What you can learn from my trip to Poland

The echo of your own two feet walking across the train tracks that brought millions of Jews into Auschwitz Birkenau stays with you. It changes the ways that you look at the world and it changes the way that you look at life. How could it not? Being places where the unimaginable has happened will continue to send shivers up your spine every time it crosses your mind. I’ve always known about the Holocaust. Being raised Jewish, this is no doubt inevitable.

I’ve always known that my friends and family had connections to people in the Holocaust, but what I did not know was that once my fingers grazed over my own last name in the book of four million known names of those who perished in the Holocaust, it would end up changing my life.

This summer I traveled to Poland on a program through United Synagogue Youth. I chose to visit Poland because I wanted a more powerful connection to my Judaism. While being a Jewish teenager is different for each individual, words cannot explain how much more passionate I am now about life than I was before visiting Poland. While in Poland, I had the opportunity to see four concentration camps: Majdanek, Auschwitz I, Auschwitz Birkenau, and Treblinka. I also had the chance to learn about the unfortunate uniqueness of each of these camps that resulted in the extermination of millions of Jews, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals, and many others. I walked in the little that is left of the Warsaw Ghetto and I saw the thousands of unmarked graves in Jewish cemeteries across Poland.

I’ve noticed that people don’t know how to react to my stories about my experience, and I don’t expect them to. The part about this trip that changed my life was, that I now understand how complicated this part of world’s history is. The Holocaust is something that I have a hard time wrapping my mind around. It’s so hard to comprehend the significance of the numbers written in textbooks and the reality of the situation. How can one ever understand when they have been fortunate enough to not been put through it themselves? You can’t imagine the situation and the circumstances and you should never have to. Holding a crying friend in your arms who had a great-grandparent die in the very place you are standing brought me a learning experience that I have a hard time finding the right words to explain.

I have no toleration for Holocaust jokes. I don’t want to hear Holocaust jokes, and I don’t want to have to face the fact that there are still anti-Semitic people, filled with unimaginable amounts of hatred, in our society.

Given the circumstances today, I believe that as a country and as a world, we must liven the intoleration for acts of hatred. After having formed a new compassionate outlook on the events of the Holocaust, I hope that as a Jewish student, I won’t ever have to deal with anti-Semitic  peers again. Yes it actually happens. I can’t look at swastikas without letting shivers take over my whole body, and I am constantly reminded of the time I saw one staring me in the face when I looked at a school desk that had one etched onto the desktop. Even though I have encountered antisemitism, Holocaust jokes, or acts of hatred, I don’t know how I would respond now.

Westside High School offers the class Dynamics of Global Intolerance. This class provides students with an opportunity to learn about genocides and acts of  ethnic cleansing around the world. When I took this class freshman year it was a good chance for me to learn about things I had no clue even took place. According to numbers provided by Rebecca Sosalla, Schedular for Westside, there have been a decreasing amount of students enrolled in this course since the year 2013. The numbers have dropped from 272 students enrolled in the 2013-2014 school year, to 141 enrolled in the 2017-2018 school year. While students’ schedules have more recently been crammed with other Social Studies courses, according to Sosalla, I believe that there should be more of a push for students to take this class. The opportunity to be able to go to Poland and learn about the Holocaust is rare and students should be taught to take every chance given to them to learn things outside of the normal curriculum that pertain to matters like this. The opportunity that I had this summer, is certainly one I will never forget.