MARCH OF THE LIVING JOURNAL
Wednesday, April 6, 1994 - Grand Hotel, Warsaw
Today I met up with the N.Y. contingent of the March. We (i.e., the four of us who had come directly from Israel, the cameraman, and his wife) drove around for nearly two hours trying to find the NY group. We finally met them at the "Arrivals" gate at the airport. After catching up with school friends on Pesach, college acceptances, etc. we finally settled in for the bus ride ahead. I sat next to a kid named Ryan from Mamaroneck High School, who seems like a really nice guy. Most of the other people I've met are also very friendly. Our bus consists of about 20 Ramaz kids, and another 20 from several public schools. It's interesting having these kids on our bus as opposed to the usual Yeshiva scene. Our bus leader's name is Rabbi Tom Weiner, and he also seems like a great guy.
The NY/BJE group is eight busses big, about 300 kids. On our bus, number 551, is where we find ourselves most of the time. Today, all eight busses traveled together. Our first stop was Tykochin, a small shtet'l outside of Warsaw. There, we went to the synagogue which had been partially destroyed. Looking at the art which was all over the shul, now a museum run by the government, you could really feel that there had once been a strong Jewish community there, which, like so many other towns, was completely destroyed.
From the shul, we walked to the Jewish cemetery. What had once been a large, nice-looking burial ground for the Jewish community now looked like a cornfield. The few tombstones that were still in place were cracked and badly rotted. We spent a while just standing outside in the pouring rain, looking at all that was around us. This place was the result of neglect, on several sides.
After that, we went into the forest at Tykochin, where Jews were marched to and shot, left to die in mass graves. Three large areas were fenced off, and there was a monument in front. The sites were known only because a small child miraculously survived the executions and lived to tell of what happened there. There, some brief words were said, and then Tehillim and Kaddish were recited.
From there, we went to Treblinka. Treblinka was a death camp primarily for the 300,000 Jews of Warsaw. Now, nothing is left of the camp. Concrete blocks meant to simulate railroad ties stretched along the border of the camp. In the center, a large stone monument stands, engraved on three sides with skeletal figures and on the fourth with a menorah. All around this are some 17,000 stones, for all of the villages in Poland that were destroyed in the Shoah. Some actually had names of villages written on them, but most were just sharp rocks sticking out of the ground. Without even beginning to consider the number of human beings killed in the Holocaust, even the number of entire villages that were destroyed is staggering.
At Treblinka, like everywhere else today, the weather was miserable.
The sky was overcast, and it was cold outside, and it rained all
day. The weather made the bus trips seem longer, the sites more
gloomy, and generally made everything a lot more depressing, which
I guess was appropriate. After walking around for a while at Treblinka
(when we came, an Israeli group was in the middle of ceremony),
we gathered around the monument where microphones were set up,
and we had a short ceremony. Finally we headed back to the hotel
(Grand Hotel), where we arrived at about 10 PM. We went in for
dinner and afterwards went up to the rooms, talked, etc.
continue...
