Today we went to a forest. It was shady, sunny, and mossy. I sat down in this forest and experienced. I experienced how the moss easily came off the ground, revealing the soft, moist dirt that sticks easily entered and stood. I experienced birds chirping nonchalantly from mysterious places (but since the birds were infinitely less important than their chirping, where they were was ultimately unimportant). The sun made the forest warm and the breeze made it a comfortable heat. The trees were gathered about each other so that one could only see 100 or so yards away before the trees walled in his vision, giving an enclosed and safe feeling.

A more ignorant forest-experience would not have known that less than 70 years ago, a group of Jews from a nearby shetetle were marched here for their humiliation and death and then dumped into a pit and buried like a pile of refuse.

Knowing this, what struck me most was not that this happened but that it was inconceivable that a forest was beautiful and serene as this one had been witness to such a horrific scene. If not for the monument at the mass grave site and the memory of the tragedy, it would have been like it never happened at all.

Yaron Adar


Today we went to a small shetetel. We saw the synagogue, which was amazing. We learned that all the walls had prayers painted on them so that one didn’t need a siddur to follow a service. The writing was truly beautiful. We then followed the path of the jews of this village on their march to their death in the forest. It was a quiet, grim walk in the silent forest. When we arrived at the site, we saw three different mass graves where the bodies of an entire jewish community was buried. Different from my experience in the mass grave in the cemetery in the Warsaw Ghetto, the graves were a blotch in the beautiful scenery of the forest. In the cemetery, the mass graves actually seemed to be a welcoming sight among the intimidating headstones and weeds. Afterwards, we rode to Treblinka, stopping for lunch along the way. Treblinka was a very different experience from what I was expecting,as it was mostly monuments rather than actual landscapes of the time. It was disturbing to know that 870,000 jews walked the same path I did on their way to a horrifying death in Treblinka’s gas chambers. The monuments at this site could not do the massive loss suffered there justice. Despite this, I feel that it is better that there is some remembrance rather than none. Afterwards, we all rode back to the hotel.

Cyrus Sussman