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During a weeklong tour of the sites of former concentration camps, the Warsaw ghetto and Vilna, Lithuania, the 19 students who made the Prozdor school trip to Eastern Europe in April set out from their hotel each morning draped in Israeli flags. "It was a proud show of Jewish identity," says Prozdor Director Margie Berkowitz. "It was our way of saying 'we are here to bear witness.'" But the attention they drew could be disconcerting, too. At the Auschwitz museum, as they stood in tears before a wall display of tallitot that had been taken from the camp's prisoners, the group was startled by a flash of camera lights—and the discovery that other tourists were taking photographs of them. "Suddenly we had this odd sensation that we weren't just looking at the exhibit, but were also part of it," says Berkowitz. They found the incident painful, but discussed it and processed it in a way that was ultimately empowering, she recalls. "It was a defining moment of the trip." Spending most of their time in Poland, the group, which included students from grades 9–12 and four adults, also visited the camps at Birkenau, Treblinka and Majdanek, the cities of Bialystok and Krakow, and the trenches in the Rudniki forest, where the partisan fighters hid during the war. In Lithuania, they accompanied Dr. Michael Libenson P'53, HC'58, former director of Prozdor, and his daughter Laurie Libenson Yablon P'81, to see the shtetl where Libenson's mother once lived, and they celebrated Shabbat with the local community in Vilna (known today as Vilnius). Throughout the week, scholar in residence Elana Heideman served as tour leader and educational guide. A Prozdor instructor and PhD candidate in Holocaust Studies at Boston University with Elie Wiesel, Heideman also designed and organized the trip. On their last evening together in Europe, the group created a seder centered around their journey, in which everyone marked the occasion with a personal memento, bringing stones from the grounds of the concentration camps, books and photos. But the experience they shared was "beyond words or pictures," says Rebecca Parad P'04, who values the deep bond that formed among trip participants, as well as her newly sparked interest in exploring Judaism on a religious level. "So much of it was emotionally felt." |
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