Arise

It’s 5:45 AM. My field of vision is still blurry as I reach to turn off the buzzing alarm that awakens me from a deep sleep. The room is still dark and the air chilly, causing the hair to rise vertically on my goose-bumped arms. For about half a minute I’m completely disoriented: This doesn’t look like Bat Yam. Where am I? And why am I so cold?

At first I think I’m still dreaming. All is surreal until the bedside light switches on and I process my illuminated new environment: hotel room, Warsaw, Poland.

In hindsight, I see how this sense of disorientation pervaded our group’s week-long journey in Poland. At first, it manifested itself in our physical discomfort - coldness, hunger, and chronic fatigue became a normal and prevalent part of each day. Yet, as the trip progressed, we witnessed our challenges transform from physical to emotional.

In this sense, this trip helped put the complaints of everyday life in perspective. How could we moan about our frozen toes or grumbling stomachs while inside a concentration camp, where thousands suffered fates infinitely worse? All it took was a slight maturation of our minds - and appropriate attitudes - to brave seeing horrific sites in the midst of Poland’s freezing winter.

But like any situation, there are times to be serious and times to be silly. So granted, we did find appropriate moments to let the goofiness we’d been suppressing surface. After long days of soaking in harsh realities, humor proved to be an important, if not vital, coping mechanism for the group of eighty-something young adults.

You may wonder how we could be lighthearted on a trip devoted to the Holocaust? Well the answer is simple: humans seek a state of equilibrium. We naturally stabilize ourselves after extreme highs and extreme lows, to find our functional happy medium. I recall one instance in particular where I had to pull myself out of an extreme low:

I am standing at the site of a mass shooting in what used to be the death camp Majdanek. I stare at my feet, attempting to avoid the biting cold wind, while listening to my group leader read aloud an anecdote of a family murdered at that very site. Suddenly I see faces, bodies, and even voices come to life from within the ground, beneath my boots, and around the desolate camp. My imagination makes the anecdote real - more real than I was expecting. More real than I had hoped. (Yes, this was the reason I came to Poland - to learn, to see, to feel - but nobody can prepare you for the reactions that you have in your own mind.)Suddenly tears well up in the corners of my eyes and I look up at the monochromatic grayness of the sky. At that moment I understand why I came there - to see the lowest point humanity is capable of reaching, so I will never forget it or let it happen again. Yet, my mind relentlessly grapples with the how. How could humanity reach such an unimaginable low?

That is the ultimate question I was left with after my journey.

And after searching tirelessly for answers, I learned that no matter how much textbook knowledge I stuff into my mind, there will only appear more questions.

From what I understand, that’s simply how the universe works. We study topics to learn, to connect neurons to one another, to use that ten percent of our oversized brains. But as we gain knowledge, we learn that there is still so much we don’t know. We see how much of the world we have yet to explore.

That is how I ended up arriving back in Israel, one long week later, still feeling like I had only scratched the surface of such a colossal historical event. Because frankly, only God knows the millions of names, facts, families, stories, lives that exist in the physical realm only as air particles of undifferentiated ash.

That may be what haunts me the most - the thousands of families who simply vanished, as if they never existed at all. No grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, or even grandchildren to continue their legacy. No photographs to be remembered by, no friends to tell their story. Those are the people who become a part of the tragic statistic - because that is all that is left of them.

“Kuma,” the name of the trip to Poland, translates in Hebrew to stand up or arise. Another trip similar to “Kuma” is called “March of the Living.“ Both names almost intertwine in their messages; one of our goals for coming to Poland was to stand up for those who could not. We filled old synagogues on Shabbat with our voices - with our prayers for those who fell. We marched through forests, on the sites of mass graves, to listen to anecdotes and pay our respects.

I will always remember the blueness of the Israeli flag we waved while walking through Auschwitz-Birkenau. I will remember when we sang the “Hatikva,” the Israeli national anthem, at Treblinka. I will remember when other tour groups joined us in singing, our voices bouncing off each other in unison, sending chills up and down my spine. I will remember returning to Jerusalem straight off the plane, finding a stone from Auschwitz in my pocket, and carefully placing it in a crack in the Western Wall.

All of these memories have become a part of me. They have left an impression on my being - and there they will remain - so I will never forget.