I have not written anything for a while.  For the past few months, I’ve been working on my plan to visit Poland. The tickets for my wife and I have been purchased, and we leave in eight days. We will be arriving and staying in Warsaw, then traveling to Krakow for Shabbat, then moving on to Lodz, after which we will rendezvous with a guide to visit western and eastern Poland where our relatives came from. Part of our problem has been to secure a guide. The first person I contacted, who shall remain nameless,  agreed to take us around Poland for $350 a day, which seems to be about the going rate. Unfortunately, he was not very communicative, and I have not heard from him at all since I paid him a $200 deposit via Paypal. And so we have arraigned to hire another guide. (He charges $400 a day but we’ve heard he’s worth it and, at this point, we can’t be too picky.)

I don’t know what to call this trip. It’s the summer so it’s partly a vacation. But for a Jew, visiting Poland is unlike visiting any other part of the world. I’ve been on many vacations before, but visiting a mass murder site has never before been on the agenda. I expect to be moved and disturbed. I expect to cry. I expect to have nightmares either before or after. Of course, we plan to do other enjoyable things such as tasting the local beer. We expect to meet interesting people. Nevertheless, I approach this trip with a feeling of trepidation that I’ve never experienced before leaving on any “vacation.”

Can I have an enjoyable time and visit Auschwitz and Treblinka at the same time? I’m sure that by the end of the trip, I will have a sense of accomplishment, of having visited Zambrow, the place where my descendants lived, of having gotten as close to my roots as is possible in 2015. But when I get back and someone asks me, “so, how was Poland?,” I’m not sure how I will answer that question.