April 25 - Yom HaZikaron in Warsaw

Aviva O. ‘23
Hey everyone! We enthusiastically boarded the plane and couldn’t wait for our future voyage. Everyone either passed out or was completely awake. Finally, we arrived in Warsaw, Poland.

After our flight, we took a shuttle to our first location: the Jewish cemetery. We met our marvelous tour guide, Rafi, who is accompanying us for the entire Poland segment of the trip. He showed us the beautiful gravestones that were still standing because it would have taken an unbelievable amount of dynamite to destroy it all and it was just not worth it for the Nazis. He also told about a man named Meir Balaban, the founder of Polish Jewish historiography. It is because of him that we know so many of the Warsaw Jewish community’s stories. He was the one who gathered information and kept their stories alive.

With these gravestones, came so many different stories. There was a man who lost his father during the war and decided to find more information about him. He played a non-Jewish man who was interested in history and asked some guys in a bar about his father. They told him about how in the war, his father was murdered with an ax. Later, this man dug up his bones and reburied him in a proper, respectable grave. 

Rafi later told us of people who would use their children’s rations and not report their death after they died. Luckily, there was a woman who would pick up these children’s bodies and properly bury them. Our classmate, Yaakov W. 23, shared the story of his great-great-great-grandfather, who was also buried at this cemetery.

After visiting graves and hearing different stories, I began to recognize the miracle of how this graveyard still exists. How these powerful stories can live through us and it is our duty to pass on these stories to grandchildren when the time comes. 

Following lunch, we visited the Warsaw Ghetto. I get goosebumps just thinking about it. We saw the buildings where thousands of people were forced to stay. It got me thinking about how little they were allowed to bring with them — either you brought food, jewelry, blankets or clothes; or the terrors of starvation and overcrowding and how it lead to death. I just can’t fathom how our ancestors had to go through something like this, with no way of knowing what was coming next. 

Later, we walked to a memorial with names similar to our own and thought about those lives that perished. On the wall it said, “Along this path of suffering and death over 300,000 Jews were driven in 1942-1943 the Warsaw Ghetto to the Gas Chambers of the Nazi Extermination camps.” Rafi told us a choice that one father had to make about his daughter. Either he could save his daughter with the sacrifice of another Jew or let the other Jew live. We heard of many similarly horrific tragedies and losses that occurred each day during the war. But to truly understand the pain they went through is simply too difficult. The feeling I get isn’t even remotely close to what those men, women, and children felt all throughout the war. 

We are grateful for this educational day today.