The Last Day in Poland

Well, here we are, the last day in Europe and in Poland.

I remember when I was first seleted for the trip it seemed like years away, and now, it is almost behind me. On the other hand, it feels like we've been gone for years.

The last few days have been mostly traveling and making our way back to Warsaw for our flight home. We were in Lodz (pronounced "Woodge", interestingly enough), which is sort of comparable to Detroit- very factory-oriented. They did have quite a large mall I very much enjoyed, and it just happened to be directly behind our hotel. Convenient, eh?

It is striking how few Jews are left in Poland. Of course, we've all read about how the Jewish population in Poland dwindled after the war, but truly, there are just a handful of them in these cities. The population is barely enough to sustain an active synagogue.

We also stopped in a smaller town, the location of the first Jewish ghetto, and the location of a horrible porgram. If you are unfamiliar with the term, it is a mass act of violence on a group of people. Thus, Jews lucky enough to survive the Holocaust came back to their towns, and then many of those were beaten to death. The Poles or new residents felt threatened these Jews might "want their stuff back" (which the new residents had stolen)- their houses, their belongings, their land, etc. How horrible to have survived such a terrible situation and then be put into another one at home!

Today, we visited Treblinka. Before much studying on the Holocaust, I assumed concentration camps were pretty much all the same. However, some of them were, in fact, "death camps" or "extermination camps". As I described in a previous post, victims did not live in these camps- they were sent there to be killed. A handful of Jews were kept only to deal with all the bodies. Again, when the Nazis knew they were in trouble, they hastened to clean up their tracks. They demolished the death camp, and then had it plowed, to make it look like a farm!

Tomorrow, we will have the pleasure of sitting on another plane (please let our luggage get there WITH us..) for 10 hours or so, and then arrive in Washington, D.C. We will have more meetings Sunday and Monday, and I'll be headed home Monday. I'm sure I will blog once or twice more, if nothing else, as a follow-up.

Thanks for reading, all.