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The Detroit Teen Unity Mission
visits cemeteries and death camps in
the first few days of their two-week
trip to Poland : and Israel.

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JILL DAVIDSON SKLAR STAFF WRITER

E

THE D ETRO IT JE WI SH N EW S

arly on the fourth day of the
Teen Unity Mission, Adam
G
said what most
. of the other participants
were thinking:
"I can't wait to leave Warsaw,"
he said as he boarded the bus. -
The sun had barely risen over
the city filled with concrete build-
ings and tinged with hatred, but
Adam, like the rest of the kids, had
had enough.
He and the other 58 kids in the
Detroit contingent traveling with
the International March of the
Living had traipsed over a mound
where the Warsaw Ghetto upris-
ing took place five decades ago,
into a lecture hall at a former
yeshiva in Lublin, through the
nearby death camp at Majdanek
and into the overgrown brambles

14

Above: Sari Tracht
takes a breather after
visiting the Majdanek
museums.

Left: Wherever the
students went, Poles
often craned from their
windows to check out
those wearing tallit and
tzitzit.

Right: In old Warsaw,
participants checked
out the shops. In the
evening, three Israeli
teens were attacked by
skinheads in this area.

at Warsaw's Jewish cemetery.
Along the way, the teens en-
, dured the stares and worse from
the Poles, dusk-to-dawn lectures
from Professor Zvi Gitelman of the
University of Michigan and less:
than-desirable food in bag lunch-
es and in the city's only kosher
restaurant.
Not that anything was going to
get any better. The next stop on
the tour was a march from the
death camp at Auschwitz to the
death camp at Birkenau followed
by dinner in a kosher restaurant
in Krakow.
But somehow, leaving cold, grey
Warsaw behind was comforting to
the participants.
"Thank God," Adam said as the
city disappeared from the back
window of the bus. ❑