A Journey Unlike Any Other

Learning from the past to safeguard our future: 32 Technion students travel to Poland as part of the International March of the Living program organized through the National Union of Israeli Students

“The journey to Poland is as important as any other subject we learn at the Technion. After all, first we all need to be human beings living in a civilized society.”

Amit Kornberg is a Technion student at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management. He returned last month from a trip to Poland, organized by ASAT (the Student Association of the Technion). “I knew quite a lot about the Holocaust before going, because most of my family was murdered in Poland, but up till now, any talk about the subject was always in the form of labels – ‘Holocaust and Heroism,’ the ‘Yellow Star’ (of David), and of course the appalling number ‘Six Million.’ On this journey, we examined each of these categorizations in detail, and we began to understand the significance of the events that occurred: What really happened, how it happened, what motivated the people – also on the German side – and whether we too may deteriorate one day to such behavior. We learned that every individual also has a negative force within him or her that may erupt in wartime, and sweep the mainstream society. This trip was actually a break, a chance to ask and think about these majorly difficult questions. I’m glad that the Technion invests in this project and subsidizes it, and think that it should be offered by all academic institutions; I believe that what we learn today can become the doctrine of tomorrow for another.”

The Technion delegation included 32 students – the largest number in Technion history, and this year’s largest university student delegation. The delegation spent a week in Poland as part of the educational tour organized by the National Union of Israeli Students, under the direction of Roy Hanani from the tour company ‘Mool Nevo”. “We offer an alternative approach to Poland tours,” explains Hanani. “For us, the journey begins long before boarding the plane and continues long after returning to Israel. The journey is actually a tool for critical thinking, to enhance social awareness and involvement in society. Our goal is for participants to gain insights from this experience, to fundamental questions such as what makes us human, what is our responsibility as individuals in society, as citizens, as Jews. We certainly try to steer it clear from taking on a nationalist direction, while not ignoring the unique Jewish aspects of the Holocaust.”

Alon Cohen-Naznin, who headed the delegation and serves as the Vice-Chairman of ASAT said, “This journey, which took me to places where my late grandfather Arie Viceberg had been and where he lost all of his family members, filled me with a sense of victory. It is a great privilege and honor to tread on this ground, at the hardest sites in the history of the Jewish people, alongside wonderful people representing Israel’s college and university students.”

According to Technion student Smadar Boyam, the journey has been very important and significant. “At our age, we are mature young adults, which makes us more focused on the journey itself and less so on the social aspects of the trip and excitement about a trip abroad as compared with high school students. There was something very practical, educational and informative on this tour.” Learning about the holocaust is especially personal for Smadar because her maternal grandmother had escaped from Poland to Siberia, along with her parents and older brother during World War II. After the war, she returned to Poland to discover that all of her relatives were murdered at the Sobibór extermination camp. She and her nuclear family eventually made an Aliyah to Israel in 1950, at around the same time her paternal grandmother made an Aliyah with the group of Holocaust survivors known as the ‘Tehran Children.’ “About a quarter of my family were murdered in Sobibór, and from the remaining three-quarters, nearly none survived.”

Smadar recalled that the most emotional parts of the trip was when the delegation unexpectedly met with Holocaust survivors along the tour, one of whom they encountered within the ruins of a gas chamber. “He was leaning on a stick, with an Israeli flag wrapped around his shoulders, and he had rolled up his sleeve so that the number tattooed on his arm was visible.” ‘I saw my father sent to this place,’ he said.  This statement really hit it home for me – suddenly you see before you a man that remembers his own father being sent here in rather than trying to comprehend a statistic about an inconceivable number of people who perished here during the Holocaust. I returned from the trip with a lot of questions for my grandmother, in the hopes that one day I would be able to return here with a more personal focus.”

Miriam’s story, who managed to survive the Majdanek concentration camp, was one of the survival stories that were followed over the course of the journey. Miriam often said: “Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day represents your grandfather and me. I – a ghetto and concentration camp survivor (Holocaust), and Grandpa – a partisan – he represents the heroism.” Their granddaughter, Inbar Shriber, a Technion master’s student from the Faculty of Chemical Engineering, joined this year’s delegation. “This trip clarified just how wrong this distinction between holocaust and heroism truly is, because anyone who was capable of maintaining their humanity through this cruel period is a hero. From now on, for me, both of these concepts are one in the same. Tracing the path my grandmother took from Warsaw to Majdanek was an empowering experience for me. I felt proud of my family and my country and I view it as a victory over the Nazis.”

Inbar speaks positively about the heterogeneous make up of the Technion delegation – made up of students from all academic levels, different age groups, men and women, single, married and some already parents. “This unique composition contributed to the diversity and richness of the discussions we had over the course of the tour. I feel that this journey sharpened my Israeli identity, and hightened the awareness of the dangers of inflammatory rhetoric, racist attitudes and militant behavior to society.”