Dylan Thomas reciting his villanelle 'Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Ni...

Kristallnacht for Holy Cross, 2015

Journal 8: Washington, D.C.

Narrative = Ideology

Journal 7: Jerusalem

Teach what was lost; rescue the individual; connect in interests of students.

Journal 6: On the bus, Poland

Barracks #5 “Material Proof of Crimes”

The road from Kielce to Lodz is the road

from Rochester to Logansport.

Behind a fence a woman on a hot day steps out of her home

in shorts and a bathing suit top to pick up a toy and

rush back in to answer the phone.

A satellite dish on the roof collects what she needs to know

And shoves it through a tube to the front room.

Lodz..pre-war Jewish population of around 180,000…fewer than 900 survived

It’s not so far away..as close as my eyes, my nose, my ears….as real as that

Do we know that this means?

Do we think we know that this means?

Where does this end?

Do we know that this means?

-space-

and

-silence-

Palpable and mute - as a globed fruit - a poem should not mean but be

My heart stops to breathe

Squirming under glass – I have looked through my window – I

have touched the glass

You look through the window at me looking through the window… I touch the glass

Journal 5: Jerusalem

There were heroes everywhere. My students need to know that, even if the proportion of time spent on heroes is not equal to the proportion of heroes, because the recognition of heroes is the recognition of choice. That is easily relatable to students’ own experiences.

Journal 4: Washington, D.C.

In one of our sessions at the museum before we left for Israel, USHMM curator Kyra Schuster told us about a homemade puppet that appears in a grainy black and white film of an American medic entertaining children in a French displaced persons camp. The puppet showed up last year in a box in a basement in Cadillac, Michigan.

One and a half million children were murdered in the Holocaust.

Journal 3: Lublin, Poland

In response to Needville, Texas's Susan Davis inquiry about more than once seeing the same drawing of a stereotypical Jew on an illustration for sale, the Lublin, Poland shop clerk says, “We have here to bring us money.” She adds, "It's the Good Luck Jew."

Journal 2: Bergen-Belsen

“Our fathers and grandfathers were perpetrators…younger generation not to blame, but they do have a great responsibility to acknowledge and to teach.”

Carola Rudnick, German educator at Bergen-Belsen

Bergen-Belsen

Journal 1: Washington, D.C.

Maintaining one's humanity is a form of resistance.

My journal

In an attempt to close this blog, I went into my trip journal this morning.

I thought I might find a few things to share and then be off on my merry way, but it will not work that way. Instead, I'll keep the blog open and share a little bit at a time.

The journal is another form of the video and the verbal posts. There are quotations, observations, narratives, and poems created along the way, but no end in sight.

Waclaw Wojclechowski

Summer Reading

I met Gerda Weissmann Klein when the Kurt and Tessye Simon Fund for Holocaust Remembrance brought her to South Bend in 2006. I am re-reading her Holocaust memoir All But My Life, the summer reading assignment for my incoming four sections of level 3 American Lit. and Composition class.

Gerda is one of six thousand Jews who lived in Bielitz before the war. Only 25,000 Jews live in the entire country today. Over nine percent of Poland was Jewish in 1939. Today, it's less than seven-tenths of one percent.

Because of the trip, I've seen now first hand what a vibrant culture was lost; her home town of Bielitz, now called Bielsko-Biala, is only a few miles from the beautiful city of Krakow where we stayed for three days. From what I can see from some pictures on the internet, Bielsko-Biala looks a lot like Krakow.

The trip will make me better able to teach and to encourage my students to learn for themselves about the Holocaust. "Please remember," said Waclaw, "These were individual people."

Lublin

Berlin

Berlin from here

After flying through the early morning hours from Tel Aviv, we landed in Berlin Sunday, July 11. Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday were full of people to meet and places to go.

Sunday evening, Program Coordinator Stephen Feinberg gave us a quick tour and history lesson of some of the important locales of Nazi operations in central Berlin.

Oddly, on the day we arrived, a huge outdoor tent housing a Berlin fashion show covered the site of the famous book burning of May 1933. We managed to make our way to the memorial to that event, however, a well-lit, starkly white underground bookcase that holds no books.

That event, by the way, was generated not by the Nazi government, but by the German Student Association as a way of attacking what they called, "un-German spirit." They saw it as patriotic, an expression of love and devotion for their nation.

