by Eric Lerner
Eric Lerner joined the Greenspon Center’s inaugural community trip to Poland in October 2025. His poignant words capture the essence of the experience.
My first day in Warsaw was exciting. The entire old quarter was built after the fall of Communism in 1989. The quarter was filled with busy pubs and quaint cafes. But wait a minute, I thought I was here to witness the Holocaust. The story continues.
I have done much world travelling, but Poland was an exception. I witnessed the most cruel side of human nature and the agonizing suffering experienced by millions of Jews. From the Warsaw Ghetto to the vast landscape and buildings of Auschwitz and Birkenau, the experience seeps deep into the soul with unforgettable sites.
To visit these places is to stand in the shadow of human cruelty, but also in the light of human resilience. And yet, what makes it personally difficult is not only facing the atrocities themselves, but knowing how easily the world can dismiss and forget.
As I mentioned, my journey began in Warsaw, a city that has rebuilt upon the bones of Jews. Ironically, the capital today feels like an exciting new city with dozens of glass bank towers. When digging the foundation of these structures, bones come up – it is like building on a cemetery. 90% of Warsaw was destroyed in the war. Few remnants remain of the Warsaw Ghetto, once home to 350,000 Jews crammed into less than 2 square miles. Modern apartment blocks and parks stand on top of a horrible and devastating tragedy. The Jews fought back against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, but they simply did not have enough munitions.
As I walked through the Muranów in Warsaw, the neighborhood built over the ruins of the ghetto, I found small plaques and lines on the pavement marking where its walls once stood. They are easy to miss if you aren’t looking for them, and that invisibility is part of what makes the experience painful. So much has vanished—people, buildings, an entire culture that had flourished for centuries. At the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, I stood in silence before the massive bronze figures. They are larger than life, defiant and tragic. Life seemed to be moving on with kids laughing and adults working.
The most difficult part of Warsaw was not what I saw, but what I didn’t see. The city’s Jewish quarter no longer exists as it once did. Its absence is the loudest voice—a testimony to erasure itself. I realized that remembrance in Warsaw is not always about what is visible; it’s about listening to what has been lost.
After Warsaw, I traveled south to Kraków, one of Europe’s most beautiful cities. The medieval old town glows with charm, its market square filled with street performers and the ringing of church bells. It’s easy to be swept away by the city’s beauty. This was a town of bustling Jews. They estimate that Krakow had 100 Synagogues in 1933. Today, the remnants of 9 of these synagogues remain. Truly, the town is hauntingly beautiful and picturesque. Miraculously, they have a modern JCC that serves 100-200 people every Friday night. Of course there is a Chabad house, There are now 2,000 Jews in Krakow, far less than the 90,000 before the war.
Walking through its cobbled alleys, I felt the strange coexistence of vitality and mourning. The 9 synagogues stand like survivors—some turned into museums, others still in quiet use. At the Remuh Cemetery, tombstones lean against one another, cracked and weathered, like the weight of history pressing down. Each stone bears a name, but so many names are missing.
In Kraków, the emotional difficulty comes from contrast. How can one admire the city’s serene beauty knowing that, not far away, thousands were being deported to death camps? It is a city that forces you to hold two truths at once: the endurance of life and the persistence of tragedy. I left Kraków feeling torn between awe and sorrow.
No part of my journey prepared me for Auschwitz. The name alone carries a weight that chills the air before you even arrive. Auschwitz was both a concentration and extermination camp—a place where over a million people, mostly Jews, were murdered.
When I entered through the gate marked Arbeit Macht Frei— “Work sets you free”—I felt a physical sickness. The memorable phrase is so grotesque in its deception that it feels like a wound reopening. Inside the camp, everything looks deceptively orderly: the brick barracks lined up in rows, the barbed wire neat and uniform, the watchtowers precise. The architecture of murder was efficient, industrial, almost banal in its organization.
