"Memories of Absence"

YIVO Study Tour of Lithuania & Poland, June 17-30, 2024

by DAVID ALTSCHUL

In June of this year, my wife Margaret and I participated in the YIVO educational tour to Lithuania and Poland. Both of us are Ashkenazi Jews of Central or Eastern European origin whose grandparents or great-grandparents had immigrated to the United States between 1870-1910. Neither of us were the children of Holocaust survivors. We were simply curious to learn about the life and culture of the world from which our ancestors had come as well as pay homage to the millions of our fellow Jews who had been murdered in the Holocaust.

We joined a group of perhaps 20 or so fellow travelers, most of whom were the children of Holocaust survivors, including some who had been born in Europe after the war and were returning to the world of their birth. We had so much to learn from them. Accompanying us were Irene Pletka, the Vice Chair of the YIVO Board, YIVO Executive Director & CEO Jonathan Brent, and historian Samuel Kassow, all of whom contributed so much to our understanding of what we were seeing and experiencing.

Our journey took us from Vilnius to Kaunas, Warsaw to Łódź, Lublin to Kraków and, more somberly, from the Ninth Fort to Ponary, Treblinka to Auschwitz-Birkenau. We walked through the haunted streets where our fellow Jews had thrived and then been confined into ghettos by the Nazis before their final transport to death camps. We also visited a number of libraries and archives as well as museums, most notably the POLIN Museum in Warsaw which presented a comprehensive set of exhibits covering the almost 1,000 year history of Jews in Poland.

The trip was somber, emotional, and, at the same time, empowering: how can we possibly understand our present and future place in the world without understanding the history and culture of our grandparents and their predecessors? How can we help to prevent a second Shoah unless we understand the history and unfolding of the Holocaust?

Finally, I am a photographer who has been inspired to create a collection of images from this trip under the title “Memories of Absence.” I had no choice but to render the predominantly images in black and white – the subject matter demanded that choice. Here are a small sample of images from that collection.