My favorite part of the Pledge of Allegiance we observe at school is the ending, "with liberty and justice for all." For all. The Nazi definition of "nation" did not include "all." Also, the German pledge was to Adolph Hitler as the embodiment of "German-ness" and did not locate the nation "under God." I know the inclusion of "God" in our pledge is controversial, but for me, as a suggestion that the "nation" is subservient to an ideal, and not the other way around, it works.

I've already included video and comments here on the Gruenewald train depot and Wannsee, but I want to add what I can on our visit to Bergen-Belsen, the former Gestapo Headquarters known as the "Topography of Terror," and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

Jerusalem

From home

The window of my room in Jerusalem

From July 7 to July 10 we were in Israel, mostly Jerusalem. The bag that contained my computer arrived on July 9 from Frankfort, via Lufthansa, so I did not exactly hit the ground running on my plan to post video and text to my blog so I could share my experience with you.

Some of the video I am going over only now, and I intend to share segments from Israel, Berlin, and Lublin with you. It's fun to discover some of the things I had already forgotten. One of them is a segment of around 30 seconds recorded through my open hotel window during a long, hot, and un-air conditioned night in Zamosc. It's an outdoor performance of "Let the Sunshine In" from Hair, with a Polish accent.

My final product will be to put all of these segments together into one extended video that I intend to share with my trip mates. It's a labor of love: for my colleagues, guides and directors; for the program; and, of course, for the spirit of the survivors and the memory of the departed.

I turned 57 years old today. Judy is surprising me with dinner at a secret location this evening. My mother's health took a turn for the worse while I was gone; I visited her yesterday and attended an assessment meeting with my sister, Linda, and the staff of the rehabilitation center where she is being treated. Her strength is faltering.

Next week, I will be filling in for Tony Krabill at WVPE, during All Things Considered. The local host of Morning Edition, Michael Linville, and I talked about the trip yesterday and he suggested that some sort of interview might be in order. I will let you know about that.

Jim Messina and I spoke on the phone yesterday. He suggested that a recording of any interview would be a great thing to send along to our colleagues. I agree. I told Jim that I thought briefly Wednesday, while at the grocery store, that I saw Program Director Elaine Culbertson in one of the aisles ahead of me. Then, when I got home, a quick glimpse of our letter carrier fooled me into thinking that our mailman is, in fact, colleague Nick Hart.

I wait for myself to arrive.

Landing

.............I am home.

This post runs the risk of being incoherent. My thoughts are too new to coalesce.

Everything changed for me at Auschwitz.

As Agnes, our guide, told us that, "The hair had value; the Lives had no value," I walked into a room filled to overflowing with protheses ....

"Never- will I forget this night, the first night in the camp, it will remain with me as being the longest night in my life. Never- will I forget the smoke. Never- will I forget the small faces of the children before my eyes, whose bodies rose up like coils of smoke, into the blue heavens. Never- will I forget the flames, that consumed my faith forever. Never- will I forget the silence in the night, that took my lust for life away- for all eternity. Never- will I forget the moment that killed my God, and my soul and my dreams- which took on the face of the depraved. Never- will I forget even if I am sentenced to live as long as God: Never!!“ ~Elie Wiesel

..protheses ....

It has occurred to me that my breakdown happened at the place where we were not allowed to take pictures.

Without thinking my body seized and I bolted from the room...no, I can not look at that. My brain became my shield...like the impulse that grabs my arm when my finger touches the stove.

The image I ran from, however, is the image that I will never forget. I had a picture. No camera needed.

The hair had value, the people did not.

Protheses.

I had my picture.

My brain told my body that I had to leave. I snapped a picture.

My video project had had the effect of separating me from the direct experience.At Auschwitz I was not afforded that luxury. It's ironic because I generally don't take pictures much. On this trip I was constantly looking at our experience through the shield of a camera. Until someone told me I couldn't do that here.

Hair had value...lives did not. A room filled to overflowing with protheses.

That's where I was. That's what I shared with my colleagues and with my guides: Elaine Culbertson, Stephen Feinberg, Margret Atkinson, Armando Banchs, Mary Ann Bolinger, Linda Christensen, Susan Davis, Erin DeHart, Rebecca Elmore, Nick Hart, Brian Hurd, Laron Johnson, Rosa Lamb, Debra Maller-Natoli, Carrie McCarthy, Megan McCuiston, James Messina, Stephanie Murdock, LaVonne Napier, Cassie Nodine, Mitch Polay, Lynn Ringle, Brad Sims, Teresa Starkey, Maribel Villalva, Brian Woodward, and Waclaw Wojciechowski.

Now I am home.