As you know, last week we took a five day trip to Poland to visit sites relating to the Holocaust. We saw lots of terrible things that had to do with death, like the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek, and also more lively things, like synagogues in the Jewish quarter in Krakow. There were a lot of programs building up to our trip, and during one of them David Solomon told us he thinks it is a journey that every Jew should make in their lifetime. So, going into the trip, I knew it was going to be very meaningful and have a significant effect on me, but I didn't realize exactly how much it would change the way I view the Holocaust. The things I learned there made me realize the importance resistance in all forms, as well as how evil the Nazis were.
One of the things that always baffled me about the Holocaust is that it seemed to me like the Jews always just went with it. I never understood why even at the last moment of life, when there was no hope left, people would still cooperate with the Nazis, making their hideous task easier. I always thought any last act of defiance, despite the certainty of death in the process, would be better than going "like sheep to the slaughter." It made me angry that nobody ever stood up to the Nazis. While in Poland, I learned that there were a lot more acts of resistance than I thought. The most notable is perhaps the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in which a group of young Jews wielding handguns were able to hold off the Nazi army for four whole weeks. I was so happy to find out there actually were people who weren't willing to let the Nazis take them without trying to do anything about it. They showed that we are not a weak people, that we will fight back. In addition to this, we talked about less violent forms of resistance. I was introduced to the idea that just living a Jewish life is an act of resistance. The Nazis did everything they could to de-humanize the Jews, so having an orchestra and a school inside of the ghetto was resisting, by showing that they refused to become anything less than human.
I have always known the Nazis were truly evil. Their disregard for human life cannot be explained by anything else. But while in Poland, it really set in how wicked they were. I had never learned much about the Holocaust before, so I always wondered how it could have happened. It never made sense to me how an entire nation of people was willing to support someone whose plan involved murdering an entire race of people they live right alongside. We learned about Nazi propaganda, and how they de-humanized the Jews. Hitler was able to convince the German people that Jews were not real people. To them, they were animals, mere scum. They were brainwashed into thinking the Jews were parasites, hell-bent on destroying their society. Because of this, the Jews were treated like they were less than animals. They didn't deserve to live. Before going to Poland, I had never learned much about the ghettos Jews were forced to live in. We watched a movie called The Pianist about life in the Warsaw Ghetto. I was completely horrified at the things that soldiers did to other humans, and the conditions they were forced to live in. They were expected to survive on a diet of fewer than two hundred calories per day. It would not be out of the ordinary for me to eat a two hundred calorie candy bar, and still be ready to eat a full meal. Sometimes the guards would feed their dogs meat, and give the Jewish prisoners the bones to gnaw on. While the guards were told the Jews weren't human, they had to know the truth. They interacted with them every day. They saw their human emotions, desires, and feelings. And yet they still continued to shoot them as they walked past, for sport. I cannot fathom how any person could do such things to another. I am convinced that while the Nazis may have succeeded as making people view Jews as less than human, the Nazis themselves were even beneath that.
Poland was an incredible trip that I recommend every Jew to make. I have a much better understanding of the things that happened in the Shoah, and it's all real now, rather than being something I just learn about. Poland taught me that resistance is so vitally important, and that the Nazis were even worse than I could have imagined, among so many other things.