Running On History • • For Poles, these infamous sites are on their jogging routes. TALI ZECHORY Special to the Jewish News I like to jog. I jog through my neighborhood, the perfect suburban setting, complete with minivans, golden retrievers and children behind lemonade stands. I saw a jogger last week. She looked just like every jogger I know and she was probably on her everyday route. But this route had no golden retrievers. Hers was a route through the Plaszow concentration camp. It seems almost insignificant, but this event stunned me. A woman jogs through an infamous concentration camp, nonchalantly breezes by 70 Jewish kids from half a world away who are leading a service for the thousands killed at that very site, and she does not say a word or even turn her head? Does she not realize that she could be running over the unmarked graves of hundreds or thousand of Jews killed there? Does she just not care? Or is she simply desensitized to the Holocaust by the integration of it into her regular environment? To us, the participants in the Mitzhad Ha- Chaim (March of the Living), the sites are like nothing we have ever seen before. Where in America can we find places like Auschwitz, Treblinka and Plaszow? Nowhere. But for Poles, these infamous sites are in their very back yards, on their way to work, on their jo ging routes. And it has been this way for the past half-century. What kind of responsibility do the people of Poland today hold for the Holocaust? Some say it should play a major role in the day-to-day educa- tion and lives of Poles. Shema For The Living After tears, a redemption in a barracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau. ELISA LINDOW Special to the Jewish News About The March Forty-two Detroit area teens went to Poland and Israel as part of the Detroit Teen Unity Mission/International March of the Living, a trip that allows the teens to learn about their ances- tors' experiences in the context of the Holocaust and post-1948 Israel. This trip, which included teens and rabbis from Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Traditional backgrounds, is the sec- ond sponsored by the Agency for Jewish Education of Metropolitan Detroit and Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit. B'nai B'rith Youth Organization has been send- ing teens on the March of the Living every other year since 1988. The Jewish News asked three teens to file reports, reflecting on their experiences on the April 10-26 trip. Here are their stories. Rain was falling April 19 when we started our tour at the black gate of Auschwitz. For some on this March of the Living, the rain just blended in with the tears. We went first to the building that records all those who died of starvation. Seeing the pictures and sculptures, I leaned up against a tall, cold, green stove; chills ran up and down my spine. Here we were, wet and overwhelmed by what we were seeing and hearing, and it was only the beginning of what was to come. As we walked down toward the "wall of death," where so many people had been shot to death, many of us started to cry again. Next was the special railway ramp from Auschwitz to Birkenau. Here, women and children were sepa- rated from the men. About 25 percent of the arrivals were considered fit for work and were directed to the camp. The others were led to the gas chambers. As we walked inside one dark, cold, gray cement room with so many crammed inside, we saw the blue marks left on the walls from the Zyklon B gas that poured out of the "shower heads." I thought of the 1,000 victims shoved in at a time. After 15 or 20 minutes, the chamber was opened; the bodies were stripped of gold: teeth, rings, etc. Then the bodies were transported to the crematoria and the victims' personal documents were destroyed. We, ( unlike them, were able to walk out and go outside. Soon after we lined up with hundreds of other teens from all across the world. The rain stopped, but the gray clouds remained. This was it, the March of the Living. Israeli flags blew in the wind; Death, Life And Memory A small Galilean settlement celebrates Memorial Day and Independence Day. SHIRR TRAISON Special to the Jewish News Hoshaya, Israel . On a slighly chilly evening in this little yishuv in the Central Galilee, no one said a word. It was Memorial Day, but a barbecue was not on the agenda. Three hundred people, many with tears run- ning down their cheeks, stood in the dark in front of a beautiful synagogue, staring at the pictures flashing on the overhead projector. Even the chil- dren stood with their arms by their sides, looking at the images of people they had loved who died for the State of Israel. When the siren went off, all was deadly silent. "It is probably the only time in the world when an entire country is quiet, commented Marc Barnes, a senior at Birmingham Groves High School. For the residents of Hoshaya, and for all of Israel, Yom HaZikaron is the most somber of occa- sions. Every Israeli knows someone who died for Israel. It is a fact of life most live with uneasily, yet daily. In this small country that rose from the ashes of the Holocaust, this is one more daily reminder of survival. When I whispered to Moriah Ashkenazy, my Israeli cohort and host for the evening ceremony, < "This is so nice," she whispered back, "It is because they were nice." Moriah, 16, understands what this means because this is a way of life. With each photo projected, a relative or loved one rose to tell an anecdote or two about the per- son, a quirk or characteristic that made them spe- cial, something that made this martyr live. Some of these soldiers had been only 19 or 20 K 4/30 1999 , r py 16 Petrqit Jewish News )