July 20, 2010

Today we had a local guide who took us on a tour of Krakow from a Jewish perspective. She pointed out the walls of the old town as we drove over the Vistula River to the industrial area. Here we found Shindler's factory - though it had been renovated, it was made to look the same. Here workers from Krakow Ghetto A walked to work. Though the factory is now a museum to the Holocaust, we viewed it from the outside and saw the original gates. We understood that Steven Spielberg had the help of the city of Krakow when he made Schindler's List, and was able to use many of the original sites. We then drove to the main part of the Krakow Ghetto to see part of the ghetto walls there - erected by the Germans, they looked like large Jewish Headstones. In the center of the square was a memorial called "Heroes of the Ghetto Square" which was the site of the Krakow deportations. Here there were large chairs spaced unevenly and facing in different directions to signify the fact that Jews from that area were sent in all directions. The chairs brought back the memory of people carrying their wordly belongings, such as chairs. The Jews had 800 years of history in Krakow before the Holocaust and it is important to remember that they were a large part of both Krakow's and Poland's history.
We then toured the Galicia Museum which was filled with beautiful photographs from the past and present looking at that part of Poland's cultural history. Many of us took the bus back to our hotel, had lunch in a nearby food court, and then headed into the Main Square of the city to search for the perfect souvenir or bargain. Most of us came back with sore feet and a few packages. Amber was the thing to get and we compared our finds.
I was very lucky today - I had set up a meeting with some of my Polish relatives - I had never met or talked with any of them, as they don't speak English. I set it up through a relative in the US, and she helped me organize it with an aunt here in Krakow. My roommate, Debi, and I walked to the restaurant and were met by eleven smiling faces. They had flowers and gifts for both of us. My cousin, Josefa, was there with several of her children and a few of their children. We had a delightful meal at Polska Smackie (The Taste of Poland) and though we sometimes struggled with communication, it was a wonderful meeting. I am so glad that we were able to connect and hope that we will keep in touch in the future. It was a great connection for me - I was able to speak to them about their grandparents plight during WWII. It turns out that their grandfather was in the Polish police and fought with the Germans. Though I did not find out much more, it was interesting learning about their view on things. We walked them back to their cars through the old town and gave lots of hugs and kisses to my "new" relatives.

July 19, 2010

It is after 11 pm and it's been a very long and emotional day, though I think we're all still digesting everything we've seen today. We took a one hour drive to Auschwitz, which consists of the brick buildings that primarily housed the political prisoners, Soviet POW's, and other ethnic non-Jews. Several of the buildings have been turned into individual museums covering different aspects of the camps, such as camp life, things they left behind, etc... There was a room just filled with hair - the hair keeps growing, and by now the hair has turned grey which is rather eerie. The hair had been shaved from prisoners after they were killed, in most cases. We saw clothing and materials made of human hair – did the people who bought and wore this, know where it came from? At Auschwitz, they began by taking pictures of prisoners and giving them a number, as the number of slave laborers increased, they used the tattoo system in order to keep track.

