Prior to coming to Poland, I thought I knew a lot about the Holocaust. After coming to Poland I realized I was very wrong. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know what the Holocaust was. My family was killed in the Holocaust and until this trip, I didn’t know many details about how they died. I hadn’t thought to ask. One of the very great things about learning about the Shoah is the remembrance the victims get. Whether they are family members or you hear their testimony, see their belongings, or see where their remains are. Before learning about my family history, I would brush the deaths of my family members and the 6 million other Jews off, acknowledging the fact that I had relatives who died, but not looking into their stories and lives before their death. I never thought about it until this trip, but Holocaust survivors are only described as Holocaust survivors after the Holocaust, it doesn’t matter what career they had before the Holocaust, their name is associated with victim or survivor. This disturbs me. The most important thing I got out of this trip is getting to know about individuals and coming to the realization that this was not a single 6 million or 6 million as a whole, but individuals that make up the 6 million. Besides my grandma, I’ve heard one Holocaust survivor speak, these were the only personalities I knew who endured the Holocaust. I thought unless I meet more survivors in my lifetime, there would be no way I could know any more personalities. Walking through Birkenau is when I got to know more about people’s lives during the Holocaust than I ever did before. I didn’t expect to get to know more personalities when going to the camps if anything the opposite but being at the camps showed me the personalities. Meeting these personalities is what I least expected when going to Poland.

On the first day of Poland, we visited the Warsaw cemetery. Before the Shoah, Warsaw had the second largest Jewish population in all of Poland. At the Warsaw cemetery, the majority of the graves have symbols on the gravestones that tell something about who they are. For example, the Kohanim all have the same symbol so they are known as Kohanim. We went around and found symbols that stood out to us and copied them onto a paper. After we each shared our symbol and learned what it meant, we shared what we would want on our gravestone. This activity pointed out the vibrant Jewish culture that was in Warsaw. The first thing we did at the cemetery was going to the grave of a rich Jewish man who had meticulously planned out his tombstone. His grave was huge and full of symbols that represented his life. He represents the spirited Jewish life that Warsaw and Poland once had. Before the war there were 3 million Jews in Poland, now there are 500,000. We went to this cemetery to learn about the 3 million Jews who lived out fulfilled lives in Poland and are buried in this gigantic Jewish cemetery. The scenery at this cemetery was incredible, the trees had all turned and their leaves were so pretty, the orange leaves littered the ground. I think this beauty was God saying, “Jewish life in Poland was beautiful and still can be”.