This photo and caption speaks volumes about the power of traveling with a survivor. During our visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau yesterday, the students and teachers heard Howard’s testimony about the camps and witnessed two other survivors (& possibly more) walk the…
Following a one hour bus ride from Krakow through modern architecture and lush Polish countryside we arrived at Auschwitz I. Walking through the iron gates that lied, “Work Will Set You Free”, I was immediately confronted with the vast visuals of the…
I had planned to blog every day, but I hadn’t accounted for the emotions that would hit me when we went to Treblinka and Majdanek. I have been teaching about the Holocaust forf twenty years and I have been to Dachau and…
I’m not sure what I expected on this trip. I’ve been studying the Holocaust and World War II since I was in the fifth grade. Never once did it ever occur to me that I would get the opportunity to travel to…
Hello, I composed this blog while on our early bus ride from Warsaw to Lublin. It is now 12:08am and currently I am one day behind on the progress of our journey. This evening we had a meaningful reflection between teens and…
This morning the educators and students walked through parts of Warsaw, a city that was 85% destroyed during the war. The wealth of archived historical information allowed us to learn how the Warsaw Ghetto eventually contained up to 450,000 Jews within the…
We arrived in Warsaw, tired and hungry, but eager to begin our journey. The educators and students went to their separate buses and headed to the Jewish cemetery and then to the oldest remaining pre-war synagogue in Warsaw. I knew the experience…
It’s 2:30 am here in Warsaw and despite the fact that I’m truly learning exactly what the meaning of “jet lag” is, I find myself wide awake. We’ve been in Europe for less than 24 hours and in Poland only for about…
Thankfully, after delays…I can report that the planes have landed, the first day of touring has concluded, and we have had our welcome dinner. It is 10:50 in Poland and many are probably drifting into dreamland to adjust to the time change….
When you visit Temple Mount, you are visiting a place so holy that, in ancient times, only the highest Jewish priest was allowed to visit once a year. And you are stepping your feet upon “Haram al-Sharif,” or “Noble Sanctuary,” which Muslims…
It is widely known that trains and train stations had a traumatic effect on the Jewish people. Even the movie Paperclips honors Shoah deaths by collecting 6 million Paperclips in a train-car-turned museum. At Yad Vashem, we learned about the twisted Nazi plot…