The camps were first set up to separate political prisoners - primarily intellectuals such as teachers, religious leaders, writers, artists, lawyers, etc… - those people who could possibly lead a resistance. Auschwitz is located about one hour west of Krakow – right along the railway lines, surrounded by rivers. There were already abandoned army barracks on the property. When the concentration camp filled with Poles and gypsies grew too large, they created a second camp nearby (Birkenau) that became a death camp for the Jews.
As you walk into Auschwitz, there is a cleared area, where a group of prisoners played marching music prisoners were forced to march – making it easier to count, so that they could be marched out into the community to work. As many as 20,000 people could be counted in this way.
The buildings at Auschwitz were two story, with windows and large rooms down long corridors. The rooms could hold 200 prisoners or more. As we walked up the stairway to the second floor, the stone steps were smoothed and imprinted from the many feet that had walked on them. I could feel their presence. Most prisoners were forced to wear the striped clothing and wooden clogs. As we walked along the wide walkways with rocks popping up all around, we wonder how they could stand upright, let alone march. Their daily calorie intake was very low, and people in Auschwitz died from starvation. In the morning they would typically have a bowl of brownish “coffee”, soup with potatoes (or essence of potatoes) for lunch, and a small hunk of bread(with added sawdust) with margarine.
Many people that the suffering began long before the camp, on the trains that people were transported on. In some cases, such as those taken from Greece, they were on trains for nine days without food, water, even clean air.
We took the bus over to Birkenau and were dropped off where prisoners were originally taken before tracks were built right into the prison. We then walked their route into the camp. Now, there are homes around the property, which gave us all chills – especially when we saw locals working in their fields, fields that had been fertilized with the ashes of Birkenau.
The buildings in Birkenau were either wooden or brick - with dirt floors and three tiered bunks along each side of the buildings. Ten to twelve prisoners could sleep in one bunk, with the upper bunks being most desirable, as you were not allowed to leave during the night and if someone was sick, those on the bottom felt it. In addition, if the top bunk was too heavy, the bunk could collapse on those below. There was a heater in each barracks, but because of the cost of heat, it was not used. There were no windows other than some small eyebrow windows near the roof. There was no electricity or light. It was filthy, smelly, and claustrophic for me, I can’t imagine how it must have been then. There were large buildings for latrines which included long troughs for cleaning and three large rows of cement toilets – prisoners would have to share the toilets. They were given 5 minutes in this latrine – once in the morning and once at night. One writer called this excremental assault – another type of dehumanization.
Our director Elaine’s mother, Dora, was a survivor from Birkenau, though her aunt was lost. She related her mother’s story about wearing several layers of clothing to the deportation, being shaved, tattooed along with her older sister. Her mother weighed 140 lbs when she was taken, and 58 lbs at liberation. She had suffered from malaria, as Birkenau is built on a swamp. She and her sister, Fania, were working in a nearby quarry, and Fania was tasked to carry the hot soup kettle. They slipped in their wooden clogs and started falling down the slope, as they fell, they were both shot by the Nazi guard. Fania had to carry her sister’s body back to the camp so that it could be counted. Dora became very despondent and thought of touching the electrified fence in order to commit suicide, but she was taken under the wings of her fellow inmates and carried on.
There is more that I could tell – facts and figures – but the enormity of the place, the systematic way separation was carried out right there at the tracks, the organization of the gas chamber and crematorium, where they changed, were told to hang their clothes on hooks and remember the numbers so they could get them back, the gassing and crematoriums - I can’t explain - those these buildings are in ruins, they have been left the way they were. The place, the experience, the weight – too huge to explain ….
There were many “visitors” at these camps, especially at Auschwitz, as compared to the other places we have been. It was hard to be reflective with so many around, though most were respectful of this hallowed ground.
We spent eight hours there today and were all drained, though the weather was cool and misty, we enjoyed the change in temperature. At dinner at our hotel, a Polish teacher joined each table. Our teacher, Krzysztof Nurkowski, did not speak English very well, but we managed to get some information out of him. He is a history teacher from about one hour away. He loves American music, so that gave us a common ground for a few minutes, anyway. That is Krzysztof in the picture. After dinner, the group met with all the Polish teachers and we discussed Holocaust Education – very different in Poland as we discovered when we inquired about the treatment of Jews after the war.
Our group is melding well – we figure out where we can get free internet, and meet there or share the cost of room internet. Last night, many of us were in the bar skyping or writing blogs - it’s many laughs after an emotional day.

July 18, 2010 continued

I just wanted to talk a little bit about the good times that we have, too. We are always looking for new things to eat. The first picture you see is Nick Hart and my roommate, Debi Maller, enjoying a picnic lunch that we picked up at a little grocery store - trying to read Polish words and decipher pictures has become quite an experience. We traveled to Krakow by two lane roads, primarily and we enjoyed the countryside. It has been very flat over the area from Warsaw to Zamosc, and we notice the rolling hills that break up the scenic vistas. I spotted a sign for my grandmother's village, Jaslo, but missed taking a picture. The scenery and house are typical of this area.
We had a traditional Polish dinner tonight with veal, boiled potatoes and beets, preceded by a crusty bread covered with an aged cheese with a cranberry sauce. We all know one Polish word for sure - Lody - which means ice cream - that, and gelato are everywhere!! Lody and toileta are the words for the day!

