“Wow, everything looks so clean,” my Grandfather said on the way to the airport, “it’s as if the rain washed the dirt all away.” This morning was a very beautiful one. It was cool last night in Cincinnati and now, at ten-thirty in the morning is just barely eighty nine degrees. Today is an important day for me. Today I will begin my trip to Israel. I will travel with Christians United for Israel for the March of Remembrance. This is a new program for Christian students to learn about Judaism and Israel. With the other students from the group, I will visit Poland and then Israel to learn the history of the Jewish People in Europe and across the world. I’ve been so excited about this trip! I’ve actually lost quite a lot sleep to sheer enthusiasm. Imagining the Temple Mount, the Dead Sea and the Church of the Holy Seplicure has occupied much of my time. What I’ve looked forward to less is Poland, the first leg of the trip. I imagine Poland will be an emotional and difficult week. Much of our itinerary for the week is devoted to the study of the Holocaust. I’ve not spent much time thinking about it or imagining it because I can’t imagine what it will be like. That said, I plan to leave Poland in the knowledge that even when things seemed darkest, Good still found a way to prevail. In the end the good always prevails, somehow it finds a way. When ever I leave Cincinnati, I realize how wonderful a place to live it is. I’ve grown up here. I feel comfortable here. I am happy here, but there is a whole world to see and learn about. So, this morning as we drove through the city and crossed the bridge to Kentucky on the way to the Airport I felt thankful for home, friends and family. Right now the Delta Airlines agents are calling for passengers to check in. The airport is nearly empty today, people are coming and going slowly. New York will be a different story. So, now as it’s almost time to embark on the next leg of this journey. In a few moments I will fly from Cincinnati to New York. I am praying that everything will go well, that my bags wont be lost and that I’ll have a great two weeks. “With service to New York-JFK we’d like to welcome passengers to board the plane through the breeze way, zones one and two...” That’s my call. I must board the airplane.

Tags: cincinnati new york 

The first day of what I have come to call, “my fact finding trip to Israel and Poland” began early. I’d not exactly slept that night. I was a little tired, but I was ready to go and explore. I was looking forward to a day in New York. My mother and grandparents took me down to the Airport. It had rained through the night and the day was cool, the air slightly damp. My grandfather said, “wow, everything looks so clean. Mom cried at the airport. I never understand why parents do this. Going through security took about an hour, I had a coffee at the gate. My flight to New York was quick and I was to the hotel quickly enough. In the evening we gathered together and discussed the trip we were preparing for. We talked about the history of the Jewish People in Europe and the Middle East and we were introduced to our guides, who would become our friends. There were a number of fine people who would accompany this Christians United for Israel Student Activist group. We were all excited about going to Israel, most of us were ready for the first leg of our trip as well. We would spend a week in Poland, finding the traces of Jewish life in Warsaw and Krakow. We would visit the where the Jews of Europe had thrived and would confront the places where these innocent people met their end. In Poland we would bear whitens to one of the great failures of humanity. Irving Roth would join us in Poland. He was a born in Czechoslovakia in 1929. I would meet him that evening, when he would speak about his experiences. It was Friday, so we were joined by a Rabbi lit candles for Sahibs.

Tags: cincinnati new york poland warsaw krakow irving roth holocaust 

Our trip would be guided by a number of excellent people, one of whom was Irving Roth: Irving Roth is a fine gentleman who lives in New York. He looks much like others from his generation, only he is more smartly dressed and he smiles a lot. His smile is very warm. When he grew up in a Slovakia his family made railroad ties and lived what must have been a beautiful life. The Roths lived in a small village, the town's Protestant Minister was a neighbor, living just across the street. But, before he reached adulthood, he and his family were run out of the country he called home and then deported to the Aushwitz Death Camp. He explained to us how one day he went to school and was told, "Roth, go home. You can't come here anymore." This was when he was just a teenager. Remembering his thoughts as a boy, he said with a little bit of a smile, "Well, I didn't have to go to school! I went home and figured out what I would do." Roth was a fine soccer player, in fact I'm told he was best fullback in the area. What must have hurt more was going to the park to join his team and hearing, "Roth, go home. We don't want Jews on our team." When Irving Roth talks about these things it's difficult for me to imagine them. How could a group of people be persuaded to hate so much? How could they allow their classmates to be barred from the school because of their religion or ancestry, then again these values were not always so foreign to the American mindset. Nazi ideas were spreading across Europe, and Jews were being systematically pushed to the margins of society. Mr. Roth explained, “the objection was to isolate the Jews so that they would not infect society.” Somehow much of the population of Europe was convinced that Jews were both 'selfish capitalists' and 'Marxists'; this is a complete oxymoron. In fact, the Jews were exiled from Israel when the Romans decided they couldn't remain there. They were spread across Northern Africa the Middle East. As they faced a large amount of persecution among these people they moved to across Southern Europe, finally coming to Eastern Europe where they lived for nearly one thousand years. When Irving Roth explains how his family went from a respected part of the local community, to being pushed out of schools then marked for extermination, he makes it seem like a simple process. “They [the Nazis] began by organizing small little groups at first, something called the Einsatzgruppen. Their objective was very clear, to go into towns and cities and kill people; Jews. What they realized was that machine gunning was not a very cost effective way to do this.” Roth adds, “Also there were people [Einsatzgruppen Death Squad members] who had volunteered to do this and they became tired of this. After a while it becomes tiring to kill fish in a barrel.” Before any of that came plans. In January of 1943, a number of powerful German men including scientists, doctors, military officials and members of the Nazi high command met in a large home in Wannsee, in Brandenburg. At this conference fifteen officials of the Nazi State met to discuss the issue of how to deal with the Jews of Europe. The conclusion they reached was that they would kill every last Jew across the whole of the continent. We all know the means they used. In the Warsaw City Center lived 350,000 Jews. Today there are less than five thousand remaining. There were 300 temples, today only one remains. Nazis made sure to destroy any trace of Jewry from the city. “How was this accepted by people? It’s hard to tell." He pointed at a girl in the room, "If I would tell you to kill her, you wouldn’t do it. But if I can change what she is in your mind. If you no longer see her as a beautiful young woman then you might....there was no logic, the step by step was to begin by the demonization, then to the separation [of Jew and non-Jew], then bullets and when that didn’t work well, mass gas chambers.” It was a step by step process. Never again, is our mantra when remembering the Holocaust. But how do we make sure of this unless we look at how it was perpetrated? Roth puts it well, “We need to recognize the sign posts on the way to Aushwitz. We need to recognize the sign posts on the way to the Rwandan Genocide. There are signs along the way and when we come to the first sign post, we must do something about it.”

Tags: new york poland irving roth holocaust