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Trip will bring pain, pride

Eight area Jewish teenagers are among thousands who will take a life-changing trip to Poland and Israel.

By WAVENEY ANN MOORE
Published February 23, 2005

ST. PETERSBURG - Though bracing herself for the inevitable emotional pain, Mayan Aviram says it's important for her to delve into one of the most wrenching chapters of Jewish history.

The 16-year-old has chosen a significant time to do so. This year marks the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the Nazis' largest concentration camp where an estimated 1.5-million people - mostly Jews - were starved, tortured and killed.

In May, Aviram and thousands of other Jewish teenagers from around the world will travel to Poland, where they will visit Auschwitz and other concentration camps and see towns and synagogues where Jewish life once thrived. Then they will travel to Israel to commemorate Yom Kazikaron, the country's memorial day, and celebrate Yom Haatzmaut, its independence day.

The emotionally charged program is not for every teenager, said Lois Pardoll, who visits synagogues and temples to recruit students for the trip that was first organized in 1988.

Those who go are committed, she said.

"It's something I really strongly believe I should do, because of all the anti-Semitism," said Aviram, who attends Seminole High School.

"Knowing about your past can make you a stronger person. I want to go there and know that I have seen what happened to my relatives."

She said her great-uncle died during the Holocaust. Her grandfather, who lives in Israel, was sent to work camps in his native Romania. Her father is St. Petersburg developer Jimmy Aviram.

Michele Osnos said she learned of the program from her mother, who began raising money to send her on the trip years ago.

"I thought this would be like a really amazing opportunity to relive the past and experience history," the Blake High School student said.

Last weekend the two girls joined more than 100 teenagers from Florida, Texas and Georgia for a retreat designed to prepare them for the trip. During the two-day gathering, which began Sunday at the Florida Holocaust Museum, participants prayed and shed tears in the museum's boxcar that was among the many that hauled Jews to imprisonment and death in concentration camps.

The teenagers, high school juniors and seniors, paid rapt attention as a Holocaust survivor gave her firsthand account of being picked up by the Nazis as a young child. Monday morning, they painted tiles for the museum's Wall of Remembrance and discussed the future of Israel after the death of former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

The weekend was just one part of a weekslong program to prepare for the rigorous trip organized by the March of the Living in New York. The eight Tampa Bay area students started a 10-week orientation course on Jan. 18 that is offered for college credit. All will miss 10 days of school, which generally means they cannot be exempt from final exams.

Students who are taking Advanced Placement tests will have to take them soon after they return. It's an experience that requires a lot of sacrifice and emotional maturity, organizers say.

"The trip is not for everybody," said Mrs. Pardoll, who does her recruitment as a volunteer for the Holocaust Museum.

"We do turn away kids. We do have mental health workers on the trip."

"I know that it will be a painful experience," Michele said Monday.

"I'm going to have tissues ready. Yesterday, they were doing the prayers in the boxcar and I was just crying."

"It was really emotional," agreed Leah DeLorenzo, who attends the Pinellas County Center for the Arts at Gibbs High School. "I think anyone, whether they have a Jewish background or not, should go on this trip."

She added that survivors of the Holocaust will not be around in 10 to 20 years to tell their story.

"It's our generation and generations after that that have to make it known to the world," she said.

Until then, survivors such as Mary Duzinski, who spoke to the students Sunday, will continue to tell their stories. She was 11 years old in 1941, when she and her father were picked up in their native Poland, Mrs. Duzinski said. They were separated and she later found out that her father died in Dachau, a concentration camp in Germany. She was taken first to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, where she remained until the end of the war. During an interview this week, Mrs. Duzinski said she thinks her life was spared because she spoke German and was able to serve as a translator for the Nazis.

She met her G.I. husband in Germany.

"After the liberation, I didn't want to return to Poland and then I had no family," the Brooksville widow said.

The American soldier was an answer to her prayers.

"He said, "I am going to take you home with me,' " Mrs. Duzinski recalled.

In 1957, she arrived in the United States, she said, and was welcomed into his family's Roman Catholic home. Today the Jewish woman says she respects both Christianity and Judaism and points out that both faiths worship the same God.

Until a few years ago, she didn't talk about the Holocaust.

"First of all, when we were liberated, they told us to forget what had happened, don't live in the past," she said.

"I think it was maybe 20, 30 years before I have a peaceful night's sleep."

Mrs. Duzinski will accompany the teenagers on the May trip. It gives her "goose pimples" to think about going back to Auschwitz, she said.

But, she added, "If you write a book, you have to finish a chapter."

She wants to experience the freedom of walking out of the notorious concentration camp on her own accord, she said.

"I want to say, "See, you didn't kill me. I'm still around.' "

Noreen Brand, director of curatorial affairs for the Holocaust Museum, said the March of the Living program was designed to help ensure that what happened to Mrs. Duzinski and millions of others will never happen again.

"Walking on the hallowed ground of these memorial sites provides these young people the ability to touch history and understand firsthand man's inhumanity to man," she said.

"It's a life-changing trip, without a doubt."

[Last modified February 23, 2005, 00:34:19]