July 18, 2010

We left Zamosc early this morning, driving south east, and arrived at Belzec as they opened the gates. The train tracks end right at the gates of the museum. Belzec, along with Sobibor and Treblinka, was constructed for the sole purpose of killing Jews. There was no selection process and only a few victims were kept to do the menial jobs, and then they were eliminated as well. This was all part of Operation Reinhard which ran from 1941-1943 when close to 450,000 Jews were killed. There is nothing left there as the Nazis disassembled and plowed under all remnants of the camp along with the ashes of the victims. In order to preserve the spot, it was decided that the memorial would cover the whole camp area and it is covered with dark gray rocks with a path leading through the hillside that seems to go deep into the hill. There are rusted metal bars sticking up at along the top of the path. At the end, there is a large concrete wall. On the opposite side of the end wall, are written first names of the known victims. Elaine, our director, asked the women in the group to accompany her to pay tribute to her grandmother, and two aunts, who were killed in Belzec. Her grandmother had just given birth to her fifth child, and was taken from the hospital. No one knows what happened to the baby, a girl. Elaine told us more about her grandmother, Malke, and she and one of our Jewish teachers said Kaddish. I lit a memorial candle and we had a moment of silence. The following poem was written by my roommate Debi:

For Elaine

The Pregnant silence hovers over
Women who have given life
Those who will give life
Those who have felt the quickened
movements of life within us.
The Pregnant silence hovers
Collectively we are silent.
Individually we scream out
We are the harbingers of life
We are the givers,
Yet we are suffocated in the
Pregnant silence that hovers
in this place.

After all the facts and figures that we have been learning, this event brought everything back into focus - these were real people - The area is definitely in the view of the town, and though people knew that something was going on, they were silent.
After the starkness and silence at Belzec, I noticed a Catholic cemetery on the way to Krakow and took a picture. It was covered with flowers, bright with so many signs of remembrance - quite a comparison.
We then got back on the bus for a long ride to Krakow, made even longer by a huge traffic jam that kept us crawling for over an hour. Krakow was worth the wait though. Our hotel is close to the Old Town and we walked through the Market Square on our way to dinner - what a charming city with no vehicles and people strolling or watching the strollers! There was lots of music and activity and we had a hard time not just standing still. Though the day started out very warm, it cooled down with a pleasant shower when we came out of dinner and we had an enjoyable walk "home."
I spoke to Maria, a distant relation, who is going to help me meet up with my grandmother's family on Tuesday night. We are going to try to meet tomorrow when I return from our day at Auschwitz.

July 17, 2010

I am writing to you from Zamosc, Poland. We're about 90 minutes away from Lublin. Besides the hotel not having any air conditioning during an unseasonably warm weather spell throughout Europe, everything is great. We spent the majority of the day at Majdanek concentration camp; at least it feels that way even though we were there just over 3 hours. Majdanek is located about 10 minutes outside of Lublin. It is especially noteworthy for a few reasons. First, the camp served multiple purposes in its existence. The camp started out as a concentration camp for political prisoners. It then became a labor camp, ultimately morphing into a death camp. Many of the camps, such as Belzec, Birkenau and Chelmno were only built to murder Jews. Majdanek was liberated by the Russians in 1944. It is such a unique concentration camp because it is almost entirely preserved as the Germans abandoned it. For most of the concentration camps the Germans were able to sabotage the main traces of their mass murders; not so with Majdanek. Two gas chambers still remain today, along with the crematoriums.

