As people asked me if I was ready for the trip I would say that I would start preparing mentally after the High Holy Days that ended a few weeks ago. The truth is I have been preparing for this trip since the day I began planning it. It is all thanks to one little girl, Sophia van Hasselt, a name chosen for Carly to share her bat mitzvah with, a girl who's life was cut short at the hands of the Nazis. Learning that Sophia breathed her last breath at Auschwitz really solidified my decision to include Auschwitz as a part of this trip. I am grateful that there were people who were willing to walk these steps with me.
When I was in middle school I remember going to my locker between classes and finding that someone had stuffed a yellow flyer in it. I opened up the flyer and read what it said, something to the effect that the Holocaust was a hoax, invented by the Jews in order to collect on insurance claims. I had never seen a flyer like this before and wasn't quite sure what to make of it. I looked on either side of me and saw other kids reading the same yello piece of paper. Most just tossed them into the trash, but for some reason I brought mine home and shared it with my parents. I remember my parents calling my rabbi, John Sherwood, of blessed memory, and me meeting with him in his office. As he looked at the yellow paper I saw something I had never seen from my rabbi before. He was crying, and then began my first deep lesson about the darkness of the Holocaust. He brought our book after book and laid them on his table, showing me picture after picture and saying "Look at these pictures and you tell me this was a hoax." He shared with me how he had visited a camp and witnessed with his own eyes what had happened. I think this was the first moment I knew that one day, at some point in my life I would have to walk these difficult steps and see a camp for myself. It is hard to believe that I am only a couple of days away from walking into the unknown.
What I have realized as I float in the air through the dark night towards this next phase of my life's pilgrimage is that all of the reading, all of the preparing I have been doing for this trip was not about walking into Auschwitz. How can you truly prepare to see such darkness? You can't. What I have been preparing for is how I will walk away from Auschwitz. And how that walking away will change my perspective on everything.
After my day of flying I landed in Warsaw and took my first steps in Poland. It is cold and rainy here, a very big change from the sunshine in Thousand Oaks. I guess I kind of expect it to be cold, dark and rainy here, given the dark history I will be interacting with. I was very excited to get to the hotel to meet up with Daron, my brother in law who is here with me for the next few days as we tour Poland together. He and I have been planning see next few days for a long time. We will tour Warsaw tomorrow and make our way to Lublin tomorrow afternoon in order that we can spend a lot of time at the concentration camp Majdanek. You will undoubtedly hear much more about this in
Tuesday's blog entry. Tonight we braved the cold and the rain to walk to a local restaurant. As we were walking we saw that there was a glott kosher restaurant on the second floor of a building down the block from our hotel. We went upstairs and were greeted by the rabbi who was in charge of the kosher restaurant.
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