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Poland Wrap Up

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Hands-on Albion experience! Jim, Mickey, Rebecca, me, Anthony, Mary Ryneck of Wroclaw I wanted to do an overall wrap-up post of the trip and am finally getting around to it. We had a long day of traveling to get back to the US. I was able to do some lovely math homework before we boarded each plane and then did lots of sleeping and reading while on the flight.  Our group on the last day at the cemetery  (with the groundskeeper) Book Chairs outside of a mall in Krakow This trip was an amazing experience. The topic of the trip was difficult, but each and everything we did was rewarding and had a purpose. We spent days laboring in the cemetery, doing as much as we could in the little time we had to work there. We went on half a dozen tours to really explore the places we were visiting and learned so much about Jewish history in Poland. We were able to attend a community Shabbat service which was really really fun. We went to museums to learn about the his
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Poland Day 11

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One section of the Warsaw Ghetto Wall Today was our last day in Poland! We had a tour of Warsaw in the morning and a meeting with Warsaw Hillel, then we were free for the rest of our afternoon. Our walking tour was very interesting. We saw the last remaining pieces of the ghetto wall, buildings that survived the war, and many monuments dedicated to the people who perished throughout the war. Our guide told us that the ghetto was actually divided into a smaller section and a larger section and they were separated by a single street. The two parts were eventually connected by a bridge that went over the street. This tour was a really great way to learn about the history of Warsaw and see a lot of the city in a relatively short amount of time. After our 3 hour tour, we met with a person from Warsaw Hillel and she talked to us a little bit about what they do. One way that their services differ from in the US is that they get a lot of cases of adults coming in having been told that thei
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Poland Day 10

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Monument for Janusz Korczak We got to sleep in today! We left at 9:45 to walk a few miles to the museum that we would be visiting today, the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews. On our walk there, we passed a memorial dedicated to Janusz Korczak (Dr. Henryk Goldszmit) who was the director of an orphanage in Warsaw. When the Second World War broke out, Korczak stayed with his children rather than fleeing to another country. When his orphanage was forced to relocate to the Warsaw Ghetto, he went with his children. He stayed with his children until they were all forced to be sent to Treblinka, an extermination camp. He was witnessed walking through the town with all of his children, some as young as two or three years old, each carrying one toy to bring with them on their journey. He chose to stay with his children all the way until they were sent to their death at Treblinka. This story was told by one of our faculty members and it was very hard to hear. It was extremely courag
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Poland Day 9

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The entrance to the Muzeum Narodowe We reached our final destination! The first half of our day was spent traveling from Krakow to Warsaw. During the last 45 minutes of the drive, I started paying attention to the scenery around me. The buildings weren't very big and there were a lot of industrial businesses and a few companies that had Chinese as the primary or secondary language. That caught my eye because for the past week or so I have really only seen Polish, English, and occasionally German. I also noticed a large use of solar panels which is awesome! When we arrived in the city the traffic picked up a lot, there were many more tall office buildings and a huge shopping mall. After arriving at the hotel with one wrong hotel in our recent past, we waited for our rooms to be ready. While we waited, we were given a map and I spent the time figuring out where our hotel was and where the places I wanted to go to were. The transit map was very vague, so it was difficult to figure
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Poland Day 8

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Today we visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. I wasn't sure how to quite prepare for such an experience, and after being there, I don't think there was a way to. When we drove up to the entrance, it didn't feel like we were driving up to the largest concentration camp of the Nazis. There were food stands and gift shops advertising postcards and posters. There were a dozen and a half or so charter and tour buses parked and huge groups of people in line to take the tour. I'm not sure what I was expecting to see, but I didn't expect it to be as commercialized as it was. It is difficult for me to respond to a place that has that dark of history, and looking back on while I was there, I wasn't thinking much during the tour. The entire time I was there felt surreal. I did not take many pictures because I wanted to be in the moment absorbing the information, rather than taking pictures of everything. Throughout my visit, it was very hard for me to comprehend that there were ove
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Poland Day 7

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We had a very busy day with lots of walking. We had a 7-hour (primarily walking) tour. We went to Plaszow, Schindler's Factory, the Jewish quarter, a cemetery/Synagogue, and finally Wawel Castle. In total today, I walked 7.5 miles all around Krakow so you could say my legs are pretty tired and my feet a little swollen. A memorial for all of the unmarked people who were murdered here from 1942-1945 The guide we had for our 7-hour tour was very knowledgeable about Jewish history in Krakow and Poland and I think a lot of our group learned something new, whether it was something they already knew, but learned the meaning behind it, or simply something they had never been taught. For example, I knew about the tradition to place stones on the gravestone of someone who has passed, but I didn't know where it originated, or the reason for why flowers are never seen in Jewish cemeteries. I had a lot of different feelings at the Plaszow Concentration Camp. The number of prisoners,
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Poland Day 6

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Ryneck of Krakow We left for Krakow today at 8:30 in the morning, and after a three-hour drive, arrived at our hotel. As we were told, Krakow is very different from Wroclaw. The city itself is not only bigger but much more urban and has a much higher population. The traffic didn't flow as efficiently and there were fewer people walking in the outer parts of the main square. There is still a lot of public transportation, though I am not sure how it is compared to Wroclaw. Since today was used as a travel day, we had most of the afternoon to ourselves. After checking into the hotel, we got ready to walk to the main square. The walk was a lot longer than in Wroclaw, roughly a 30 to 35-minute walk to the heart of the square. We stopped at the Jewish District to see where we would be meeting up for our group dinner. The faculty person that walked with us there told us that Krakow was largely undamaged by the war, so most of its buildings and the Jewish District are original, but i
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