We visited Bergen Belsen a few days ago. Visiting Majdanek was an entirely different experience because nothing remains at Bergen Belsen. Majdanek has been preserved throughout the years. Barracks, the gas chambers, the crematorium, guards' towers and so forth still stand today. The first things we noticed when we arrived at the front of Majdanek were the barbed wire and the posts. Many of these posts are the original ones that were installed by the Germans. Barbed wire surrounds the camp's perimeter in different levels. The wire was intended to keep inmates confined and to keep the Polish people away from the camp. Polish people who approached the wire or attempted to smuggle food to the camp inmates risked their lives. Many of the original wooden buildings still stand today.

If you've ever visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum you have seen the picture of the large pile of hair. At Majdanek there is a collection of human hair preserved in one of the storage barracks. When inmates were first taken to the camp part of selection involved having their heads shaved. During the camp's existence they collected 730 kg of hair. Hair was collected for mattresses and for slippers to be worn on submarines. Supposedly, wearing slippers made of human hair would be undetectable to sonar.

One of the most powerful exhibits at the USHMM is the overwhelming pile of shoes. Majdanek has an entire storage barrack full of shoes. When you walk into the storage building, shoes are gathered on all sides of the building, along with two large bins in the middle of the building. The reason so many shoes survive at Majdanek today is because it was a gathering point for luggage and other confiscated materials collected from prisoners there and other camps around the area. The shoes have been sprayed with oil to preserve them somewhat, but they are just held in with chicken wire. I walked along and stopped at a beige high heel shoe that caught my eye. I tried to picture the young woman who would have worn it and wondered why she would leave in shoes like that. It dawned on me that she probably didn't have a choice. Our director, Elaine, whose parents were at Auschwitz, and whose grandparents perished at Belzec, told me a story that her mother relayed to her about watching a young woman get off the train in a wedding dress. Her first thought was that - she came on her wedding day, her second thought was - there are still weddings?

Majdanek is unique because it still houses gas chambers as they stood when the Russians liberated the camp. Seeing the gas chambers up close was a very solemn experience. Up to 300 people could be gassed at once. The actual chambers are very compact; I can't even begin to fathom so many people in the chamber struggling to hold on for one last breath. We were able to look into the gas chamber, but were restricted from walking through. The walls were stained green from the chemicals. The heavy steel door closing off the chamber was still attached. If guards wanted to look in and observe the deaths, there was a peep hole for them to watch. Gas chambers were of course used to kill people, but they were also used to disinfect clothes. In a separate area, guards would put in inmate's clothes to disinfect the clothes using Zyklon B. Before Zyklon B was used to murder Jews it was a pesticide.

We were able to walk into one of the prisoner's barracks that held triple bunk beds - some could hold 3 or more people on each bench level, others held two (these were much narrower than a twin bed. It was hard to imagine 450-500 people living in this building. I tried to imagine the sounds and smells - anguish, mumbled prayers, cries of anger - old straw and filthy bodies and clothes.

After leaving the gas chambers and walking throughout the prisoner's barracks, we visited the crematorium. When you walk through this building you first see a room that houses a concrete slab. Before bodies were cremated someone would search the body to make sure there weren't any valuables left on the corpse, such as gold fillings, hidden jewelry and so forth. The German motto during this time was "nothing to be wasted." After a corpse was thoroughly inspected it was put in a storage room. This room also doubled as a place of execution for Polish people suspected of aiding prisoners and we could see the bullet holes in the wall. After this room we came to the crematorium. Multiple crematoriums still exist today. You can walk around the entire room and view each oven from the front and the back. It almost seemed too cold - these weren't baking ovens - they once held someone's mother or son. We had seen several small butterflies landing in the overgrown meadow in the roll call area. One was caught inside the crematorium room and kept hitting the window to be released. Though several of us tried, we were unable to help it to freedom - perhaps a symbol of the tragedy of that room.

