The Leader-Post (Regina)

Life-changing lesson

Poland trip gives student teachers vital class material

Adam Grachnik

Special to The Leader-Post

Saturday, August 20, 2005

University of Regina student Ryan Wood says he'll never forget the sensation of running his hands over the deep grooves on the concrete walls where prisoners tried to claw their way out as Zyklon B gas poured from the ceiling, or the seeing the vastness of endless orange chimneys at a death camp.

It's this imagery from thousands of kilometres away that swims around the 20-year-old education student's head as he works his summer job at Don's Photo Shop on Dewdney Avenue. It's there he spends his days reflecting on a week-long trip to Poland that gave him the opportunity to see the Nazi death camps first hand and helped him develop as a future teacher.

He travelled far from his Regina home with fellow education student Keith Adolph, 20, also of Regina, to take part in the March of the Living (MOL) May 5 -- Holocaust Remembrance day.

It's an annual commemoration tour that culminates with thousands of mainly Jewish people marching the same three-kilometre distance between the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps that prisoners would have marched over 60 years ago on the way to their death. This year, 18,000 people from around the world joined the march on a wet and chilly day.

The trip was organized and partly subsidized by the Regional Jewish Communities of Ontario (RJCO) and was special because it was the first time non-Jewish educators were invited. Adolph and Wood aren't Jewish and were the youngest of the 42 educators on the bus.

The days were intense and usually started before 7 a.m. and ended well after 10 p.m. They visited the old ground of the Warsaw Ghetto -- the largest ghetto in Europe and once home to almost 450,000 Jews. Most of the residents ended up starving to death, perishing from disease or were killed in the death camps.

They lit Yartzeit Candle's (remembrance candles for the dead) at Majdanek -- a camp still largely intact that can be up and running in days. They saw the bluish-green stains on the walls of the gas chambers. They stood in awe at the massive bowl of human ash collected from the crematoriums and rode trains on the same tracks that would have been used to ship prisoners around the country as part of Hitler's Final Solution.

"Seeing the rails that led to the gate and through the centre of the camp (Birkenau) and walking beside them was very hard," said Adolph, a fourth-year student who is working this summer at Wal-Mart in Southland Mall. "You can read a text and know the dates and the names and say you know all about this event. I've now been to these places and caught only a glimpse of what it was. You can sympathize but you can never really know."

The main part of the trip was the visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Established in the Polish town of Oswiecim, Auschwitz (the German name) is the most widely known of all the Nazi death camps. It's believed that close to 1.5 million people were killed in Auschwitz. The gates reading "Arbeit Macht Frei" (work will set you free), gave the educators a vivid reminder of what millions of prisoners saw each day.

The prisoners, upon their arrival in cattle cars, went through a selection, with some sent to the forced-labour camp and all others killed. It is at Birkenau (sometimes called Auschwitz 2) that Wood said he was most affected.

"I was hit with overwhelming vastness and shock and awe of walking in there. You look to the right side and it's just chimney and brick pillars as far as the eye can see," Wood said about the orange chimneys that are the sole reminder of the small barracks that hundreds of emaciated prisoners called home.

"It was a sobering experience," he said, adding that since returning it took at least a week until he felt comfortable talking about what he had seen.

The young men might not have even gone on this trip had it not been for one of their professors.

Dr. Jennifer Tupper, an associate professor of social studies at the University of Regina, said she heard about the trip and thought it would be a terrific opportunity for her students to learn.

Wood told Adolph and within days they were scrambling to get their application in on time. Months later, after collecting the necessary $1,000 -- which covered airfare, food and lodging -- they boarded a LOT Airlines plane in Toronto bound for Warsaw, for their first flight overseas.

They would have quickly learned, thanks to pages of information they received, that this was a chance to expand their education. Carson Phillips, co-ordinator, Holocaust and Human Rights Education with the RJCO said that the goal was to give these teachers -- some from as far away as Newfoundland -- the opportunity see the death camps and to offer them teaching tools to use in the classroom.

"There is this sense of urgency that this important message needs to get out in a window of time," said Phillips, who organized and led the trip in Poland.

"We live in a privileged society and we have strong values to stand up for. But we need to step outside of this wonderful society to see what can happen and did happen and continues to happen."

As terrible as the sights were, nobody knows the Holocaust as well as Vera Schiff.

Schiff, 79, is the author of two books: Theresienstadt and Hitler's Inferno and joined the trip to provide the educators with first-hand accounts of her experience as a Holocaust survivor. She talked stoically of riding the trains, dealing with the daily fear of life in a concentration camp and the emptiness of losing of her family.

"She's an amazing lady, I can't imagine how difficult it must have been for her," Wood said about the first survivor he had ever met.

There was also an Israeli flavour to the trip. Omer Eschel, an Israeli educator and leader working in Toronto, was on the bus.

The grandchild of Holocaust survivors, he provided personal accounts of what happened to his family and tried to instil in the teachers the importance Israel (Eschel's homeland) plays as a home the Jewish people immigrated to after the Holocaust.

And, how have the two young men reacted?

"You have that guy in Alberta (James Keegstra) who taught that the Holocaust never happened for years. You have Rwanda happening now," Wood said.

"One of the simplest things someone can do is not to push to the back of your mind, but to remember such a dark moment in the human day.

"As a teacher-to-be I want to do my part to stop that," added Adolph.

Wood and Adolph are planning on making some classroom presentations when they start their fourth year in September.