Poland Pilgrimage

by Talia Hirsch,     11^th grade,      NJ

The Sages of Lublin Yeshiva

We started off the day at the esteemed Sages of Lublin Yeshiva. The yeshiva was in existence from 1930-1940 and it was one of the most prestigious and competitive yeshivot in the world. Rabbi Meir Shapiro, the leader of the yeshiva, trained the elite there so they became teachers knowledgeable in the Torah and able to teach it well by learning personal skills. It was in Lublin because it was the center of Torah scholarship in Europe. Meir Shapiro had to raise a lot of money for the yeshiva. Money was used for all the students needs such as: room, board, studies, etc. because the students did not pay to go. Secular Jews donated a lot of money.

the beit midrash in the Lublin Yeshiva

The דף יומי (daf yomi)- one page of Talmud each day was created at the Lublin Yeshiva and is still used today. The method is to ensure everyone in the world is on the same page on the same day. It takes 7 1/2 years to complete the whole Babylonian Talmud using this method. To get into the yeshiva you had to memorize 400 pages of Talmud ahead of time and you were tested. You had to be a scholar before you got in. The yeshiva also included a library with 25,000 books and a model of the Beit Hamikdash. When Nazis came and took overtook it, they made the men put all the books outside and the Nazis had a book burning that lasted 3 days. Before we left we studied a page of Talmud from Tractate Ketuvot with Rabbi Sykes in the yeshiva, it was very interesting. 

Majdanek

Next we went to the concentration camp Majdanek. Death camps were in Poland because the largest population of Jews were in Poland and it is in the center of Europe. Poland’s flat land made it easy to lay down rail roads which were used to transport people easily to the camps.   Majdanek opened in the summer of 1941, it was originally for prisoners of war. The majority of people that came and that were murdered at the camp were actually Poles. The first Jews came in October 1941. It was also the first camp to be liberated in July 1944. The building to the right when you first walk in the camp was a sanitation building and also contained the first gas chamber.

barracks containing tens of thousands of shoes from prisoners at Majdanek

Then the buildings along the road were used for holding the possessions taken from the prisoners who entered. The Germans who ran the camp used Jewish tomb stones to pave the road. This was very hard to see because tomb stones are very sacred and using them as a road is repulsive. There is a statue with three eagles on top that represent the Third Reich. The prisoners were forced to salute the statue as they passed so the prisoners came up with a solution instead of saluting the Third Reich: the prisoners would dig holes under the statue and bury ashes of their family or friends and when the guards would make them salute they would be saluting their loved ones. This story was very meaningful and showed that the prisoners were still witty even through terrible circumstances.

fragment of a road the Nazis paved with Jewish tombstones

statue of eagles at Majdanek that prisoners secretly saluted their comrades

The crematorium building was split into seven rooms, all used to dismantle the bodies, search them, and then cremate them. The thing at the camp that really hit me the hardest was the huge mound of ashes of the prisoners, under a large cement dome. It was crazy to see.

Going to the yeshiva and the camp showed two very different sides of the Jewish people, from life to death.

crematoria

a memorial with an enormous pile of human ashes under a dome

Poland Pilgrimage

by Marissa Magasiny,      11^th grade,       NJ

I wrote this poem after we visited the Maidanek concentration camp in Lublin.  I believe that although it is about the memorial there, it fits the theme of all the camps. It explains the same feelings after we saw everything else and what life will eventually bring us. If you dig deep into it, it shows how lucky we are to live our life to the extent that we are given, how we are not forced to die right away like people in the Holocaust were.

Ashes to Ashes

“We are all dust and ashes”

A memorial

A true life filled memorial

Huge and directly in front of my eyes

I stood staring

I didn’t know what i would see

A few more steps up

Some forward

And I...

I am...

Lost.

Unable to breathe,

A pile maybe fifteen feet high,

Could’ve been 100 feet around,

The ashes of human beings.

The ashes of a life

Killed so easily.

My heart shattered.

