By Amanda Kornblum
“How was the AMIT trip to Poland?” I have been asked this question many times since I returned a few days ago. Each time, before answering, I have an instant flashback of some moment that affected me in a way I don’t think I’ll ever forget—a moment that is difficult to find the words to describe. And I find I can answer in a positive way or a negative way.
I can say Poland was horrible. Nothing is good about Poland! It’s all death camps and ghettos where Jews were murdered and completely eliminated: Auschwitz, Chemlo, Maidanek, Treblinka, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, the list goes on. And there is the Children’s Forest, a horrific place where thousands of innocent Jewish children were brought to be slaughtered. How would you think Poland was?
Then there’s the positive answer. I can answer “it was amazing!” and hope that people won’t get the wrong idea. I could answer, “It was great” or “it was a meaningful experience.”
And it’s true. Poland, for me, was a meaningful and great experience. We had the opportunity to see where Jewish life once thrived. We went to numerous beautiful synagogues where hundreds of people davened every day. We saw talits (prayer shawls) from Jews that were killed in Auschwitz. We heard stories about Jews who would wash their hands before walking into the gas chamber, and about Jews who recited Shema while holding their loved ones as they were systematically murdered. They still turned to Hashem in the worst possible times.
My mission—self-imposed—throughout my journey through Poland was to find positivity in something so negative, so tragic, so mind-bogglingly unspeakable: something positive in the places where evil human beings had the power and willingness to kill six million of their fellows in truly psychotic ways.
Six million people that didn’t have the lifetimes to perform mitzvot, have bar or bat mitzvahs, get married, have children.
“How was the AMIT trip to Poland?”
So easy, so tempting to respond in the negative; I found I had to stress the positive.
Yes, the Holocaust was horrible beyond description. But we can think about the six million people that valued their Judaism. And the fact that we’re still standing—we’re still here. We have our own nation. We have a land to call our own. The Jewish people are thriving.
So if the six million who perished knew that the Jews would live on, what would they have wanted? They would have wanted us to continue doing mitzvot and chesed, and to live the lives they were unable to have.
What the girls at Midreshet AMIT are doing this year is unselfish. We are putting college on hold to spend a year learning and performing chesed in Israel. It’s so fulfilling—we are living the dreams of so many people. We are choosing a positive route.
May the mitzvot we perform to be worthy of the six million, in order to lift their neshamot.
