High School Class Trip to Poland

I'll never forget what a shitty time I had trying to figure out the right thing to feel.

When was 18, I went to Poland with my high school senior class. For ten days, we toured every concentration camp, mass grave, and ghetto. My grandparents survived these camps, but when we visited, I worried mostly about boys and the kids who had snuck vodka on the tour bus but had not invited me to drink with them. Despite our teachers’ insistence, there was no “one right way to feel” about what we saw, I believed there was something off about my ambivalent emotional response.

We were a group of about fifty teenagers from a Modern Orthodox Jewish high school in Manhattan. Every day we got on the same air-conditioned coach bus to drive to another hell hole in Poland. We were exhausted from our competitive dual curriculum in Hebrew and in English, and from a life-long education in second-hand Holocaust trauma. Many of our grandparents were survivors. We weren’t a group that needed to learn about the Holocaust or was nudged to remember. It feels like I was born knowing. My aunt kept my grandmother’s Auschwitz uniform somewhere in a Queens storage unit.

For most of my life, I’ve felt afraid of literal ghosts. I’ve involuntarily believed the spirits of my grandmother’s murdered family have followed me and expected things of me. This is not surprising when I consider the education I received. Senior year of high school, the head rabbi of our school asked each student to promise, one by one, to have at least three children in order to ensure Jewish continuity. Years later, when I had my first non-Jewish boyfriend, I went to my grandmother’s grave to ask for her forgiveness. I felt a tremendous responsibility to honor the dead. And though I was unaware of this burden while in Poland, I see in retrospect how it manifested in confusion and shame during those two weeks.

We went in May when the fields were striped yellow and purple with daffodils and lilacs. Despite the tour organizers’ insistence on making Poland seem as morose as possible, most days were non-compliantly blue-skied and sunny. We visited towns where there had once been large Jewish populations. The tour guide would lead us around what had once been the Jewish section. He’d show us the market square, a restored wooden synagogue, and an outdoor community oven where locals would bring food to keep warm during Shabbat. But these relatively pleasant cultural history lessons never lasted long. Inevitably, the guide would lead us through the flower fields, into the birch woods, with a cryptic comment or question. “Do you know what happened here on July 9, 1939?”

We knew what had happened but the guide insisted on showing us anyway. He’d point to a patch of dead leaves and moss in the woods and tell us approximately how many of our ancestors had been shot and buried underneath.

Sometimes, the itinerary included lunch directly after these excursions—a lunch of hard-boiled eggs and rehydrated Israeli kosher-certified soups, and instant mashed potatoes we kept on the bus. The windows on the bus didn’t open so it smelled perpetually of soup mix. Sometimes after lunch, we’d do another activity, like visiting an abandoned Jewish orphanage or cleaning up the neo-Nazi-desecrated headstones at a Jewish cemetery on the side of the highway.

I was miserable in Poland. But if you asked me why at the time, I would’ve said it was because I was lonely and heartbroken, not because I was undergoing a grueling sort of ideological indoctrination to make me recognize the necessity of the state of Israel. I was very lonely. And the horror all around us, which had faded into a subtle ambient scream, didn’t help.

For good reasons, my closest friends had chosen not to come on this trip and I felt left out. I shared a hotel room with a classmate I hardly knew. She had a new boyfriend who had given her an iPod as a one-month anniversary gift. I remember this detail because I was so envious of her relationship. I thought that’s what real love looked like: a boy buys you an expensive one-month anniversary gift.

My boyfriend had broken up with me a few months prior to the trip but I was hardly over it. I was consumed by this loss and nothing else mattered, not even the murdered six million.

At sixteen years old, shy and shaky with religious shame, this boy had been my first kiss. At our school, girls and boys were often separated and forbidden to touch. All sex outside of marriage was considered tameh, or impure. My classmates and I broke these rules but created new ones nearly as restrictive: girls were slutty if they went too far, particularly outside of the legitimacy of a relationship. I let him touch my boobs in the back of the school’s synagogue while it was empty. After we broke up, he told me we could keep hooking up if I would go further with him than I had when we had been in an official relationship.

“How far?” I asked him.

“BJ?” he said. He laughed self-consciously, probably aware of his own audacity and surprised he was getting away with it.

Sometimes I would sit next to him on the bus. I remember one particular evening, driving past flower fields at sunset, the perpetually sealed windows looking out onto a countryside sunset. We sat side by side without looking at each other. “This is the Poland of my dreams,” I remember him saying. While together, we’d read Jonathan Saffran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated together and formed a shared nostalgic fantasy of a Polish shtetl where violence and persecution created martyrs and folksy mysticism. The tour bus televisions played Escape from Sobibor while I inched my hand closer to his, longing for his comfort and affection.

*

In Poland, I thought much more about my ex-boyfriend than I did about the Holocaust. Except at night when my roommate snuck into her boyfriend’s room. I lay alone in one of the twin beds with the lights on, convinced—literally, I think—that the ghosts were there with me. They were annoyed with me for flirting when I should have been mourning them. And they were judgy about how far I’d gone with this boy while I was not even in an official relationship.

