By Lilli Silverston, NFTY in Israel Participant, Bus 5
Hi! My name is Lilli Silverston, and I have been going to URJ Eisner Camp for 6 summers. I live Brookline, MA, and I am a sophomore at Brookline High School. I enjoy playing tennis, and I love to try new foods from around the world. This summer I am traveling with my Eisner friends on Bus 5.
Last week we traveled to the Czech Republic and Poland, to mark the beginning of our journey through the history of the Jewish people. To be completely honest, it was a hard week. It was tiring and emotionally draining. We focused on the migration of Jewish people before the Holocaust. We then learned about the concentration of Jews during the Holocaust by visiting various ghettos throughout Eastern Europe. We followed in their footsteps, continuing on to Terezin, a concentration camp. From there we left for Poland, to visit the Auschwitz camps. We went to Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was primarily a death camp, but also included a section that served as a concentration camp. We then traveled to Auschwitz I, which was primarily a concentration camp. Below, I write about my experience at the camps.
My expectations of visiting the camps were very different than how it actually went down. I expected to be very emotional, with tears streaming down my eyes throughout the entire experience. However, I went numb. My face was blank as I walked through the paths leading to torn apart gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I felt emotionless, just in shock at what I saw. I felt like I had a duty to make sure this would never happen again. I was in disgust at how much effort the Nazi’s put into killing Jews. The trickery and deceit into getting the Jewish people to believe that they were in for a better life at these camps. One story hit me really hard, the story of a father whose wife and child were being taken away from him towards their death. The fact that he would never see them again, and that there was such a fine line between life and death. The pointing of a finger one way, you live, the other way, you die. This brought tears to my eyes, families separated and brought to their death within seconds. What an awful, awful thing. I realize how lucky I was to be able to walk out of those gates, for all of the lives that were taken by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Especially for my ancestors, and all others that were killed during the Shoah. This cannot happen again, and it is up to my generation to make sure it doesn’t.
