“Together we are building what should not have been destroyed.”

Jill Miller, a member of Harry Kay Leadership Institute’s Cohort 11, reflects on her experience in Poland.

Travel can blur the boundaries of time, and Warsaw is no exception. The city stands at the striking intersection of past, present, and future.

It’s been 29 years since I first came to Poland, a 16-year-old on March of the Living. Back then, the Holocaust felt like a distant chapter of history. We mourned the lives lost, honored the survivors, and remembered the vibrant Jewish community that once thrived here and was home to more than 3 million Jews.

I returned anticipating carrying a similar weight of tragedy, perhaps with a new lens that comes with age. And yet, what I found was also something unexpected. While I have changed, so has Poland.

Paradoxically, the older I get, the nearer the Holocaust feels. As a teenager, it seemed so long ago; today, it feels heartbreakingly recent. In Auschwitz, we had the profound honor of hearing survivor Sara Weinstein. Her testimony of surviving three years as a child in the forest was a reminder that the survivors living among us were only children then. The window to hear these stories firsthand is closing — a blink in the span of history — underscoring just how close we stand to the events we mourn and memorialize.

But this journey has not only been about memory. It has also been about building a future.

Our Harry Kay Leadership Institute experience is made possible by the Harry Kay Foundation as well as the Jewish Federations of St. Paul and Minneapolis, for whom a large percentage of their allocation budgets support overseas Jewish communities, including the Polish Jewish community. Thanks to their support, we met local Jewish leaders who spoke not just of the Holocaust but of the long shadow that communism cast afterward — a time when those Jews who remained were forced to hide their identities or bury them deep.

When I first came in 1996, Jewish life was still quiet. Today, it is stirring back to life — especially in Warsaw. The physical landmarks are mostly gone; the places where Jews once filled every third home have been erased. But in the absence of stone and street signs, something powerful has taken root.

A new generation — young cultural Polish Jews along with Ukrainian Jewish refugees — is reclaiming and rebuilding Jewish life. Poland is home to close to 20,000 Jews today, small compared to what was, but notably on the rise. Warsaw’s Jewish Community Center is expanding, now home to 500 members. Krakow’s has 1,100. Across denominations and organizations, the community gathers to celebrate holidays, share Jewish joy, and remember not only who they lost but who they are.

They are shifting the story: from one of destruction to one of revival.

Driving through downtown Warsaw, a city in the midst of rebuilding, I noticed an expansive sign that read, “Together we are building what should not have been destroyed.” Those words belong as much to the Jewish community as they do to the physical construction underway.

As we turned from the bustling city of Warsaw to the calm of Shabbat, our Harry Kay cohort lifted our glasses with a resounding “L’chaim” — to life, to the living, and to the spirit of revival.