My mind unable to comprehend.

I thought I’ve seen it all.

I've seen rocks and statues,

Tomb stones and flowers.

This time

I was wrong

Because this was so different.

Ashes.

Thousands of them

Just piled like dirt.

Dust to dust,

Ashes to ashes.

All I thought,

All I knew,

Was that we

Not like this though,

Will all be

Just dust and ashes too one day.

Auschwitz, it is a name in which many see hate, destruction, loss, history, and wrong-doing. January 27^th, 1945 was the day that Auschwitz was liberated.  Seventy-four years later, on April 4th, 2019, I stood at Auschwitz. I stood alongside my fellow classmates and my amazing staff. Proudly and so uncertain, all of us trudged forward on the tracks into a place once so dark. Over 70 Jewish teens with our teachers and madrichim stood on the famous train tracks headed straight for the unknown. We did exactly what the Jews, Gypsies, Gays, Disabled, etc. did many years ago. As we walked towards Auschwitz with our Jewish history classes, we felt uneasy. My class was asked to line both sides of the track and kneel down. Our teacher, David, said “ feel the senses around you not only what you see but what you see, hear….now put your hands on the rail….” He went on to discuss our being there and that we were not tourist but that we were witnesses. We were all witnesses to such a tragedy. Through our journey in the concentration camp, David read many testimonies and told stories. Each one having some type of relationship to the spot we were paused at.

The first stop was out of order in his lesson plan. So many of the students were interested in seeing the barracks where the victims lived. Now they were not the real thing, they were very accurate replicas of it. The first barrack was mostly empty. In the back were three rows of concrete. In each were two rows of holes, each row had maybe thirty. That was their latrine. Human beings stripped of privacy and humiliated just so they could relieve themselves. It was so terrible. We walked into the barrack a few feet away from the first. This one was filled on each side with queen sized wooden bunk beds with no padding or blanket. In the middle was a small brick wall attached to two chimneys. It was used for heating. This was where we heard the first shocking news, but at this point everything was already a shock. The worst form of punishment was when Nazis would push a prisoner over the brick wall, pull down their pants or pull up their shirt and whip them or hit them with a wooden plank. I felt disgusted and sad.

The next large stop was at a train car. We all put our hands to it and nobody spoke. That single cart once held many. They were squished and crammed. They could have been in there for days, weeks, even close to months. Now all it was, was empty. That was not fair. It was never fair. These people were treated like animals and eventually made to feel as though they actually were. One story we were told is how human beings, victims, barely got food and the closest they came was by eating sand and grass around the barracks and work areas.

We then made our way through the woman’s section towards two of the four gas chambers/crematoriums. All four gas chambers were destroyed during the war. The only part we saw was the remains all over a small area of the ground taped off. We were able to see what was left of the inside and the stairs of crematorium number 2. The victims of the Holocaust were either brought there right away during the selection process off the train, or sometimes after suffering for an amount of time in the camps. They were forced to undress themselves and stand in a small room. All these people wanted was a shower and instead of shower, poison was dropped that killed them all. Millions Jews died like this. I felt so lost. The gas chambers and crematoriums were the worst part of all of the camps we visited. At some camps we were able to walk through them. So many of my peers and I were unable to walk through. The ones that did came out unable to speak or in tears. Some had said they felt angry, sad, suffocated. These are feelings none of us wanted to feel.  

We ended our day at a spot in the back right corner of the camp. All of our classes met together. The teachers gave us about fifteen minutes to just walk around or write in our journals. When the fifteen minutes ended, our group circled up in front of three memorial tombstones. Eight students and one madrich read poems, prayers, and testimonies. As they finished what they were saying, all of the Heller High staff and students put our arms around each other and sang Hatikvah. Hatikvah came to an end. The group started to walk towards the exit. Most of us kept holding hands with at least one other person or had our arms around one another. I alongside two other girls and one boy lit yahrzeit candles and placed them next to the memorials directly before leaving.

We will always remember what happened and how it happened.