My Children's Journey

Sunday night at 1:30 am we delivered our two girls to the departure point for their class trip to Poland, an educational journey now de rigeur for Israeli high school students. I must admit I have mixed feelings about this trip, beginning with the cost. For many Israeli families $1100.00 is simply out of reach, and although scholarships are available this trip is clearly not an equal opportunity educational experience.


My kids were excited, but mostly about going abroad with their friends. I suppose it's a bit unrealistic to hope they'd be looking forward to the powerful emotional experience that awaits them and the deepening of their committment to the Jewish people that will surely follow. They're teenagers, after all. What most concerns them is how many outfits they can cram into the suitcase and still make the weight limit, or who gets to wear the penguin hat.


We were asked not to send the kids with more than $150 spending money each. Beats me why they need so much cash - what is there to buy in that gray, ecomically emerging country that we don't have here in Israel? And anyway, this is not a shopping trip. I can't stomach the idea of buying souvenirs from a place where memorials and death camps are the only mementos of Jewish existence.


The kids were well prepared by the educational team running the trip; they had seminars and special classes throughout the weeks preceding the departure. However, Benny and I decided to supplement their preparation with an assignment of our own. We asked our girls to interview their grandfather, who was born in Poland and lived through the Holocaust. We asked them to prepare a list of questions that would familiarize them with his personal story, since he has never actually spoken to them about his experiences. He shared happily and lovingly.

They learned he had six brothers and sisters and that he became an athiest at age twelve; that when the war broke out the extended family of twenty souls lived together in one apartment in the ghetto and most of them were rounded up and sent to the gas chambers at Treblinka. They learned that the Nazis killed his eleven-year-old brother before his eyes for stealing potatoes, and that he took his shoes before burying him, even thought they were too small. They learned that he managed to jump from a cattlecar with his one surviving brother to spend the rest of the war hiding in the forests.

Benny's persona has been deeply influenced by his father's experiences. He has little desire to seek out the landscapes of his father's childhood, but the approach of the girls' trip brought up a wellspring of emotions. He expressed his conflicted feelings beautifully in a letter the parents were asked to write, to be delivered to the kids midway through the trip.

"You are on your way to a journey that I, your father, have taken in a different form," he began. He spoke about growing up without any grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins from his father's side; about his parents' reluctance to allow him to serve in the army; about his father's experiences as the source of his Zionism.
"Your feet are treading on ground soaked with the blood of dozens of members of your family and three million of your people. It's hard to imagine the depth of evil that can turn people into monsters. It's difficult to find the strength and desire to live and love and build after you've been to hell. I hope this journey will help you understand from where you've come and to where you will return."

Teenagers are very emotional creatures. The magnitude of what they will encounter in Poland will surely affect them deeply. Hopefully they will return home with a new awareness of their identity as Jews, as Israelis and as human beings.