Somehow my parents convinced me that visiting Poland before going to Israel was, like, the Harvard of summer trips. My warped, dorky, overachieving mind was easily tricked into writing the EXTRA ESSAY portion of the application to this particular Jewish teen tour, all to be part of the most esteemed of summer trips. What a deluded little pissant I was. I don't think I ever considered that the preverbal ring I was reaching for included tours of five concentration camps and countless gravesite, the most powerful of which would have no gravestones at all.

The normal kids, and I say normal as opposed to my abnormal in this case, went straight to Israel to get down (teen-tour style) in the promised land for a full month and a half. In retrospect, that was the move. Somehow these other kids all realized right away that doing extra work to get the opportunity to see some of the grimmest shit in modern human history was about as appealing as . . . I don't know . . . going on a trip to visit concentration camps!!! I can't actually think of anything grimmer than the actual thing in this particular case.

I still remember my first impression of Poland from back in 1995. As our bus rolled away from the cement structures of the airport, I couldn't get over how beautiful the vistas were. Fields of wildflowers lit up the green hills that rolled like waves up to and over the horizon. How could this be Poland, I remember asking myself. Every image I'd seen of Poland was black and white. The photos of prisoners. The old grainy video of living skeletons being ushered into a building or across a yard. All black and white. Even the Hollywood depiction, Schindler's List, was in black and white. You'll forgive me if my mental image of this country was drawn in shades of grey.