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 adults about our day at Madjanek concentration & extermination camp as well as the trip thus far.
The day in Warsaw, July 1
It is 830 in the morning on our third day. We are en route to Lublin, Poland. Here’s a recap of our Tuesday, July 1, 2014. “People are built to remember.” These are the words one of our tour guides used and on our second day as we began at the ghetto wall and walked from the small to the large ghetto, I think each student began to hear and feel the voices of the Holocaust who had walked the streets of Warsaw. There are a variety of construction sites related to modernizing Warsaw’s transportation system, and I couldn’t help but wonder if any of the material being displaced is unearthing rubble from World War II. If so, what would be found? Memorial plaques along the way echo the concept of Remembrance. We saw places where ghetto and non-ghetto area intersected, for example, at the courthouse. These points of intersection gave some individuals the chance to smuggle supplies into or people out of the ghetto. Our tour included stops at the memorial to Mila 18, which is the site of The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Rappaport memorial, which is two-sided and includes both images of suffering and perseverance/resistance. The students pondered the concept of uprising as we stood on the memorial that looked like a sewer lid. This commemorates both the resistance & survival, since the sewer system functioned as a means of transportation. Warsaw ghetto was an example of a closed ghetto, yet we also learned from Howard Chandler about the open ghetto of Weirzbnik where he and his family lived. As a young boy without responsibilities of a wife or children said, “To me, it [the ghetto] was as an adventure.” Later, on the bus after Treblinka, he told us how he would sneak out of the ghetto to play with his Christian friends. As we journeyed to Treblinka to see the memorial that was created we learned under Gerald Savage’s tutelage a song called L’dor Vador. This song is in our Poland Personally songbook for our memorial services.