All the Jews and Polish dissenters from the town were taken there. It was really hard. There were memorials for the graves of the different groups. Separate for the Jewish adults and the Jewish children. I can't imagine. It was so hard. I was overcome there with the realization of how much love I felt, how much love I felt for all these people, for my Jewish brothers, for my socialist brothers, for my fellow human beings, how sorry I was, how terribly sorry I was for this to have been their reality, and I love them so much.
And then what? Are the people who shot them not human? They are. Do I not love them as well? Am I not also so sorry that they, my fellow human brothers, came to do these horrible things in their lives?

We afterwords went to Dombrowa Tarnowska, a shtetl from the 16th century. Still standing is a synagogue, from the shtetl's later years. It was beautiful, very large, grand, a monument to the name of the childless rich people who built it, and also to the community and world that existed there once. I really loved to be there, to look and to be on that ground. We were told that until he died in the mid-90's, the last Jew in the village used to pray outside the shul, because inside it was in too poor shape and too dangerous. Now a restaurant is looking to renovate and move in. I don't want it to be true, I really, so badly don't want it to be true, but I don't know what there is to do.
We then went to Kresnik, another shtetl, and saw the synagogue there. It is renovated and still functioning. We learned about the Hasidic movement, how they brought the idea to Jewish culture of holiness in all living things, wherever you find it, of having words that mean to you be prayers as are those written in the books. How they changed the Jewish educational style, with stories and a more united method as opposed to a strictly preaching one. We learned how shtetls were based in these ideas as the people there were poor, how the Hasidic movement turned reactionary in order to keep Jewish tradition united, and how Hashomer Hatzair was founded in Hasidic ideas. It made all the similarities I've seen between things in my religious experience and my shomer experience make so much more sense. It gives me more drive now to work with that and reveal our rich roots, from which in this trip I saw we have so much to learn, but how, I still don't know. In the courtyard outside the synagogue we made a circle of the approx. 150 Shomrim, the shnat kvutzot from Europe, North America, South America and Australia, plus the additional delegations from France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria and Hungary. We sang songs in Hebrew and began a huge celebration of our songs and cheers. It was great, to be outside a Shtetl synagogue, still with some function, and to have our movement, begun from this Galicia area and now all over the world, able to be there and to celebrate life, heritage, unity, freedom and the power to go on.

The week is going on. The next day we went to Majdanek, and I went to the memorial in front of the camp before the others all went in. The memorial I think is very good, fitting as it could be. I had a very interesting discussion on the bus while I waited. I wasn't any more the only one not feeling it fitting to walk through the camps, and the others, for different reasons. They told me how it was to be there, how it was to be a tourist in that kind of place. How Auschwitz has a logo and is turned in to a museum, designed to make you feel things fake and distant. How it is part of a tourist industry. Also about the people there, how there are tourists on family outings, couples taking photos. Shomrim eating sandwiches, smoking cigarettes and sleeping inside the camps. Cigarette butts in the huge memorial dome of the ashes found in Majdanek. I know everyone takes things differently, I know everyone understands and experiences differently, but can I say this is okay? Why is this real? I know also that these aren't bad people, there is no question, but feeling right in having your emotions evoked by piles of hair and shoes that were of real people, photos of those dead and dying, people who have already suffered enough dehumanization... Why? I don't know why you need that. Okay, maybe I can trust that for whatever reason, you do, and maybe that can be okay, but is that even the right feeling? Does that feeling sit in the right place at all? And what else is there to do, to throw these things away? To let people never feel anything at all? And beyond this. I don't know why a Jew, a Shomer, someone who has talked about and knows about these things, can say it is okay for them to smoke a cigarette in Auschwitz because being there is like being in a museum. I don't understand. And why a man can take a bike ride through Majdanek with his daughter, why someone will throw garbage in a room of a camp that people didn't walk out of, how someone can put their cigarette butt in the ashes.... I really don't know.

The next part is great. We went to another shtetl. Kazimierz Dolny. Nothing is there but some remnants of the cemetery, destroyed and rebuilt in to a monument. The Jewish community in Kazimierz Dolny was from the 11th century until this one. The cemetery monument stood on a hillside, now with many trees, that once was covered in tombstones. Some are still there. I looked at the tombstones, the Hebrew, I stood on the hill and I looked around. I felt there. I felt holiness there. We talked about the reverence in a concentration camp, if it was holy. It isn't holy, absolutely not, it's disgusting, it's the most horrible desecration and destruction of the holiness of man in numbers unimaginable. This place was holy, this place really was holy. To be there, to be on such a land of my people there, and to be a continuation of the grandeur of what was there- it was awe-inspiring. I don't have words.
We also went to a synagogue in Lublin from before the war. It was there that I learned really that these more assimilated, or less secluded, less strictly religious and less shut off ideas of Judaism aren't something so new as I usually thought. The modern cultural Jew I still believe is far different, because Jewish culture now is used I think more loosely, but to know that Jews in the old communities still had their differences and that for so long there have been Jews still part of their community but with progressive ideas, it was very interesting to learn.

