While touring Majdanek in Lublin, something that stood out to me the moment we step foot on the grounds was how well preserved the camp was. Walking down the gravel path sent chills down my spine as if at any moment this…
On our first evening in Warsaw, the guest speakers told us not to leave Poland sad. The weight of this journey holds pain and sadness, but the message was clear. Be thankful for the time we live in and spread the important…
Today was challenging! There was a complete disconnect for me- As you roll into Treblinka, there is a beautiful forest and the area seems peaceful. Yet, if you know anything about the past, it is a place of ugly, hateful destruction of…
This afternoon we visited Treblinka Memorial Site, a two hour bus ride outside of Warsaw. My friend and colleague Kate Vitek and I traveled with 20 stones from our community of Beachwood, a small suburb outside of Cleveland. Before our travels, we…
I have held an extreme interest in WWII and the Holocaust for many years, educating myself throughreading, researching, and watching documentaries; but nothing I have ever done could even come closeto teaching me as much as this trip with Classrooms Without Borders….
To be frank, Warsaw is a city that, for most of my life, didn’t cross my mind often. It was one of those cities that could be added to a list of the many places in Europe touched by war, tragedy, and…
On the first full day of our trip we visited the Polin museum. As our guide said, “we traveled through 1000 years of history in an hour and a half.” While there was so much information to take in, what really stuck…
We arrived in Poland on Sunday, June 18, and opened with a lovely dinner in our hotel. We were greeted by Tsipy, then heard from the local Chabad Rabbi and a Ukrainian refugee. His story stood out from the others that evening,…
They arrived to this land at the calling of birds. Polin, polin, rest here. Here, enclosed beneath the trees, row after row the headstones stand silent, angled this way and that from roots below, so overrun with moss and leaves, it’s as if…
Stalin famously said, “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of ten million is a statistic.” I knew going in that it would be nearly impossible to wrap my head around the numbers of those killed in the Holocaust….
Today’s tour had a consistent theme: “thou shalt not be indifferent.” These words, delivered by survivor Marian Turski in a speech commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, echoed throughout our day; they are perhaps even more important for us…