Gathering Stories
Kate Dietrick, a member of Harry Kay Leadership Institute’s Cohort 11, reflects on her experience in Poland.
This morning an informal poll of my fellow travel mates echoed my own sentiments: this was the day we were all the most anxious about. Confronting Auschwitz and Birkenau. Day two of our Harry Kay Leadership trip and already I’m overwhelmed with emotions and thoughts, the Notes on my phone bursting with slivers of quotes, stories, and musings on feelings.
The morning dawned sunny and warm, a beautiful spring day in Krakow. There was a cognitive dissonance between the horror of where we were headed and the gorgeous weather, much remarked upon by our guide Benzi who admitted we mostly think of grey and bleak when we think of Auschwitz. Yet I found the weather a good reminder that ugly things can happen in beautiful places too. We started off at Auschwitz before heading to Birkenau after lunch, both places different and striking in different ways. I do not know how to convey all that we saw and experienced, and I’m told I don’t have to write about everything, but rather should focus on the things that struck me the most.
And so I will speak of forests and hair.
Humans have a hard time grappling with large numbers — how do we fully understand a number like 6 million? The larger the number the harder it is to wrap our minds around it. So despite the statistics peppered throughout the museum placards in Auschwitz, the spaces that I found the most striking were simply the piles. Piles of shoes, pots, eyeglasses, suitcases, all to illustrate the large numbers of people who passed through these spaces and met their deaths at the hands of people who failed to see their humanity.
But as I stared at the piles and piles of hair, stolen forcefully from Jewish men and women, I was overwhelmed with emotion. Our guide Benzi shared stories from female survivors who spoke about their biggest shock being losing their hair; they said they did not feel like women anymore. The markers of femininity many societies store in women’s hair, coupled with the humanity that hair illustrates, made for a powerful symbol behind the plexiglass.
It was an emotion I unfortunately knew well, as a stage four breast cancer thriver. Chemotherapy stole my hair, and with it my sense of self in a way that is indescribable to those who have not experienced it. I understood. Here was a very small, seemingly insignificant way I was understanding this experience, tears welling as I looked at piles of human hair. It helped me understand the weight, and some of the scale, of what happened in this place. My own story connected with what we were witnessing.
Towards the end of our tour we went into a building that had an exhibit installed from Yad Vashem. As we were leaving we hoped to look in the last room with the large pages of victim’s names, but were told to wait — they were filming some sort of documentary, and a survivor was looking through the names. To our surprise, on the spot, the survivor ever so kindly sat down with us to speak of her experience surviving the Holocaust. We learned her name, Sara Weinstein, and she survived by hiding in the forest for three years, starting when she was six years old.
Once again I couldn’t stop the tears from falling, thinking of Sara as a child hiding in the forest. The day we left for Poland was my niece’s sixth birthday, and imaging her hiding in the forest was too much for me. How can one survive such an experience? Yet here Sara was, gracious with her story, sharing it with us strangers.
All during her testimony she was speaking in Hebrew, translated into English by our guide. When she told us that she lived in Rehovot, a collective gasp of excitement rippled through the room as we explained to her that we were from Minneapolis, the Partnership2Gether partner with Rehovot. The fates that brought us together with Sara today made the experience all the more powerful.
As leaders in the Jewish community, I understood that today’s goal was gathering stories. To bear witness, to hear testimony, to learn about parallels in our own lives, and bring these stories and wisdom back to our communities.
These are just two of the stories I gathered. Ask any of the other participants and they undoubtedly have different ones. We will return to Minnesota with a bundle of them, ready to continue the fight towards never again.