The thought of traveling to another country without your parents is crazy enough, but going to another country during that time is psychotic.  Poland taught me so many more things than what I thought I knew. I expected Poland to be this gloomy and rainy place, but I couldn’t even think that it was going to be 60 degrees and sunny the whole time. Poland was supposed to be this place where we remembered the six million Jews who died there, but it turned into almost a vacation until they he concentration camps. I really expected the camps to be barren and empty, but in reality they were tourist sights for many people. Going into Poland I knew a few things from my Hebrew school. Our director tried her best to get as many survivors as possible so we can learn the most. There were two particular survivors of which I remember best. The first one was a male from Krakow, Poland. He was 20 years old when he was thrown into the Krakow ghetto. He was later sent to Auschwitz where he was able to survive because his father was sent there too and they were in the same barrack as each other which gave him emotional support. He also had a friend in the kitchen who was able to get them extra soup and at the end of the war both of them survived and he found his sister who was in Plaszow. The second person was living in France during that time and was sent to Dachau. She was 18 and was fit to work beca use she worked on a farm. In Dachau she met a male kitchen staff who liked her and gave her extra food. At the end of the war the two got married and had three kids. The main point of the survivors stories was that you needed other people to help you survive the camps and love you throughout your time in the Shoah. Poland really did mean a lot to me. I was learning about the places where 11 million people died and half of them were people my family could have known. Although I didn’t have any family that I know of who died in the Holocaust, I was really able to connect to all the suffering that occurred during this terrible time in Jewish history. We have to learn about this otherwise we will forget what happened and the world will never know what really happened during the times of the Holocaust.