On November 3rd, 1943 Nazis murdered 18,000 people in one day. As these murders were taking place, loudspeakers were set up around the area to play music in an attempt to distract people from the sounds of shooting and screaming. This massacre is referred to as ERNTEFEST, or the Harvest Festival. This massacre fell around the time of year that Germans traditionally celebrated a harvest festival. The memorial today includes the area where the murders took place, and a very large circular monument that contains the remains and ashes of the 18,000 murdered Jews. It was hard to realize that we were looking at the remains of so many. The inscription at the top of this monument read, "Let our fate be a warning to you." My roommate, Debi, lit a memorial candle and spoke about the importance of this camp to our students and our teaching.

It was as if we had entered another world - Bizarro - of the 150,000 people that went through the camp, 80,000 died there. People decided the fate for others.

Today was a long, hot and difficult day; however, I'm glad I had the opportunity to tour Majdanek. Today's visit demonstrates how important it is to use primary sources, such as the remnants of camps which still survive today to teach the Holocaust. But how to use what we saw today in our teaching - that's the key.

We then checked into a small hotel at Zamosc - a very quaint city with a large market square filled with small cafes with outside umbrellas. We rested for a few hours and went out for a short tour of this former lovely city that had a population of 12,500 Jews before the war - 43% of the population - today there is no longer a Jewish presence, though the Warsaw community is funding the renovation of the town's synagogue. We dined in the bowels of a local restaurant which we all loved, as it was quite cool in the lower basement. Tonight, though we don't know what we ate, we all enjoyed it immensely - starting with smoked salmon (which I am beginning to like), a sour green salad, and the main course of what seemed to me some type of golumpki, green beans, and boiled potatoes. We finished off with a sponge cake with apple filling and drizzled with chocolate which was surrounded by ice cream! Yum. After dinner we returned to the hotel to write in our blogs and download pictures. Many of us congregated in the bar where one of the participants, Margaret Atkinson, from Louisiana, had set up a Skype with some of her students. They asked us questions and we told them about our experiences. It was lots of fun for both teachers and students.

Tomorrow we head to Belzec concentration camp. The next few days will perhaps be the most difficult of the entire trip. We are all hoping that the heat wave breaks soon.

July 16, 2010

Last night we had the opportunity to attend a piano concert at the Minister of Health's palace in Warsaw. It was a beautiful evening and we all dressed up for the event. The music was divine and we then drove to newer restaurant in the older section of Warsaw for a meal of herring, beef with gravy and polish potatoes. We all questioned the ingredients of the dessert which was spongecake with fruit topping - we're still unsure!

We rose early for a three hour bus ride to a small shetetl named Kazimierz Dolny. We first stopped at a hillside cemetery that had been vandalized by the Germans. They had taken many of the stones to pave local courtyards and roads. After the war, the Warsaw community helped to find the stones and constructed the wall you see above made from broken stones. One of our directors, Elaine Culberson, who is Jewish, met a Canadian gentleman there who asked if she would help him say Kaddish for the dead there as he had been travelling from the Ukraine, he noticed cemeteries such as these and wanted to say Kaddish, but had been unable to get through it as he got too emotional. She was touched, as were all of us.

We continued to the shetetl of Kazimierz Dolny whose Jewish population had been totally eliminated. Though much of the village had been destroyed, the stone synagogue (it was used as a warehouse by the Germans) was still standing as well as the slaughterhouse - a long wooden building that had four doors and windows on one side. Jewish women would bring their chickens to the doors, the shochet would kill the animal following Jewish laws, and then hand the chicken back through the window. We walked around the quaint touristy town, and many of us were taken aback by the Jewish music that floated out from the old synagogue as some students were practicing for a performance. Most group members took advantage of the ability to purchase a lunch of pierogis - cheese or meat! They were homemade, light and delicious.

Our bus then continued into the city of Lublin, which had 120,000 citizens in 1900, one-third of which were Jewish. Now there are over 370,000. As we drove by the yeshiva, the rabbinical school, that was built in 1930, it was evident that the Jews were sure of a future in Lublin - this didn't happen. In 1941, a ghetto was created , and in 1942, deportations to Treblinka and Belzec were conducted. We had a tour of the old city, which was very quaint, though it had been reconstructed after the war by the Soviets, and now was slowly being reconstructed again. The Jewish quarter around the beautiful old castle is gone.

