by Leah Goldstein

At the beginning of June, a delegation of 32 Yad Vashem workers (including the author of this article) left Israel for a six-day intensive study tour of Poland. Our guide was Inbal Kvity Ben-Dov, Director of the Study Seminars Department at the International School for Holocaust Studies. The group comprised members of staff from almost every department in Yad Vashem, with a comprehensive combined knowledge. However, for all except two, it was the first visit to the country, and expectations, as well as concerns, were high. What would we gain, professionally and personally, from visiting the actual sites of mass murder, or from seeing for ourselves the cities and villages that once housed thriving Jewish populations? How would we feel walking through the forests where people we never knew were murdered in cold blood? Could Poland 2006 give us any closer understanding of the horrors our Jewish brothers and sisters experienced there over six decades ago?

Our trip spanned many places—including Warsaw, Lublin and Krakow—as well as three death camps. In the cities, we toured the Jewish cemeteries, walked through areas that once enclosed the Jewish residents in ghettos, and visited numerous memorial sites and monuments that had been erected since the end of the war. In the smaller villages, such as Tykocin and Kotsk, we entered the ruins of synagogues and yeshivot, and crossed the market squares that have changed little in the past 70 years. Journeying from town to town, we noticed road signs to places we had only read about in books, and heard about the centuries of Jewish history that were destroyed in a few days, and the same question kept arising: “What would I have done?”

At the death camps—Treblinka, where nothing remains but a field filled with monuments to the 870,000 Jews murdered there; Majdanek, where one can literally walk through the entire “death factory”; and Auschwitz-Birkenau, which is now a national museum—we came a very small distance closer to imagining the terror experienced by the people who were brought there. While we were fortunate enough to be visiting so long after the murderous policies had ended, the ominous feeling of death that still lingers there is impossible to glean from any book or testimony. As many of us who have lost relatives—close and distant—at these places enunciated their names, it was almost as if time was standing still, and our voices were bringing their memories back to the present, even for a fleeting moment.

Inbal Kvity Ben-Dov provided us not only with layer upon layer of factual information about the decimated communities and the events of the Shoah, but also with many personal testimonies from survivors she has met over the years. This undoubtedly raised our level of understanding, and the harrowing and emotional accounts we heard became seared in our minds. We also spent one evening with Mira Gruszczynska, a Righteous Among the Nations, who relayed her story to us through our Polish guide. “Why did you help a girl you didn’t know, when the danger was so great?” we asked her. “Was there any point when you regretted the task you had taken upon yourself?” Her soft-spoken replies belied the steely determination in her eyes: “Never. It was the natural thing for me to do. It was my way of resisting the Germans.”

Our last day was spent at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the sheer size of the place, its meticulous design and the vast number of artifacts on display was overwhelming. After an exhausting 12 hours in both camps, emotions were high, and a spontaneous round of Israeli and Jewish songs on the bus back to the airport served to strengthen our crushed spirits and reinforce our commitment to Jewish continuity.

Arriving back in Israel as dawn broke the following day, many of the participants felt they had returned with more questions than when they left—some of which may be impossible to answer—but all had a yearning to learn more about what had happened on Polish soil during those terrible years. At a reunion a few weeks later, the benefits of the trip became even clearer: one participant described how her enhanced guiding in the Holocaust History Museum; two described their stronger connection with Israel and Judaism; and another commented how she was finally able to discuss the topic with her children, who had made the journey some years earlier.

“We have no doubt that the trip to Poland deepened our understanding and feelings about the Shoah… From today, every book we read, every movie we watch, every account we hear, and every conversation we hold about the subject will be totally different,” participants wrote to Chairman of the Directorate Avner Shalev. “We also bonded together as a group, which added a unique value to the trip.”

The group thanked the administration for their assistance and their managers for their consideration during their absence from work, but the most special thanks went to Inbal Kvity Ben-Dov. “Inbal was a pillar of support during the trip,” the letter read. “Her vast knowledge and profound sensitivity imbued in us the last request of those who perished: ‘Let our fate be a warning to you all.’”

top