Helen and Sol Krawitz Holocaust Memorial Education Center

It was a typical Friday night service at Temple Sholom in 1984, except it wasn’t. I was nine and a fellow congregant had just returned from the March of Living. He told stories of what he witnessed, and how it fundamentally changed how he saw the world. At the age of nine–I was still too timid to go to a sleepover at a friend’s house, but I knew in that moment, I would make the journey myself. I had to. And I did.

In 1991 when I was sixteen, I marched with over 3,000 other Jewish teens from around the world between Auschwitz and Birkenau. We visited concentration camps, Jewish sites and cemeteries around Poland. The experience was both one of solidarity with thousands of people and great sorrow. It’s hard to comprehend the totality of death when you are there—to be alive among so much death, to stand in the gas chambers, to see the volume of ashes, mountains of shoes and eyeglasses left behind, and to the smell the barracks.

As one goes on living, the March of Living helped me dedicate and rededicate my life’s work to repairing the world, tikkun olam. I now work in my non-profit company to help communities solve some of the most difficult problems in our country, and I work to help those communities stand up against injustices in all forms. Perhaps most importantly, the March of Living experience reinforced the importance of being physically present in community to understand and affect change. We have to be close to those who are suffering to be effective agents of change. We have to experience their world with them, and see their beauty and humanity.  We have to show up to have an appreciation for what another human being is experiencing.

To understand my people, I felt obligated to get as close as possible to the Holocaust—to see it and to smell it as it remained in 1991. I am grateful to carry that with me in my work.

I wrote a series of poems about my experience while journaling on the March to help process the experience. When I returned, my poetry series was recognized by the Rutgers-Newark High School Poetry Contest as a finalist in their statewide competition. As a consequence, I read my poems at Rutgers-Newark, and then, when our local Federation hosted a trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC a year later, and they invited me to read my poems in the Hall of Remembrance. I went along with our county’s Jewish leaders, citizens, and Holocaust survivors including Margit Feldman (refer to photograph from the Messenger Gazette). It was a true honor to be there with survivors like Margit and to honor her with my words. Reading my poetry in Washington, DC, I hoped at the time people were moved to carry forward the responsibility of “never forgetting” for the Jewish people, and for all people who experience injustice then and especially now in 2017.

May we grow our capacity to understand others, may we see the suffering of others, and may we dedicate our lives to righting injustice for all people.

POETRY BY SARA GORRELL BRENNER

Realities’ Deception

 1. Before

here, we are lost in another

world wrapped up in a birthday

 present fastened  with a bow