After dinner tonight, we met as a group for reflection - a thoroughly draining experience for most of us. We shared some of our thoughts from our different destinations so far. One of our members, an African-American teacher from North Carolina talked of his visit to the Berlin Stadium - because he wanted to see where Jesse Owens won his medal - he had promised his father that he would. Others reflected upon areas or events that had changed their thinkings, or confirmed their ideas. Many reflected on their teaching. We cried and laughed - what a wonderful group we have to be able to share our feelings in this way. I commented on how strongly the loss hit me at the Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw, especially after working with survivors, it really hits home how few actually survived to carry on their family name and traditions.
The temperatures continue in the 90's and we tend to melt early so we are packing up and leaving for Majdanek early in the morning.

July 15, 2010

Today was a very emotional day for me. For those that know me, you know that I love old cemeteries and I was looking forward to going to the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw. It was located within the ghetto during the war and had several old and beautiful stones. A Jewish tradition is to leave a stone on a grave instead of flowers because flowers die and a stone lasts forever. What struck us was that the tombstones were all overgrown and had no memorial stones on them because there were no family members left to remember them. We saw the statue of Joseph Korchak who was an educator and ran an orphanage in the ghetto. Even though he could have saved himself, he walked with his "children" to the deportation trains. Vladka Mead has a memorial headstone in memory of her parents. We stopped there and one of our participants said a mournful Kaddish-the prayer for the dead.
There are no few remnants of the ghetto wall left, but there are brick markers on the ground in several places. We visited the only remaining section of the wall which exists next to apartment buildings. It is not a place that is crowded with tourists- which I actually appreciated more, as I placed my hand on the wall and just thought about the bravery of these people who were actually just young adults. The oldest of the resistance fighters was 23 yrs old. There was on May 18, a collective suicide as the Nazi’s closed on the the remaining fighters.It was built to contain all the Jews in Warsaw in the beginning and then little by little more and more Jews were confined there until they were deported to death camps. The ghetto was built by the Jews with their own money. On top of the wall, which was 10 feet high was either barbed wire or broken glass. The Ghetto was never referred to as the Warsaw Ghetto but rather the “Jewish living Quarters” The ghetto was 2 ½ square miles with 360,000 human beings initially crowded into the area. Soon more people were contained there from Western Poland, at its height over 470,000 Jews wee in the ghetto. Jews had no means to make money since all their shops were closed and their bank accounts confiscated. Resistance came in the form of spirituality and keeping their customs alive. The Jews held meetings, concerts, made theater productions all within the confines of the walls. The Nazis allows each person to have 180 calories per day. Certainly not enough to sustain life. We all placed carnations at the Jewish Resistance Fighter's Memorial as our main benefactor, Vladka Mead, was a member of the Warsaw Resistance Fighters. Many of the markers and memorials are totally surrounded by apartments buildings and parks, as the Soviets built housing on the ruins of the ghetto.
We visited the Nosyk Synagogue, the only synagogue in Warsaw to be still standing after the war, primarily because it was turned into a stable for the German horses. Our leader, Elaine Culbertson, explained the synagogue and the significance of the services. They have renovated the building and it is quite beautiful.
We continued on foot to Mila 18 the headquarters of the resistance- a bunker that was used by the fighters. Their remains are there marked by a memorial rock with names etched on the stone. On foot again, we went to the Umchlag Platz the remains of the place where the Jews were brought to the place of deportation . There is little left to mark the place, but nonetheless one can feel the souls all around as common first names are listed to remind us of so many.. so many. Our last stop was the Jewish Historical Institute where we saw an emotional film on the ghetto- one that we all admit we have never seen, Very graphic and hard to absorb. It ended with a mother telling her story about the death of her child and saying “ No one will call me mummy anymore.”

The day concluded with some free time to explore the city and unwind from such an emotionally charged day. We attended a lovely piano concert of Chopin music which really helped to relax us and hear the music.