Going into this trip, I felt something almost contradictory: excitement. There is nothing exciting about what happened to Jews during the Holocaust, but as a teacher and a lifelong student of history, I felt the pull of standing where it happened. I have always believed that firsthand experience of historical sites gives educators something no textbook can: raw emotion, real curiosity, and the kind of unresolved questions that make learning honest. My students at East Side High School in Newark don’t have the resources many other schools do. Most know Hitler’s name and know that many people were murdered, but the history often stops there. I went to Berlin and Poland to close that gap.
Berlin built the foundation. The Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate were awe-inspiring, but it was the quieter, harder sites—Track 17, Bebelplatz, the Bayerisches Viertel, the T4 Memorial, the Wannsee Haus—that gave the trip its weight. These were the places that filled in facts and stories I hadn’t encountered before, tracing the machinery of the Holocaust from its bureaucratic planning to its earliest victims.
Nothing, though, prepared me for Poland. Poland was beautiful, and Poland was the hub of Jewish annihilation—both are true at once. The long bus ride from Berlin to Krakow gave me time to slip into what I think of as my anthropologist’s mindset: unobtrusive observation, absorbing everything so I could later carry it back to two classrooms. This fall I begin teaching Sociology and Anthropology as an adjunct at Essex County College, alongside my work at East Side High. I carry two master’s degrees—one in anthropology from the University of London, one in education from Montclair State—and this trip felt like the place where both callings converged. I owed it to my students, and I owed it to the Jewish community whose history and ongoing struggle against hatred we were there to witness, to absorb as much as I possibly could.
Krakow itself caught me off guard. I expected weight at every turn, and I found plenty of it, but the city itself is beautiful—and the Polish people I met along the way were warm and generous with us at every turn. It’s a city I would happily return to, on different terms next time.
The walk through Kazimierz, Krakow’s historic Jewish Quarter, was the first real immersion into that history. But it was the day that followed—Tarnów—that changed the trip. Standing at the Zbylitowska Góra Forest, where roughly 800 children were among the thousands murdered and buried in a mass grave, is something no text can replicate. Reading about it is horrifying; standing on the ground where it happened is something else entirely. That day, something shifted in our group. Grief has a way of closing distance between people, and by the bus ride back and dinner that night, our cohort had formed a bond that I believe to rare, and it is one I know will last well beyond this trip. I’m grateful for the friendships that formed there—with Matt, Andrew, Raffi, Zach, Scott, Sarah, Samara, Melissa (“Goose”), and Ari and everyone else—and for Ilyse and Emily, whose planning held the trip together and whose warmth became personal to all of us as the days passed. I’m already looking forward to hearing how each of them carries this experience forward when we reconvene in October, once the new school year is underway.
The next day was Auschwitz, and I’m still processing it. Auschwitz is devastating in its detail: rooms of pots, eyeglasses, and shoes belonging to the old and the young; suitcases packed by people who were told, falsely, that they would need them again; the standing cells; the execution wall; the barbed wire and the Halt signs. But nothing braces you for the scale of Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Walking its grounds—past the barracks, the watchtowers, the rail spur where trains stopped, and the section prisoners called “Canada”—I understood for the first time, not intellectually but physically, the size of the machine the Nazis built for extermination. Then came Shabbat. Celebrating it at the JCC in Krakow, and closing the trip with Havdalah, was a deliberate and necessary counterpoint—proof that Jewish life persisted, and persists still. It’s an experience I will carry with me.
As an anthropologist, I have spent my career drawn to cultures and communities that have faced oppression. This trip sharpened something I already suspected but hadn’t fully reckoned with: we tend to treat Jewish oppression as a closed historical chapter, resolved by the founding of the State of Israel, when the reality is that antisemitism remains very much alive today. That thread—from Zbylitowska Góra to the present—is exactly what I need to bring back to my students, at East Side High and at Essex County College alike. The textbook version of this history isn’t enough. My students deserve the fuller truth, and the tools to draw the line between what happened then and what continues now.
Beyond our cohort, this trip introduced me to people I won’t forget. In Berlin, I struck up a friendship with our security guard, Michael “Ako” Hintzen—an incredible person whose own path I came to admire, and whose company I’ll always cherish. Sharon, Kasia, and Matthias brought this history to life with a dedication that went far beyond their job descriptions; their knowledge and their hearts were both fully present, and I’m better for having learned from them. And through it all, Ilyse and Emily didn’t just organize a trip — they built a mission, one that ran seamlessly and with real care for every person on it. I hope to keep working alongside them in some capacity in the near future.
I know this trip will take months, maybe years, to fully settle. But I already know it will change what and how I teach—and I am deeply grateful to Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest NJ for making this mission possible.