לא קלה היא דרכנו

As the bus rolled past farmland and little groves of forest, it dawned upon me how much the countryside looked like Columbus. Then I shivered and shook the thought from my mind. Poland and Ohio could not have anything in common if I was to have any peace when I returned.

We’d been in Poland five days, and had three more to go. Our group of seminary girls, in Israel for a year of post-high school Torah study, had taken advantage of the Heritage program’s pre-Passover Poland tour to both learn about the Holocaust and affirm that we remember.

After only half a day, I wanted nothing less than to return to Israel already. I felt dirtied by Poland. Driving through its pretty landscape I sat glued to the windows of the bus, intrigued by the phantom blood that I saw running alongside the roads. I hadn’t wanted to go. I’d felt that a trip to Poland would merely be outlet for histrionics and somehow unfairly appropriate the Holocaust for myself, using those who died in an emotional game. But my own idiocies couldn’t let me keep from respecting the memories of those who perished there, nor from making the statement to the world that yet another person would never forget, so I found myself on a bus filled with Orot, Migdal Oz, Shaalvot, and MMY girls intent on capturing Poland on their cameras already filled with photos of a happy year spent learning in Israel.

We trundled along from cemetery to concentration camp, abandoned synagogue to derelict ghetto. The mud squelched into the boots we’d bought specially for this trip (who packs boots when they’re going to Israel for the year?) and clung to the Israeli flags dangling damply from our backpacks. Exhausted by a max of three hours of sleep a night and even more by the emotional barrage thrown at us, we marched along in a sort of numbness from horror to horror, subsisting solely on mapah chamahs and the knowledge that at the end of the week we’d be on a flight back to beautiful Israel.

Belzec left me gasping: too much death thrown in my face on a sunny day. Majdanek left me disgusted: it looked like my summer camp, except for the smiling empty gas chambers. Birkenau resembled the University of Maryland with its brick dormitories, a comparison I still try not to make whenever I notice the chimneys on the buildings here. Auschwitz II was too massive: I couldn’t see the end of it from the entrance, nor comprehend its enormity until four days after returning to Israel, when I woke gasping one night in my bed in Elqana, my mind reeling from suddenly being hit with all of Auschwitz.

The cemeteries were friendlier. Many of them pre-war, they marked my ancestors’ remains beneath mossy stones inscribed with the legend “Isha tznuah” –a modest woman. Often I wished that the engravers had left more of a record; besides modesty, who the hell was she? But modesty was all I got. Something that has survived Hitler’s purge to this day.

The eight days I spent in Poland were mostly spent yearning to get back to Israel. Never had I felt so strongly my position as a Diasporic Jew. My most terrifying moment was awakening alone in a grassy cemetery on a small hill where I’d sat down for “just a moment” to regain some energy. I assumed that everyone was at the top of the cemetery, and only upon gaining the crest did I realize that they’d left me behind, and the bus was nowhere in sight. I flew over the Polish potato fields, mentally running over all the Polish words I knew: “jenkuya,” thank you, and “rynik,” marketplace. I cursed myself for not having rented a phone that would work internationally instead of only in Israel. Strangely, the fear that I started to give great gasping sobs for was that I might dehydrate. Obviously I’d spent too much time hiking in the Holy Land.

If I am stuck in Poland… If I am stuck in Poland… Forever. Of course if I could have thought about it rationally I would have foreseen the bus’ return up the hill, the wiry Israeli security guard flying out and shouting “ayfoh hayit, Chanahleh?” as my friends poured out to hug me. But at the moment, I thought I was facing a very real sojourn in Poland for possibly the rest of my life, or at least until I learned enough Polish to tell someone I wanted to go home. To Israel.

Three days later, when the plane touched down in Tel Aviv and its hatch disgorged us onto the hot pavement, I finally did what I’ve wanted to do for years and never dared to, since my first trip to Israel at the age of ten; I knelt down and kissed the tarmac. Home at last.

Before we entered Auschwitz II, walking down the railroad tracks with a sefer Torah in front of us, the wrinkled survivor with us told us “komemiyut. Walk komemiyut.” Upright, he said. Enter the murder-grounds of your ancestors with heads held high. I wanted to shout to him that he was wrong. That’s not the context! It’s from bentching, the prayer after the meal, and the word is slipped in thus: “V’Hu yolichanu komemiyut l’arzaynu” –“He (G-d) will bring us upright to our land.” I walked into Auschwitz painfully erect when all I really wanted was to curl into a fetal position, but I strode into Ben Gurion Airport with my head held high and glad. Komemiyut.

Israel is coming up on its 60th birthday this week. It’s hard to go from the terrible misery of remembering the Holocaust, to joyous celebration of Israel’s birth, and within the same week mourn Israel’s fallen on Yom Hazikaron, the national Day of Remembrance. But it is also fitting. Israel stands a country young in age but old in memory: born out of the ashes of European Jewry it now exists a safe haven of refuge to Jews worldwide. So that if ever Maryland or Ohio begin to resemble Poland in more than appearance, there is somewhere to go.