Experience of our trip to Poland

Author: Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, posted on 2009/01/11 04:57 pm (EST)

On June 26th 2008 I embarked on an inspiring film adventure with two true artists in their discipline, Katja Esson, the producer/director and Martina Radwan, the cinematographer. The trip to Poland took me back to 1942 and the Holocaust. It was a chilling experience , re entering the world of a child’s mind filled with fear, loneliness and loss of home and family. What I re experienced as an adult was my strong connection to this place in that time.

As I entered the little village house of my grandmother’s where both she and I were hiding under an assumed name, I felt her presence and how she had helped me survive a separation from my parents.

When I walked through the streets of what once was the Warsaw Ghetto, I reconnected with my father who saved my life by sending me out of the ghetto where only 10 percent of children survived.

As I rode the train to Treblinka, then wandered among the stones of this death camp, I reconnected with all my aunts uncles and cousins, but also with so many others, with so many children.

And in this stony desert, this enormous cemetery of Treblinka, I re connected with my self as a Jew, haunted, murdered and dug into this earth en masse, and I felt I was walking on sacred ground.