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Witnessing the Camps
Corey Eisenson

Standing on the grounds on Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and Majdanek all felt different, and all were different.

Auschwitz-Birkenau showed me the mass scale of hate towards those Jews and others who were not the “pure German race”.

Treblinka showed me the coverup of murders committed by the Nazis, and showed how hate erased the flourishing lives of others.

Majdanek showed me how the conditions were targeted to be horrid because of hate.

Each camp was very different, but they all encompassed the pure idea of hatred.

On our final night, during dinner, we challenged ourselves to brainstorm how we will educate others on the Holocaust and the dangers of hate, making sure the lessons learned from the Holocaust will never be forgotten. Our current conclusion was to create a presentation and educate those who are our age, teenagers. But this is a small-scale idea, and does not target the main issue, hate. I believe progressively teaching individuals to look for positivity in others by exposing them to multitudes of different cultures, can work to stop hate towards anyone. Ultimately finding a true solution to stop hate is a hard way to look at it, so there is a mindset I gathered from witnessing the camps. Which is, there will always be people who deny the Holocaust, there will always be people who continue to hate, but there will always be more people willing to learn.

Reflections on Walking the Path of My Jewish Heritage 
Roger Snyder

How do you reflect on walking the same path that your family once walked to their death?

My entire life, I could hear my father say, “Your family never made it out of Poland. It could happen again. Don’t fool yourself.”

At 17, my father joined the Navy during World War II to fight the Nazis. He never finished high school, yet he devoted himself to learning about the Holocaust. He urged us, his children, to read and learn about it as well. “You need to know,” he would say.

Reflecting on my recent trip to Poland with my son Leo and led by Tamara Donnenfeld, I realized that I had not truly taken my father’s words seriously. If I had read and listened to everything I could, it still would have paled in comparison to the experience of being there. There is a stark difference between reading about history, watching films, and immersing yourself in it, standing on the very ground where it unfolded, and hearing the intimate stories of horror.

I learned about unimaginable atrocities, like the commandant of the Majdanek death camp using the warmth of the crematorium to heat his bathtub in the winter and his wife selecting Jews by skin tone for more unimaginable atrocities. I saw the massive scale of murder—not just of Jews, but also of Roma, Russians, and Poles—people targeted purely for what they were born into and not who they were.

Yet, amidst the horror, I also learned of profound bravery: those who refused to go quietly, who sacrificed their lives to save others, and whose descendants, “all of us,” carry their legacy forward. They fought in the street, the sewers, forest and even the cemeteries, refusing to go quietly.

As a Jew, I now feel an even stronger obligation to say to the world: You tried to destroy us before, and you failed. We are still here, and we will always be here.

The events of today remind us that my father was right. History can repeat itself. We must not rely solely on classroom intellect to combat hatred. We must see, feel and sometimes become a part of it. We must fight with our intellect, our hearts, and, when necessary, our fists.

This journey has been transformative. For 65 years, I thought I understood what it meant to be a Jew. But now, I know.

I urge you to take this trip with your family. You will be transformed.

What moment of site from the trip impacted you the most? How has it changed the way you see yourself, your community, or the world?
Marc Eisenson

The moment that impacted me the most on this trip, was our final stop as we toured Majdanek. As we gathered together, knowing that this would be our last site to see of indignity and horror, as the last story was read aloud, as the realization that the world would never be the same, now that we had this complete story shown to us, I looked around and witnessed love.

I saw fathers and sons and hugging, I saw mothers and sons holding hands, I saw my own tears which I desperately tried to hold back, and I felt my son lean into me and embrace me because it is ok.

No matter what the horrors were 80+ years ago, they could not eliminate us all. They could not take our spirit, and most of all, they could not take our love for one another.