"It's been a long time coming, but I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will" - Sam Cooke lyrics
Let us skip the uneventful period of my short stay in NY and plunge right into the next phase of my summer journey: Poland and Israel!! First, let me explain that I will be traveling with 34 college and graduate students from across the nation, in addition to a group of adults in charge of the program. Among them is, for example, David Brog (author and HLS alumnus), who has essentially become a big brother figure for several of us. Most strikingly, we will also be traveling through Poland with Irving Roth, who is a survivor of BOTH Auschwitz and Buchenwald (as a tangent, when he was in Buchenwald, Irving stayed in the same room as Eli Weisel). It has been somewhat strange to find myself, at the end of a tumultuous summer on my first group travel experience, and a very Christian one no less, but I have to admit that I have felt comfortable, welcome, and united with these people from the very beginning. I have been incredibly lucky and feel (if you will allow me this temporary cliché) like I have met several people already whose friendship I intend to keep after this trip is over. In part, what reassures me is that we have already had a great effect on each other, as silly as that may sound.
And so, after two days of orientation together at a hotel by JFK Airport, we all crossed the Atlantic and landed in Warsaw, Poland. The first day was relatively light in terms of sight seeing, but we still visited the Old City in Warsaw, spend time in the only pre-war synagogue that is still standing (and operating), and walked around different parts of the city as we endeavored to understand Jewish life in the city pre-WWII. After having lunch in a park, we traveled to the Gesia Jewish Cemetery, which was our first tangible encounter with death in its many forms. On the one hand, the commentary told the story of ordinary Jews who lived and died in Warsaw and who lie buried there, their graves marked appropriately, but on the other hand, there are mass graves were 100,000 people were buried after dying in the ghetto during the 2.5 years it existed. Towards the end of our time there, I walked up to a memorial to the children of Warsaw who had perished during the Holocaust and, silently, placed a small pebble on the face of the tablet. Jewish tradition is to place rocks on the graves we commemorate, to mark a promise of remembrance...I followed this tradition because the impermanence of flowers had never seemed less appropriate.
After dinner, we met in a conference room at our hotel for a discussion with two Polish students who are involved in Jewish studies, as well as Yolanda (spelling?), who runs the Olive Tree Foundation (an organization devoted to educating Polish youth about the Holocaust). All three of them spoke about their interest and their commitment to understand a people and a history that appealed to them for very emotional, very personal reasons...I have to admit that although their personal reasons were for the most part religious and rooted firmly in their interpretation of the Bible (which, I should mention, is not the case for me), I found their testimony reaffirming in a different, perhaps unintended way. At one point Yolanda quoted a rabbi who had said, "Do not tell me you love me if you do not know the reasons for my suffering." A simple phrase and a very blunt one, but to me it rang true as a denunciation of the kind of superficiality most of us espouse today in our relationships with other people: we have friends, we have acquaintances, buddies, partners, lovers, whose lives and cultural/historic paths we spend little time understanding, in the process failing to realize that in such a way we only really understand a fraction of them. On a personal note, I feel that those friends of mine who have never asked, never ventured to delve into the past of my families, my countries of heritage, have a somewhat fractioned portrait of who I am...and I, of course, am guilty of exactly the same thing in return. As a result, I took this trip as a personal attempt to rectify, at least in part, this approach and to fill in the portraits I have of the Jewish people I have known and those who are still important in my life.
After the meeting, I went to the gym with some of my new friends and spent a very solid time in the hotel's sauna!
At this point, let me briefly mention on a tangent that our group is accompanied by Avi, our knowledgeable and hyper-intense tour guide and Martin, our KGB-looking security man. Both of these men have proven to be not only helpful, but endlessly amusing, especially Martin since he appears to have been transposed directly from a film about retired operatives! He did intervene when some creepy man was following me without me noticing, however, so I have developed a greater respect for his seemingly strange position. Lastly, we also have two cameramen – Ralph and Tony – who I can easily say are two of my favorite people on this trip hands down.
In addition, we happened to coincidentally share our hotel in Warsaw with two unexpected groups of people: (a) IDF soldiers on a Holocaust remembrance trip, ad (b) survivors of the general Warsaw uprising of 1941 (not the Jewish Ghetto uprising), who happened to be celebrating the 65th Anniversary of their unsuccessful revolt against the Germans. Needless to say, being here feels like we are caught in some strange alternative history, one in which the past and the present are somehow existing simultaneously (Jorge Luis Borges comes to mind…sigh, I love that man’s delusional and brilliant writing)…here I was, a Cuban-Russian immigrant to the United States, 23 years old, walking past Israeli soldiers on their way to being reminded what they fight for and octogenarians who stood up against the very men who terrorized the Jew decades earlier. I’m not sure I can properly explain how this moment felt; suffice it to say it was surreal. David Brog also mentioned that what we are doing is almost as essential as what the IDF does, because the ideological battle also matters.
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