As the granddaughter of Jewish Holocaust survivors, Poland was a place I was taught never to forget, but also never to set foot in.
In the 1980s and ’90s, when Jews around the world started visiting Poland and Eastern Europe to “find their roots,” my grandmother Brucha thought they were crazy. She’d been a refugee from Nazi-occupied Warsaw, escaping in the months before the Ghetto was locked down. To her, returning for any reason was unthinkable. “To go back to Poland, you’d have to take me in chains,” she’d declare, absolutely adamant.
Naturally, years later, when I decided to attend an international workshop on Healing From War in Poland, I felt terrified. I shook with fear every time I considered voluntarily getting on a plane to the land my family had fled for their lives– the cauldron where the vibrant Jewish culture of my ancestors was extinguished in the most violent and terrible way. Irrationally, I imagined I might arrive and be immediately imprisoned, or executed. But I was determined to go, to shake up this mindset that imprisoned me all on its own. Continue reading “Let the healing begin!”