The next day was Treblinka. The camp is gone, burned completely, just monuments and information from our guide. I felt I could be proper there, I went. It was a lot. I really can't explain properly writing like this. The inhumanity of a cow milking machine is insane. Then what of the human murdering machine. Treblinka was a death camp. 800,000. 5 hours between arrivals. I can't.


We went to Warsaw, we saw Janusz Korczak's still running orphanage. We went to a synagogue from before the war still running and talked with a member there about Warsaw's Jews. We saw the Jewish cemetery that was part of the ghetto and is still here. My dad had told me on my birthday that I had family on my Bubbe's side from Warsaw, later I found out also on my Zaide's side. I felt while I was there how this was my real, specific heritage, how I could now finally be in the same place as my family from another time, how being in Poland I was actually in a place of my heritage, for the first time. I saw the graves of some rich Schuman's along the path and took a photo, also one of me by the gate. I want to have some kind of evidence of my family taking this journey back there.
Walking in the Warsaw ghetto, it was hard to know I was there. I thought of what incomprehensible realities I've heard from that place. Very few buildings or parts of them stand. You just can't imagine what those few walls have seen. The lives people were made to live were nothing short of torture, deep mental and physical torture.
I couldn't stop asking so many questions. In one of our discussions at night, we read a poem, not actually about the Holocaust, but it said some possible statistics about people. 99% being worthy of compassion, and 49% willing to help someone if it didn't inconvenience them much. If all people are human, I don't know why 100% of people are not worthy of compassion. Everyone does something for a reason. Everyone does something because for some reason they think it is good, either for themselves, for others, or for an idea. I also know that every person has the infinite potential for good. So why, then, should less than half the people in the world be willing to help someone when it doesn't even inconvenience them? And, when I say these comments, why do good, loving, amazing people say that fewer are worthy of compassion, and that there is no reason for me to be surprised by less than half?
All people are human. No one is a machine programmed for evil. No one thinks, "I am going to do pure evil," they think whatever it is will be good for them, or good for their ideals, or good for mankind, or any combination. People say you need evil to have good and I guess that should make sense but I don't understand. I know its not black and white, but it's hard to see exactly where evil comes in. If we're all human, how can someone not be worthy of compassion?? How can you not have faith in a person to do good when then always have the potential to do good? And I see Nazis, I see Polish citizens who weren't raised by Nazi propaganda, and who were given the option not to, and still chose to shoot Jews in to pits. I don't understand. I see the infinite potential for good, and now I've seen the infinite potential for evil, and I don't understand it but I can't ignore it. Why is this real? How is this real? I can't make the connections.

I know in the everyday sense how people do bad things. People are different, they understand each other and their realities differently. Thank God. People react differently to different things. Insecurities come out in unpleasant behavior. That's really basic. I see too often in my movement something a little more frightening, where ideals get in the way of people. And really its everywhere. The same thing that let Nazis become part of a killing machine let the major powers watch this machine as they focused on their role in a military/political machine and let a member of my kvutza say 6 months ago that one of their current closest friends shouldn't be on this program. I don't understand where and how people can get lost. We are all people. Who has an ideology for themselves? You hold beliefs for other people. I want to say it comes from love, because if you love other people then you care about them and you don't want to live just for yourself, so you have ideas for how things should be to be better for other people as well. But the fascist ideology wasn't born out of love and I don't know what to do about that.

I don't want this to turn in to every other mental battle I have with the evils in the world. I watched Pocahontas last night and couldn't get to sleep because I couldn't stop fighting with these questions in my head. I know there is evil everywhere, I can find it in any direction, any situation, but to have faith in man and in the goodness of the world, to keep that hope and know things can always be better, that is the answer. But what now, when faith in man is so questionable?
I usually run on the focus and knowledge that man is good. I know this is still true. But I've never seriously thought about man being evil, and I don't know what to do with that. I have a huge tear in my view on man and the universe and things just don't make sense anymore. As I understand from our discussions, most people know man also has the infinite potential for evil, and they still seem to have hope and all that, so I have faith that on the other side of these questions I still will too. I know I see and feel and experience love and the goodness of man and of the incredible, incredible individuals around me and far from me every day. I still feel that. All through Poland we hugged and laughed and sang and cheered. People I never met sang me happy birthday. I know love and goodness are real. But there is just so much I don't understand and I don't have anywhere to go on my own because this is uncharted ground.

In Warsaw we learned about the Uprising. Shomrim fighting and dying to not go as sheep to slaughter. They fought for an ideal of sorts and they brought good. We saw their final holding spot, their bunker at Mila 18. They're very inspiring, they fought and died in the most meaningful way that they could have. They gave us something in our history that says something different. I'm sure the story of these heroes is much more inspiring than how I felt it then and feel it now, but I just don't understand things anymore and I have a little ways to go before I do.