ETA: One week

This is blog #1 for what I expect to be an experience of a lifetime. I am one of 26 teachers in the U.S. chosen to participate in the Holocaust Teacher's program.

The trip will begin on July 4 in Washington, D.C. I'll have a cool opportunity to see the "Capitol Fourth" in DC, including an orchestral concert with special guests, and fireworks.

The program itself begins July 5. We will all then meet and have some orientation meetings. The next day, we board an Airbus for Jerusalem, via Frankfurt and Tel Aviv. I am SO excited about visiting the Holy Land. What an experience to walk in the footsteps of my Savior! We will also be meeting with world-renowned scholars (as throughout the trip) at Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to the murdered Jews of the Holocaust. We will also see the grave of Oskar Schindler (from Schinder's List), who is the only member of the Nazi party to be recognized as Righteous by the Jews. Our last day in Israel, we will go to Masada, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, and take a dip in the Red Sea.

We then head to Germany, to visit, as Indiana Jones put it, the Lion's Den of WWII. We will visit the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, as well as the Gestapo Headquarters.

Our third, and longest, destination is Poland. There we will visit several Concentration/Death camps, such as Treblinka, Dachau, and Auschwitz.

The program was begun by the amazing Vladka Meed, a survivor of the Holocaust. Mrs. Meed, a Jew, was imprisoned in the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto. She later escaped the ghetto and had some freedom outside of it, as she was Aryan in appearance. She then participated in smuggling weapons, food, and money to Jews, and helping them escape and survive. Her entire family was deported to Treblinka when she was a teenager. After three decades, Vladka returned to Poland- where she found only a few memorials to her people- as if they had been forgotten. She committed to never allow these horrors to be forgotten, and began the Teachers' program.

It is my plan to update you as I go through this experience. I hope you will join me in spirit as we remember those who lost their lives (Jews, blacks, homosexuals, Bohemians, disabled people, soldiers) and purpose to never let it happen it again.