Students send e-mail accounts of trip to Israel, Poland

EDITOR’S NOTE: Ten students who live in Newport Beach departed last week for a tour of Poland and Israel with Tarbut V’Torah Community Day School. Several of them promised to e-mail accounts of their trip to the Daily Pilot. Here are the first dispatches to come in.

Erica Shapiro, June 5

Today we arrived in Poland after a very long and exhausting flight. When we arrived the first thing we did was go to a Jewish cemetery. Located across from a site where I could hear construction noises, and see cars go by, the cemetery was a different world. A chilly wind met my face as I entered through the large black doors to the cemetery, and a gloomy site of uncountable graves met my eyes. There were numerous tombstones, cluttered together, barely any space between. The cemetery was a depressing sight to see, and it was hard to look at so many tombstones for people of all different ages. One memorial was to 1.5 million children who had died during the Holocaust. It was difficult to think about that many dying so early in their lives. I thought to myself, “What if those were my sisters?” and thought about all the young people I knew, my friends, cousins, sisters, and I could not imagine the pain that people of the people who were close to them went through. Visiting the cemetery affirmed the importance of life — a day, an hour, a minute and a loved one.

Leah Greenbaum, June 6

We went to Majydanek today, a death camp. We walked into “Bad and Disinfektion” (Bath and Disinfection) first, as prisoners did 60 years ago. And we walked into a room with shower heads lining the ceiling, and I shivered and thought, “God this must be it.” But it wasn’t. Sarah, our tour guide (a wonderful, sensitive woman whose parents are survivors who lost everything except their lives in the Holocaust) told us many people grew up believing that myth. But the truth is death camp showers were showers. We walked into the next room on creaking wooden floors, originals, like at a sauna. Sarah didn’t say what the room was, and naively as I walked into it, I’d really thought the worst was over for this barrack. But this was the room, the room I’d dreaded going to when I heard we were visiting death camps. It was windowless, with one small grated vent on the wall and two on the ceiling. Blue stains covered the walls, Sarah said, from the cyanide. She explained that the prisoners ran in, wet, naked and frantic, the great doors slammed shut. There were no lights. The only sound they heard were the two vents on the ceiling opening. It took 15 minutes to die, and another 15 to air out the room.

And then we had to sit down in there, and I was horrified because the air was so thick and there was just so much in that empty room. I wanted to cry so badly but all I could think about was how badly I wanted to leave. It was like a slideshow: I thought of the thousands (a quarter of a million, I am told) of writhing people that died in this room, screaming, the kids in my class sliding their sunglasses down to cover their faces, my teacher crying, and then I thought about why I wasn’t. I thought of what the Nazis saw when they swung the doors back open to air out the room. I thought about Sarah, who had sat in the room like that dozens of times. I thought about what my parents would say if they saw this room. I thought again about why I wasn’t crying. I thought about the piles of bodies that would be here if you could cut out the spot I sat in like a slice of time.

When we left I couldn’t have been more grateful: it was like my birthday, it was like a day at the beach. I was so overjoyed to take big lazy steps over the long grass that’s grown between barracks since that awful time in history. But I couldn’t emote any of that either. I tell you this, that I couldn’t cry, and I try to do it without shame, because Sarah told us it takes time, and I believe her, I really do.