Reflecting On Our Trip

Railroad Tracks in Birkenau

I returned from Poland last night and reflecting on the past week is hard to put into words. We were exposed to so many facts, numbers and experiences of the Shoah and to try and formulate and understand in a matter of eight days is almost impossible. Listening to the students that attended the trip last year, I expected to feel a lot more emotional than I did. I was waiting for the big moment when I felt everything that I was experiencing finally come together. I never had that moment on this trip. I believe that maybe one day I will have that moment when I reminisce on my trip, maybe one day it will all come together. However, I am okay with not having that moment. I understand that the trip was very heavy and I am still trying to piece together everything that we learned. I kept trying to put myself in the shoes of the victims of the Shoah and think about how I would have felt during that horrible time. The most important thing I felt during my trip was that the Shoah was horrible and we should mourn the loss of the victims, however, our focus is to never let anything like this happen again. We should not allow history to repeat itself. Keeping that idea in mind, I was able to detach myself from the history and focus on the future.

This past week allows me to reflect on what we have learned in class. I made many connections in my head with the different lectures we have had, writings we have read and videos we have watched. One particular connection I made was with the readings from John Chrysostom’s “Against the Jews”, Homily 1. Chrysostom argues that “I am afraid that, because of their ill-suited association and deep ignorance, some Christians may partake in the Jews’ transgressions; once they have done so, I fear my homilies on these transgressions will be in vain” (Chrysostom, “Against the Jews”, p. 5). The fact that a single person believes that the Jews are awful and their religion is degenerate is sickening. This proves that the targeting of the Jews did not begin with the Shoah. The history of hating Jews begins far back and has not come to a definite end.

Chrysostom’s Homily really hit me when I was thinking about it on our first day in Poland. We visited a Jewish cemetery that had been destroyed previously by Nazis. The defacing of this Jewish property is disgusting and horrifying. To think that people could dishonor the dead by destroying their tombstones is repulsive and unbelievable. We walked around the cemetery and Sister Mary, our guide, told us that the tombstones may not be in the right place because when they were being put back into place, they did not know where the actual bodies lied. It was sad to see a place that people come to mourn for their loved ones, destroyed by the Nazis because of the religion.

Reflecting on this past week gives me a new perspective on the Shoah. Although I did not become emotional during the trip, I was able to take everything in that I was experiencing and appreciate the opportunity I had to travel to Poland and witness firsthand the place that held so much death and destruction. Although most of us learn about the Shoah in school, nothing compares to walking on the very ground that victims of the Shoah walked on over 70 years ago. From here on out, my hatred for the Shoah is even stronger, but my focus is to never let anything like this happen again. I will not let the hate overpower the love.