P2K - Shoah Experience to Poland and Israel
Personal Experiences
Personal Experiences
Two weeks have passed since I returned from my trip to Poland. Yet what I experienced there haunts me still. The sights I saw, the stories I heard, the thoughts that passed through my mind – all seem so real and close. It is strange to be back among people who know nothing of such things, who have no way of understanding the power of the experience I underwent. How do I explain to them that I have not returned from a holiday in Cape Town or Australia, that I could talk for hours and still not give justice to what I saw?
They cannot understand what it is to daven in Birkenau and wonder how the people who stood there sixty years before could have had the internal strength to praise the G-d who “releases prisoners” and “provides for all my needs”. They cannot comprehend how it feels to say Aleinu in Treblinka, where so many died with the same prayer on their lips, the prayer that proclaims our pride in our Jewishness and our belief in one G-d, and expresses the hope that the nations of the world will one day accept us.
How can I explain the horrifying smallness and ordinariness of the crematoria ovens of Majdanek, ovens used both to burn corpses and to bake bread? Is there any way to describe how one feels when one sees the eerie peacefulness of the infamous Chelmno, and hears that, of the myriads who came there, only two remain to tell its awful tale? Poland is the graveyard of hundreds, thousands of worlds – yet so little testifies to this.
I cannot make them understand – but they must know. I believe that it is the duty of every Jew to make this pilgrimage – to see with his or her own eyes the terrible history of our people and to give honour to the memory of those who have nobody who will remember them. Our generation is obligated to perpetuate their memory and, in tribute to their dying al kiddush Hashem, to live al kiddush Hashem – as proud and faithful Jews.
Nina Bloch
They cannot understand what it is to daven in Birkenau and wonder how the people who stood there sixty years before could have had the internal strength to praise the G-d who “releases prisoners” and “provides for all my needs”. They cannot comprehend how it feels to say Aleinu in Treblinka, where so many died with the same prayer on their lips, the prayer that proclaims our pride in our Jewishness and our belief in one G-d, and expresses the hope that the nations of the world will one day accept us.
How can I explain the horrifying smallness and ordinariness of the crematoria ovens of Majdanek, ovens used both to burn corpses and to bake bread? Is there any way to describe how one feels when one sees the eerie peacefulness of the infamous Chelmno, and hears that, of the myriads who came there, only two remain to tell its awful tale? Poland is the graveyard of hundreds, thousands of worlds – yet so little testifies to this.
I cannot make them understand – but they must know. I believe that it is the duty of every Jew to make this pilgrimage – to see with his or her own eyes the terrible history of our people and to give honour to the memory of those who have nobody who will remember them. Our generation is obligated to perpetuate their memory and, in tribute to their dying al kiddush Hashem, to live al kiddush Hashem – as proud and faithful Jews.
Nina Bloch
