Every time a start a project like a blog, I promise myself that disability is one subject I won’t write about–partly because I don’t want to throw a pity party, and but mainly because I always underestimate the amount I allow disability to…
July 4, 2012 When my feet hit the floor and it caved a little, the creak echoing through the long room, the same creak that so many suffering feet had passed over, a little deeper now that my weight had landed….
Auschewitz, Fri 7/7, I have just seen a place beyond comprehension. It is different from Majdanek, which oppressively crushes emotion out of us. Here, the fear is created in the vastness of the camp and its seemingly never-ending rows of barracks and…
From Majdanek, 3 days ago, overdue, but here it is finally.) It is difficult to describe what I feel after seeing what I have just seen. Most of my emotions are such that I will probably never understand them. Yet for one…
After Majdanek, while I sat, shaken, Kyle Smith–my history teacher from Shady Side–told me something that I don’t think that I’ll forget. I’d commented on how odd, how seemingly wrong, even, it was that there should be flocks of birds flying through…
Deuteronomy 30:19 proclaims “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.” My father has often quoted this one particular passage of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) to me–in…
Plung is not an exceedingly common surname. In fact, other than my family, I know of only one other Plung individual, and I assume that, somewhere along the line, there is something of a relationship between us. I was shocked, then, when,…
Words are generally my most steadfast friends and come to me in even the most difficult and unimaginable of situations, but after Majdanek, though I feel so much, I find I have very little to say. No, that’s not quite correct; I…
There is a very specific–almost forgotten–piece of the Warsaw Ghetto wall that stands in a miniature park in Warsaw that the Soviets plastered over. Now, however, that plate has begun to peel, and underneath there is exposed some of the original bricks…
When I first came on this trip, I did so not because of my religion or ethnicity, but becuse of my status as a member of mankind. Yet after a 48-hour layover, large quantities of airline food-like substances, and the general monotony of life…
Treblinka used to be a Nazi extermination camp–to borrow Avi’s words, a factory of death. Now, nothing of the original structures remains. Instead, there exists in the place that was formally a gas chamber massive structure of stone, and around that, what…