Post written by Andrea Resnick

On the fifth day of our trip, we visited two locations with contrasting outcomes during the war. In one location, Jews were saved. In the other, they were exterminated. We visited the Warsaw Zoo in the morning and the Majdanek concentration camp in the afternoon.

I woke up that morning already processing the four days before. We had visited and toured multiple sites in Krakow as well as eaten Shabbat dinner and returned to volunteer at the Krakow JCC. We visited the Wieliczka Mines. We had our big, heavily emotional day visiting Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau in Warsaw. After that, we had visits with the Chief Rabbi of Poland as well as the Israeli Ambassador followed by a tour of a Jewish cemetery. We had visited multiple museums, memorials, and spoken to people personally affected by the Holocaust. We still had half the trip ahead of us, but we were ready to keep going. To keep learning, asking questions, discussing, and leaning on each other.

At the Warsaw Zoo, we learned that 95% of the grounds had been destroyed during the end of the war. The villa stayed standing, and this is where Jan and Antonina Żabiński lived and ran the zoo. They saved nearly 300 people by hiding them in their basement. At the time of our trip, we were told there were two survivors still living. We got to see the piano Antonina played on, and I secretly touched a key. She would play music for her friends in hiding – one song for danger, and one song for safety. The home looked like an inviting space, with family portraits, drawings, and pictures of the children with various animals in the zoo. Sadly, only 1% of the animals survived the war.

We were led down into the basement and were shocked to learn that the door leading to the basement was kept open at all times. Antonina’s grandmother lived in the home, and didn’t know anything about the hidden Jews. I kept thinking about my young children and how difficult it would be to keep them quiet in such a small, dark place. There were no windows or lights. We got to see the tunnel leading outside from a back basement room, which was much smaller than the one in the movie The Zookeeper's Wife. It was originally built by Jan because he had heard
rumblings of the war coming, and he wanted to be able to save his family in the event of bombings. Little did he know that the tunnel would be used for such good.

We got a few minutes to amble around, check out the zoo, and meet up again to head to our next destination. Seeing the Warsaw Zoo, for me, was the mental break that I needed. I kept telling myself that Jews were saved here.

Majdanek set a different tone, but ended in a beautifully symbolic way. At Majdanek, we learned that it was among the largest concentration camps and mostly intact. The retreating Germans did not have time to destroy it. Approximately 80,000 Jews died at this camp, and it was mainly used to exterminate the sick and those who couldn’t physically work. Eighty-thousand Jews.

We walked through barracks with side by side photos along the walls – one photo of the camp from the 1940s, and one photo from 2015. We walked into a re-creation of a barracks where Jews were forced to sleep on hard bunks. I again thought of my children and how scared they would be to sleep in a large room on an uncomfortable bed with strangers. We saw shoes. So many shoes, stolen from innocent people. We saw a fragment of the camp road, made by stolen Jewish headstones. We walked by a series of pictures and quotes, one from a child. “Mommy, I was a good boy! It’s dark! It’s dark!” Immediate tears started flowing and it was hard to catch my breath. Then we saw the large Mausoleum, currently under construction. The mound contains the ashes of the victims, found after the war in heaps throughout the camp.

The day was windy, cold, and rainy. But after we saw the ash memorial and began a memorial ceremony of our own, the rain stopped. We were on the edge of the camp with Lublin as our backdrop. The sun came out. A few people from our group read from a poem written by Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Holocaust, and then we were all given rocks. We personalized our rocks and each person searched for a symbolic spot to place our rock. I walked toward the fence between the town and the concentration camp grounds, looked out over the beautiful landscape, and thought about our day. A hopeful morning, and a devastating afternoon.

My rock said, “We will remember you.”