POLAND JOURNAL
June 18, 2000

See Images Below 

9:00 PM Denver Time, 11:00 PM New York, 5:00 AM Poland

Hopefully this is only the first of many journal entries written be the students and staff of IST 2000.  Right now we are somewhere over the Labrador Sea, not too far from St. John’s and Halifax (according to the computer map displayed at the front of the airplane at least).  After an uneventful flight to LaGuardia, our first team building event of the summer became a group effort to pack and then repack the bus so that we could all fit on the bus that had been provided.  Then on to JFK airport and a lengthy check-in process with LOT Airlines – the official airline of Poland.  Our flight was delayed by an hour and then we spent an hour on the plane waiting to take off.  Generally the flight is fine (though we were just told to buckle up for a bit of turbulence) though the group is spread out all over the plane.  But on to the real matters at hand…

In just a few hours we will land in Warsaw, Poland and none of us are really quite sure what to expect.  I am sure we will quickly be surprised that Poland is actually in color and not black and white like the movies lead us to believe.  We are not sure what we will see, what we will feel and what we will experience.  We expect the whole country to be anti-Semitic even though the war is more than 50 years in the past.   I don’t think that we have considered that Poland is actually made up of individuals and not just one big glob – it is made up of different people, ideas, hopes, dreams, etc.  It is easier to say that Poland is anti-Semitic rather than think about the citizens of Poland and try to figure out what they are thinking.  This in itself can be dangerous. 

I myself am very unsure of what to expect of myself, of this group and of the people of Poland.  I see one of my jobs being a reality check – what was Poland really like to the Jewish people before World War II, how do we balance the idea of Poland with the idea of Polish individuals, and what do we do with all of this stuff now?  It doesn’t seem right to just keep saying “We must remember so that it doesn’t happen again!”  There must be more to this trip and experience than prevention.  But what is it?  What do we want to understand about Poland?  What do we want to learn about our ancestors?  What will be our message to our friends in Israel when we arrive?  What will we tell our parents and friends when we get back home to Denver?    We are taught that the name Israel is the Hebrew word for struggle, as we are a people who are in constant struggle.  I wonder if the word Poland has some of that same struggle in it?  We are about to embark on a journey none of us ever plans to do again – but all of us feel committed to doing once – for ourselves, for our grandparents, for our people and for those who have no one to be here for them.  We will witness, we will remember – but how will we act?  The questions come pretty easily, the answers are much, much more difficult.

       Ira Miller, Poland Staff 2000