When people asked me if I was looking forward to the trip to Poland, I had a hard time saying “yes.” I told them I wanted to go and that I knew it would be an educational trip, but that I couldn’t say that I was looking forward to it. To me, that phrase implies that the trip is something that would make me happy or that I was going to see beautiful, wonderful sights. I knew that wasn’t true, and I don’t think I ever explained clearly how I felt about the trip.
As I look back on the Poland trip, I realize just how much I learned. Teaching the Holocaust makes one tend to look at the numbers because they are easier. The numbers are horrific, but they are impersonal. Once you visit the sites, the numbers fade to the background and the people come to the foreground. Even when I visited Dachau and Mauthausen, the focus was on numbers. At each site we visited in Poland, the people were the focus. It makes the Holocaust even more horrifying and it made me determined to put people back into my lessons.
At each camp, there were more and more traces of people. At Treblinka, the villages were memorialized with hundreds and hundreds of stones. At Majdanek, we saw thousands of shoes, personal items that had been chosen that day because they thought they were going to a new home. There was also a haunting memorial of caged lights and recorded voices playing in the background so that visitors couldn’t forget that people had died there. And at the gate in Lublin, we saw pictures of people at different times in their lives, people who would have been totally forgotten if it weren’t for the work of the theater group.
But it was at Auschwitz that it all hit home for me. We went in room after room filled with personal belongings, once treasured items of people who were murdered because they were different. Eyeglasses, shoes, and suitcases filled three rooms. They were horrifying enough, but the worst for me, and what made me see the Holocaust so differently, was the rooms about the children. I saw a case with toys in one room, children’s clothing in another, and what was for me the saddest of all, a room with recreated drawings that the children had made. Some drew scenes that showed they dreamed of freedom while others drew the horror of what they saw daily. That awful place was where I realized that the Holocaust lessons need to remind us that people died. It’s not just numbers.
So…how do I feel about the trip? It was the most life-changing trip I have ever taken and I will never regret having taken it.