I assume the trip organizers had intended to make us fear Europeans but instead, I feared my own ancestors. I imagined them reprimanding me for other religious transgressions like eating non-kosher chicken nuggets or using my phone to text on Shabbat. These ghosts haunt me still after moving to Germany. Now for paying German taxes and forgetting to call home.

Before bed each night at the Polish hotel, I would lay out my clothes for the next day. My outfits were calculated to catch the fickle attention of this boy. I knew he liked to see me in a tight V-neck shirt, which consistently got me in trouble with the school rabbis. I had to choose between catering to my ex or to the rabbis, and I was sort of aware both options would result in my disappointing men.

My roommate would usually return in the middle of the night, giddy and tipsy, whisper-shouting about the vodka she’d had a couple of sips of. I was so envious. This sounded like the most fun thing in the world to me: Yoni or Avi’s contraband vodka; a Polish hotel room full of teenagers a good ten years behind most of the country in their experimentation with alcohol and sex.

At 7 am we would wake up for one to three hours of prayers, depending on the day, in the hotel conference room. Boys and girls were separated by a makeshift mechitza. During the Amidah, the silent meditation, we held our prayer books and swayed back and forth rhythmically, collectively.

Prayers were long and boring and have too much opportunity for reflection. In Poland, my mind usually wandered to the moment when my ex had broken up with me. He’d said, “I don’t love you anymore.” I cried a whole day. My mom said, “you have more important things to worry about.” And this comment has plagued me ever since, every time I’ve cried over a boy. In Poland, I thought “Why are you crying over this boy? You have more important things to cry about.” And in Berlin, I often wonder the same.

At some point on this trip, we went to Majdanek, where my grandmother’s entire family was murdered. My classmates trudged along the dirt paths quietly joking with each other as teenagers do. The boys were passing around a water bottle, pretending it was full of vodka, coughing and spitting it out on the side of the camp’s paths. One kept “accidentally” poking my butt and I loved the attention. Then we stood in a concrete, blue-stained room, which was once a gas chamber. The tour guide told us the stains came from the gas. She pointed to two metal tables where the Sonderkommando were forced to remove gold teeth from the corpses. All of this was explained to us in detail because the description had to be gruesome enough to keep the group’s attention.

We said kaddish for the dead in the gas chambers. Or maybe we said it outside. I don’t remember exactly, but I know sometimes, when I dance in crowded clubs in Berlin, my mind drifts to the image of my classmates in that concrete room, all of us swaying back and forth in a similar sort of dark, industrial space.

I remember looking at the back of my ex-boyfriend’s head; how his curls were tight from the day’s humidity. I remember the monologue in my head. I reminded myself repeatedly where I was: you are standing in the same room where your great aunts and uncles were murdered. You are standing in the place where the origins of your family’s trauma originated. But it was too literal; too big to comprehend. And then my thoughts turned to another, arguably smaller trauma that had taken place in a suburb of Northern New Jersey. I had tried to give my ex-boyfriend a blow job to keep him interested. I was on my knees, on the carpeted floor of his bedroom. I didn’t know what I was doing. He was impatient. He said, “Shay, not like that. Haven’t you ever seen porn?”

There’s one connection I’ve drawn between the way I handle the collective trauma of the Holocaust and the pain of sexual exploitation: a shared desire to return to the perpetrator in an effort to find closure.

*

In an interview, the young adult novelist, Melanie Bishop, described the adolescent protagonist in one of her novels:

What intrigues me about it is the way the adolescent can in one moment, be devastated by the loss of the mom, and in the next moment, be intrigued by a cute boy in her class, and in another moment, be perhaps as devastated by that boy’s lack of attention to her, as she is by her mother’s murder.

Later in life, the boy thing will be minuscule, if she even remembers him at all, and the mom's loss will still be on that topo map as a huge mountain of loss, even higher and bigger for the time that has passed. But in the teenage moment, they can seem equal.  I’ve often said, when asked what I was exploring in this novel, that I was intrigued to write about a girl who’s dealing with true tragedy, against the backdrop of the more typical highs and lows of adolescence.

When I read this, I thought immediately of this trip to Poland—how preoccupied I was with the social dynamics of my high school class; the sounds of boys laughing together conspiratorially; the feeling of being watched or wanting to be watched, assessing the group to see how well I fit in.

I think about the evenings we spent in the hotel lobbies of Warsaw or Krakow in the supervised discussion group. The teacher handed us neon pink post-it notes and markers to draw or write about what we had felt during the day. During these sessions, it always seemed like the cool girls knew the right emotions to convey. They cried at the right times, they expressed uncomplicated sadness for the loss of life. What if I had used those post-it notes to tell the truth about how I felt that week? Haunted, lonely, jealous, scared. Sometimes intrigued.

Recently, I confided in a Polish Wiccan friend about the Holocaust ghosts. She told me to create rituals to speak to the dead. She said they wanted me to see them and to acknowledge their pain, and to stop carrying it.

“Do you think of these ghosts literally or as a kind of externalization?” I asked her.

“They’re literally ghosts,” she said.

“But they’re not judging you,” she added, “you are judging you.”