Midnight Train to Poland

This past weekend I went to Krakow, Poland with the entire NYU Berlin group: 41 students, 4 teachers/ staff, 1 tutor. We took a 12 hour night train with compartments that sleep 6. On the way there, I got to share one with all of my best friends here; on the way back the train was overbooked and I volunteered to share a compartment with the teachers, it was fun because I had been doing a lot of bonding with them on the trip anyway.



Our first day we did a tour of Krakow, a city that was founded in the 8th Century and became known for its large Jewish population as early as the 11th Century. The first night our group went to a restaurant in the Jewish quarter where they organized to have a Yiddish band play for us. There were three youngish guys on traditional instruments and this awesome older lady who sang and danced. Afterwards, most of us went to some bars and clubs in the area.



The second day we took a bus to Auschwitz; the concentration camp is about 1.5 hours from the city. It was an appropriately cold and rainy day and hardly anyone spoke or made eye contact the entire time. Being the only German student in the program, which included about 10 Jewish kids, I was extremely uncomfortable in addition to depressed and shocked about all the atrocities that happened on those few square miles so I mostly stuck with the teachers to avoid having to speak to students. I only took one picture, it's of the train tracks at the Birkenau extermination lot where the Reichsbahn brought 1.5 million Jews and Polish elite. I had managed to hold it together for hours but walking the tracks I finally broke down.



After we got back to the hotel that night I sat around with the teachers and we talked about family involvement in the Holocaust, they ended up inviting me to join them for dinner. It felt good to be with a bunch of Germans to sort out discussions of residual guilt and collective consciousness. I also used opportunity to practice having academic and intellectual discussions in German, which I am still not quite comfortable with.



That night was Passover and some kids threw a huge party in their room with tons of wine and the telling of the Passover story. After that we hit the bars and tried to momentarily forget what we saw that day.

On the final day, we got a few hours to explore the city on our own so Sam, Lauren, Elena and I headed for the old castle where they have a statue of a dragon that is the basis of their founding story.





The trip was really successful; I had the chance to bond with kids I had never really talked to. Turns out one girl is from King of Prussia, PA and another girl is totally into Riot Grrrl music, she even has a tattoo of Courtney Love and Kathleen Hannah!

Sorry about the long post, but I just really had a lot to say that seemed important to me.