Students remember Holocaust

Describing what they said can only be called "an experience," three students discussed their visits to former concentration camps in Eastern European and led a discussion yesterday about remembering the Holocaust. Speaking before a small audience yesterday, College freshman Yosef Refaeli, College freshman Jay Sand and College sophomore Elan Zivotofsky explained why they toured the concentration camps, how the experience affected them and why the atrocities of the Holocaust must be remembered. Refaeli and Sand went to Europe with the March of the Living program. After a week in Poland, the international group of over 4000 students spent a week in Israel. Noting that it is easy to forget what happened during World War II, Rafaeli told of how a burial field behind a memorial monument was now being used to grow potatoes. As a man was working the soil, a human bone was dug up. "You must read between the lines," Rafaeli said. "If you really want to know what happened, go beyond what the government shows you in tourist attractions." Zivotofsky, who went on a trip organized by a different group, said Poland was "very hard-core," and the experience was "clearly not fun." "I wanted to see it first hand," said Zivotofsky. "Stories are told but I wanted to remember by experiencing the places." "In a sense it's grotesque, and there was a point where it kept getting more and more painful," Rafaeli added. "On the other hand, it is important and must be appreciated." Sand said he felt his group was a spectacle to the Polish people, something which he never felt before. "They had a cold attitude, an unfriendly curiosity," he said. "It was hard for all of us to deal with." Zivotofsky said his group talked to an elderly man in Prague who could not speak to them without crying. He could not understand why a group of Jewish teenagers wanted to come to a place where Jews were clearly not wanted. Rafaeli said although people tried to prepare him for the trip, "I don't think that anyone can ever be prepared for it." After a week of visiting Polish concentration camps and cities that no longer had their once large Jewish populations, Sand said, going to Israel "seemed like a rebirth to everyone." Zivotofsky agreed, saying Israel "was the peak of the experience." All three agreed that something like the Holocaust could happen again, and that instead of denying it, people should remember and work together to prevent it. "The question of whether it could happen again is valid when the Jewish population is so small," said Sand. College senior Marci Lavine, who said she hopes to go on a similar trip herself, said she is not sure she could go through what the three speakers did. "It obviously won't be easy," she said. "You hear stories but this makes it so much more real. We need to keep remembering."

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