Strength in numbers: students and adult chaperones make the trek along the railroad tracks at Auschwitz. groups to Poland for the past three summers. "Until you get to Poland, you can- not understand how impor- tant it is to spread the mes- sage that the Holocaust real- ly happened. When the children come back from Poland, they can say, 'I touched 800,000 pairs of shoes in Maidanek. I saw where it happened.' " In 1984 and 1985, USY joined other Jewish youth organizations around the world in sending two dele- gates to a World Zionist Or- ganization sponsored weeklong journey to Poland. When USY decided to orga- nize its own Poland pro- gram, the decision was made early on to combine it with a five-week trip to Israel. "We felt that a week in Poland would be powerful, but very negative," Gutin said. "There would be no opportunity afterwards to absorb the experience in a slow, deliberate fashion." Most Diaspora groups fol- low the Poland experience with a visit to Israel, where rebirth and strength offer suitable contrast to the themes of powerlessness and destruction that dominate any Jewish-oriented trip to Poland. The contrast was clear to Charles Savenor, 20, of Needham, Mass., who par- ticipated in the first USY trip in 1986. "As I got off the plane in Warsaw, I saw a soldier about my own age," he said. "I was trying to be friendly, so I said, 'Hello, how are you?' in Polish. He didn't answer. He just used • of Poland," he asserted. "To come to Israel from Highland Park, Illinois, Shaker Heights, Ohio, or Beverly Hills, is like meet- ing a person in middle age and attempting to develop a relationship without know- ing anything about his prior life." Rabbi Poupko brings young people to Poland not so much to study the Holo- caust as to acquaint them with the Jewish civilization that it destroyed. "If all you know about Polish Jews is that they were marched to the gas chambers," he said, "then you don't know anything about them. You need to know who they were." The message becomes clear. "People are con- fronted with the imperative of the mitzvah of rebuilding a strong and rich Jewish civ- ilization," Rabbi Poupko said. The message is clear: We are here, they want to tell the Poles. The emphasis on Jewish history crosses national and religious outlook. Israel's Ministry of Education and Culture, which a year ago launched the most am- bitious program to bring Jewish youths to Poland, gives each participant two study guides. One, "Journey to Poland: In Search of a Vanished Jewish World," uses essays, historical pho- tographs, maps and poetry to paint a picture of the Jew- ish civilization that thrived in Poland for nearly ten cen- turies prior to the outbreak of World War II. The word "holocaust" does not appear in the book because its pur- pose is to educate the chil- dren about what existed be- fore the destruction. Ely Razin, 22, a business student at York University in Toronto, organizer' a stu- dent trip to Poland and Is- rael in July. His group tried to focus on the pre-war history but, he said, "Unfortunately, there just isn't much left from before the Holocaust." The Canadian group brought a Holocaust survi- vor who lives in Canada. In addition to helping translate between Polish and English, the survivor provided a cru- cial link to the past for the THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS 29 CLOSE U P his gun to point me in a cer- tain direction. "When I got to Israel a week later, we saw another soldier who looked my age," Savenor said. "I said, 'Shalom.' He smiled and said, 'Shalom.' At that point, I knew I had come to a place where Judaism isn't a thing of the past, where it's a living thing." For Israeli teens, most of whom were born in the Jew- ish state, the journey to Poland jolts them into con- sidering the significance of their homeland. Many young sabras take for granted the fact that they live in an independent Jew- ish state, and few have real- ly thought about the fact that their country is a direct outgrowth of the Holocaust. Yet while a trip to Poland gives them new perspectives on the intrinsic importance of their living in Israel, it does not necessarily create some momentous change in their lives. Ella Gutman, scientific ed- itor at Yad Vashem in Jeru- salem, led a group of kibbutz students to Poland in July. She believes a goal of such a trip should be to give stu- dents a greater sense of per- spective. She listed three themes she says should apply to any trip to Poland: up-close study of the Holocaust; grasping the fact that Poland was the center of Jewish life and learning un- til World War II; and developing an understan- ding of the Polish people and their role in the murder of Jews. The purpose of these trips is not to foster Jewish- Polish understanding. Americans leading trips to Poland also emphasize the vital role the trips take in educating Jewish youths. Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, direc- tor of Judaica at the Jewish Community Centers of Chi- cago, has been travelling to Poland since 1972. For the last three years, he has led groups of Jewish teenagers on a four-day journey to Poland as the first compo- nent of the Chicago Com- munity Project Poland- Israel Summer Program. He believes Jews must under- stand the Jewish experience in Poland in order to under- stand the current Jewish world. "The only way the aver- age American Jew can enter Israel is through the doors