March of the Living 1999 Diary

April 15, 3:15 PM

We just finished lunch and there’s an hour trip to Treblinka, so I thought I’d write (again).

We’re all pretty much back to normal now. There’s of course the underlying "depression", but it’s just that: underlying. Most people aren’t talking very much about yesterday.

We were, as I think I’ve said before, in a shtetl called Tikochyn this morning. We went and had services at a very beautiful synagogue. It was magnificent. The walls were all painted with prayers and stuff. It was beautiful. Upstairs were two preserved rooms. One was a study / bedroom and one was a dining room. They were both with the original things from before the war. I have a picture of the dining room.

We walked over to the cemetery, if you can call it that. All the stones were close to buried under the ground. Some, I’m sure, were. Ari and I found a tiny piece of stone sticking up, and so started to dig it out. It was hard, and in the end we barely got half of it uncovered.

Something interesting about that, there were three pieces of rusted barbed wire lying on the ground on top of the grave (or where the headstone was). I took one, intending to bury it in Israel along with the rocks I got in Auschwitz and Majdanik, and the ones I’m going to get at the other camps. I didn’t keep it, though. I buried it at a memorial site we went to.

They say Treblinka isn’t as graphic as the other two camps we’ve been to so far. I certainly hope not.

Later,
Julie