By Sophie Katzman

Sophie Katzman listening intensely at the Galicia Museum in Krakow. Photo credit: Lisa Kassow

When I told people I was going to Poland for spring break, I received all sorts of responses: “Why are you going there? Isn’t it just concentration camps?” “Wouldn’t you rather be on a beach?” “I would never go to Poland after what they did to the Jews.”

To be honest, before I left it was hard to articulate quite why I was going. I was hesitant to forego a beach trip with my best friends, yet after hearing about the Holocaust for so many years, I wanted to be able to connect with the atrocities on a deeper level. And this wasn’t just any trip; I was going with 11 other students, the esteemed Professor Samuel Kassow [of Trinity College], and his wife, our beloved Hillel director, Lisa. Professor Kassow is a walking encyclopedia of the Holocaust and Jewish studies, among other distinctions. There was something inside telling me I couldn’t pass up this opportunity. I just went with what felt right.

I had no clear expectations. I decided to go in with an open outlook so I could fully experience every moment. Yet, as a young Jewish woman, the Holocaust has always filled me with a sense of grief; since Poland is where most of the senseless killings took place, I couldn’t help but associate it with death and sadness. Consequently, I was pleasantly surprised to hear the words “renewal” and “celebration” associated with Polish Jewish life over and over throughout my week there.

Trinity College Hillel group inaugurated a campus cleanup project at the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery with the Taube Foundation for Renewal of Jewish Life in Poland.

My trip to Warsaw and Krakow exposed me to something I didn’t even know was occurring. In the past decade, Poland has been working at length to renew its Jewish communities, many of which were lost and never rebuilt after the Holocaust. Organizations like the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, which sponsored my own trip, have been fostering programs to renew Jewish life in a place that for many years has had so few Jews. In Warsaw on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto, The Museum of the History of Polish Jews is a testament to the Jews who thrived in Poland for the 1,000 years leading up to the Holocaust. It is truly an incredible place that has been more than ten years in the making. It officially opens in October 2014. Not only is the museum rich in content, but it is also abounding with beautiful architecture and design.

At Auschwitz-Birkenau, there is an exhibit sponsored by Yad Vashem that just opened last year called “The Return to Life.” In the midst of barren bricks and the eerie aura of mass extermination, there is now a building influencing the renewal of life. The dead are remembered through an unfathomably vast list of names and various pictures and quotations, then those names are brought to life by bright white lights and interactive screens. These types of exhibitions are changing the conversation about Jewish life in Poland.

Dr. Lena Bergman, director of the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, showing students primary documents from the Ringelblum Archive. Photo credit: Lisa Kassow

On a smaller scale, the celebration of Polish Jewish life is emerging through progressive Jewish community centers, youth groups, and a Jewish day school. Young Jewish communities that are sprouting throughout Warsaw and Krakow are organizing Shabbat dinners, Purim parties, discussions, and more. Over the past decade, schools and universities have added Jewish, Yiddish, and Hebrew Studies courses to their curriculum, further stimulating Jewish life in Poland. Many of the people involved with these endeavors are not even Jewish.

Many members of the American Jewish generation before me refuse to go to Poland – some have endured too many horrific accounts, others refuse to support a country where millions of their people were killed, and still others simply don’t want to travel to a place that evokes death and sadness. I understand these notions; it isn’t easy spending a week walking atop grounds where thousands of my own people’s bodies are buried. Yet walking these paths has allowed me to understand my own feelings about the Holocaust on a deeper level and connect to Judaism in ways I could never have imagined before.

Walking on the dirt road at Auschwitz, where so many innocent Jews marched to their death more than 70 years ago, evoked a sensation in me that cannot be replicated. After saying the Mourner’s Kaddish and listening to poetic words behind the gas chambers and barracks of Birkenau, I felt a wave of tears hit me. The wet sobs were a build-up of five days of emotions, coming to a halt right there on the very soil where my people perished. For a few moments, I stood in front of the barbed wire staring at the rubble that once was a gas chamber, just letting the tears saturate my eyes and my cheeks. And like that, a few minutes later they stopped and I was walking back to the bus. Now I had a new feeling — one of hope.  In those steps, I realized my fortune: My Jewish predecessors didn’t have the opportunity to walk back. I also realized something else: the sun was out. Every other day of our trip had been rainy, cold and damp, but that day, it was sunny and warm; the first signs of spring. To me, the sun came out that Thursday to instill hope, illustrating that with all of the death the Jewish people have had to endure, there is still renewal. Life exists again, even in Poland.

Dr. Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, program director of the Core Exhibition for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw,explaining a point in the permanent exhibition to Seth Browner. Photo credit: Lisa Kassow

I have come to believe that we must look to the past and remember, but when we integrate it into the future, we should do so with optimism. As a member of a new generation and a witness to the changing culture of Jewish life in Poland, I vow to carry on our story for generations to come, and I encourage others to engage with the Jewish past, present and future.

Sophie Katzman is a student at Trinity College. She served as president of Trinity Hillel from January 2013 to January 2014. This article first appeared in “New Voices: News and views of campus Jews” (www.newvoices.org). Photos courtesy Trinity Hillel

Readers are invited to submit original work on a topic of their choosing to Kolot. Submissions should be sent to judiej@jewishledger.com.