Inside the barracks, the museum displays the remains of lives cut short: piles of shoes, glasses, brushes, and most hauntingly, human hair. Each object once belonged to a person with dreams, fears, and loved ones. The scale of what was done here is incomprehensible. You try to imagine one person’s story, but then you see thousands of shoes, and your mind shuts down. It is too much. The cruelty was not just in the killing—it was in the reduction of human beings to numbers, possessions, and ash.
What struck me hardest was how ordinary it all looked. Birds still sing. The grass grows. The sky is blue. Evil, I realized, does not always appear monstrous; sometimes it operates quietly, efficiently, under the guise of order. That realization made Auschwitz unbearable in a way that went beyond grief—it was a confrontation with what humanity is capable of when conscience is silenced.
A short drive from Auschwitz stands Birkenau—the vast expansion that completed the Nazi death machinery. If Auschwitz was the engine, Birkenau was the abyss. When you arrive, the first thing you see is the railway track splitting the camp, leading through the infamous brick gatehouse. The same tracks that carried cattle cars filled with men, women, and children to their deaths now lie silent.
The camp is immense—rows upon rows of barracks stretching to the horizon, punctuated by watchtowers. Many of the wooden barracks are gone, leaving behind only chimneys and foundations. The emptiness is overwhelming. Standing there, surrounded by nothing but ruins and wind, you begin to feel the scale of loss in a way that no number can express.
At the far end of the camp stand the remains of the gas chambers and crematoria, blown up by the Nazis in an attempt to hide the evidence. Yet the ruins still speak. The cracked concrete, the twisted metal, the scattered bricks—they bear witness. At the nearby memorial, inscriptions in multiple languages remember those who perished.
Birkenau is not a place of exhibits or explanations. It is a graveyard without graves, a silence that shouts. I walked along the tracks and imagined the trains arriving—people stepping down, clutching children or small suitcases, still believing they were being sent to labor, not death. The hardest part was realizing how methodical it all was, how planned, how deliberate. Birkenau is where the human imagination fails; you can’t comprehend suffering on this scale. You can only stand still and let the sorrow wash over you.
Leaving these sites, I felt drained in a way that words can hardly express. Visiting the Holocaust sites in Warsaw, Kraków, Auschwitz, and Birkenau is not a passive act of sightseeing—it is a form of witnessing, and witnessing demands emotional labor. You are asked not only to observe but to remember, to carry forward a truth that is too heavy for one lifetime.
The difficulty is also internal. You begin to ask yourself uncomfortable questions: What would I have done if I had lived then? Would I have spoken out, or would I have looked away? History tempts us to believe we would have been on the right side, but standing in Auschwitz, I understood how fragile moral courage really is.
There is also the guilt of being a visitor—of coming to places where people died, of taking photographs, having nice meals and going home to a normal life. Of leaving when the day is over. The difference between past and present is unbearable. This was not supposed to be an easy trip.
What I ultimately learned is that remembrance is not only an act of mourning—it is a responsibility. The Holocaust shows us what happens when hatred, indifference, and bureaucracy align. In every generation, there is a temptation to forget, to move on, to let the silence grow. But silence is dangerous. It is the soil in which denial and repetition can take root.
Every plaque in Warsaw, every preserved barrack in Auschwitz, every empty space in Birkenau, exists so that the world can never say, we didn’t know. The survivors are nearly gone now, and soon memory will rest in our hands alone. The personal difficulty of visiting these places—the tears, the exhaustion, the quiet despair—is precisely what gives meaning to the visit. If it didn’t hurt, it wouldn’t matter.
Poland’s Holocaust sites are not just places of death—they are places of conscience. They force us to look into the darkest corners of history and of ourselves. In Warsaw, I felt the ache of absence; in Kraków, the dissonance of beauty and loss; in Auschwitz, the horror of organized cruelty; and in Birkenau, the sheer vastness of death.
The experience left me changed. I came away not only with sorrow but with gratitude—for the survivors who spoke, for the historians who preserved, and for the silent stones that still remember when the world tries to forget. Visiting these sites is painful, yes, but it is also necessary. To confront such darkness is to affirm the light.
