All posts tagged: avi wisnia

Confessions of a Jetsetter w/ Avi Wisnia

“Imagine Hell. Now imagine being rescued from hell, and returning… I can’t. I am trying very very hard, and I can’t. I am on a bus about to enter Auschwitz-Birkenau in the south of Poland, watching my grandfather as we slowly drive by the wooden-shelf bunks where he slept as a prisoner in the concentration camp for 3 years of his life, and I can’t even imagine. Can you? We started in Warsaw, where my grandfather grew up. We traveled through the Polish countryside to end up where my grandfather ended up during the Holocaust, in Auschwitz. He often says he has two lives: one before the war, and one after the war. It was immensely intense to witness those two worlds overlapping here.  There is something profound about traveling back to the land where your family comes from and touching its soil. Poland in winter is not a particularly inviting place, but I nevertheless felt the warm pull of the land’s history. It was like there was something still lingering in the air, waiting …