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Friday April 23, 1999

Sobering trip to Polish camps strips teens' tough veneer

Barbara Sofer

Memories of last year's Holocaust Remembrance Day continue to grip me 12 months later.

I found myself flying to Poland on an airplane full of teenagers with multiple ear-hoops, nose studs, spiked hair and skinny pants.

A dark-skinned girl with her hair in dyed-blond dreadlocks bounced to rock music from loud earphones. Tough-looking boys smoked defiantly under no-smoking signs.

As many as 12,000 Israeli school children visit Poland each year, constituting the largest Jewish group to tour that country. These trips have stirred up their share of controversy in Israel.

A current article in the daily Yediot Achranot raises the issue of the high cost, which makes the trips unaffordable for any but well-to-do Israelis. Other critics insist that visiting Poland reinforces persecution complexes and fans jingoism. Still others regret every zloty that drops into the Polish till from Jewish hands.

However, a recent university study of the issue suggests a rise in connection to Judaism and Israel among students who went to Poland as teens.

My own experience certainly confirmed the study's conclusions.

I had accepted an assignment for Hadassah Magazine to report on an experiment of sending 200 adolescents from Hadassah's Israeli youth villages and day centers.

Most of the children came from broken homes. Many had been kicked out of other schools. A few of my traveling companions had juvenile police records. As I ducked a hard rock cassette flying through the air, I regretted being on that plane.

Partly it was the kids. After the first hour on the plane, the idea of 10 days with such rambunctious teenagers was not appealing. Partly it was my dread of being in Poland. Three of my own children had visited the death camps. One, now an officer in our army, found them more unnerving than being bombed in a bunker in Lebanon.

However, the group turned sober when Israeli security guards checked the six-bus convoy for explosives. Very soon into our actual touring, I began to appreciate the teenagers. They listened politely as guides gave long lectures, but it was obvious that they didn't care a whit about Polish history. Neither did I. They had come to see the Holocaust.

I was outraged when people routinely mocked the way they looked. Once we ran into Israeli tourists who scolded the teachers for allowing "such kids" to leave the country. Another time, a Polish gift saleswoman called them a "catastrophe," using the Slavic word for Holocaust.

The kids were sanguine about plans that didn't work out. After riding for hours only to find a site closed, they shrugged off their disappointment. And when they confronted the death camps, there was no intellectual discussion, just raw feelings of pain and identification. They walked through the snow and mud with a trembling reverence.

In Birkenau, one of the rowdiest boys, his blond hair dyed orange, carried high the Israeli flag until his arms must have been frigid and aching. Another teenager managed to call his Hungarian grandmother from an Auschwitz pay phone and read the names of his dead relatives aloud to his classmates.

I had come to Poland to observe the teenagers, and in the end I personally drew strength from being with them.

She'erit haplitah -- the remnants of our people. The words kept repeating in my head. The teenagers with whom I visited Auschwitz were victims of child abuse and poverty, of journeys through deserts and desertion, of cruel vicissitudes of Jewish history and plain bad luck. Yet they still had the humanity to feel the pain of others.

A girl was offended when I compared her family's crossing of the Sahara with surviving the concentration camps. "We were going up to Israel," she said. "We had hope. The prisoners here had nothing."

My personal debate over whether Israeli children should go to Poland was resolved one afternoon when a porcelain-skinned, almond-eyed girl from a northern development town asked to take the bus microphone. I knew about her troubled family background and the many nights she'd slept in bomb shelters.

"Before I came to Poland," she said, "the Holocaust didn't mean that much to me. I'm ashamed to admit it, but just last year I giggled and fooled around while the Holocaust remembrance ceremony was going on.

"Now when I hear the siren I'll think of it as the scream of anguish of all those who suffered and whom no one saved. I'll tell my sisters and my friends and somehow I'll make them all listen...I pledge to those who have died that at least one Israeli girl will always remember them. May their memory be blessed."

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