Polska, Polska, Polska: Head Awake & Heart Ablaze

A blog post by Leanna Praetzel, Fall 2011

Skipping down the sidewalks of Czestachowa, Poland at 6:30 in the morning after an overnight bus ride, clapping and singing the only Polish song you know (Sto lat!) over and over again: that’s the best way to know who your true friends are.  At least… it is from my experiences, anyway.  Many students were suffering the effects of sleep deprivation—and rightfully so!  A bus is difficult enough to be comfortable on whilst passengers are awake, let alone asleep (or at least trying to be).  But with a mix of sufficient shut-eye (thanks to the semi-comfy sleeping spot I claimed on the bus’s floor) along with the Polish blood fervently pulsing through my veins, I found myself ecstatic on the streets of Czestachowa, head awake and heart ablaze.

I suppose the unveiling of the Black Madonna also contributed to my unusual alertness at such an early hour Friday morning.  A miraculous image of Mary and the infant Jesus painted by St. Luke on top of a table that Jesus built?  Yes please!  Of course I couldn’t pass up a tour given by a pleasant and quite comical German priest either; He took us around the fortress that housed the Black Madonna to see hidden chapels, statues, and even a treasure room containing the First Holy Communion veil of St. Thérèse.

From Czestachowa our bus turned its wheels toward the infamous Auschwitz—a place I was uneasy about going to.  Eighth grade history class had pounded the Holocaust into my sensitive self so forcefully, I felt sad and guilty very often.  I frequently wondered why we had to learn about the Holocaust in the first place.  Needless to say, Auschwitz was not on the top of my to-do list.  But I went anyway… and I’m glad I did.

The concentration camp existed.  It was there, where I stood, brick on brick.  It was the solid, enduring evidence of the terrible fate of many innocent people.  But the mounds of piled shoes, suitcases, and more were not placed on display to make us cry; on the contrary, they served, in my eyes, as a memorial to those who died.  Each picture and flower, building and stone had its place on the grounds of Auschwitz, reverently pointing towards the victims.  This helped me to see the Holocaust as not something that requires constant sorrow (although, as we are human, some sensitivity must indeed be felt), but rather as something that simply needs to be remembered.

Not to mention that in the dark tunnel of Auschwitz I found a surprise light—Maximilian Kolbe.  Talk about joy!  This saint took another man’s place in being sentenced to starvation, and still sang hearty praises to God.  I never imagined a concentration camp to contain a square inch of happiness, and yet, upon seeing St. Maximilian’s cell, I couldn’t help but smile.

Of course, nothing says a happy ending to our Poland trip quite like the Divine Mercy Shrine in Krakow.  One of the sisters from the shrine gave a wonderful talk reaffirming the outstanding joy that can come through suffering.  The talk also described the extreme power of Divine Mercy: during his final days of living, Nazi commander Rudolf Höss, convicted for ruthlessly murdering the lives of millions, made a 180-degree turn.  Upon finally realizing the gravity of his sin, Höss wrote Poland a profound apology letter and sincerely asked God for forgiveness.  Along with many people, I believe this man has been forgiven... What are the sands of sin in comparison to the vast ocean of God's mercy?

Our final stop, Blessed Pope John Paul II’s hometown of Wadowice, quite literally provided the icing on the cake.  Ever since he was a boy, JP II was absolutely crazy about the pastry “kremówka”.  Now, vendors in Wadowice market the delectable “Pope Cake” dessert to sweet-toothed tourists like me.  So, a plastic fork and a powdered sugar-covered scarf later, I was ready to once again roam the lovely streets of Polska, but this time the same ones that Karol Wojtyla himself roamed as a child.  I felt very fortunate, especially when I was able to touch his baptismal font!

Truthfully, I was saddened when boarding the Gaming-bound bus—Poland was so full of vibrant life!  But I knew that I will value my time spent there for decades to come.  

A gut-wrenching trip to Auschwitz calls us to Love

Before the Poland excursion, when I heard “Poland” I could only envision an icy landscape, small towns, and a concentration camp. It shows how much I, clearly, don’t know about the world. The funny thing is that nobody talks about Poland once the issue of the concentration camps has passed. Nobody bothers to discuss the vibrancy and bustle amidst the art and architecture of Krakow. Even when you leave Krakow the goodness doesn’t end because you find a quaint tranquility in Wadowice. These lovely bits of our visit to Poland seem almost unfairly idyllic when juxtaposed with Auschwitz.

Let’s talk about Auschwitz:

Everyone on the bus knew that the day ahead was going to be intense but no level of preparation could predict any given person’s reaction. I expected to cry and to leave feeling a bit sad. However, as I witnessed the remains of the atrocities done to women I didn’t have the ability to be sad or feel sympathy. I felt pure and undiluted rage and disgust. What kind of mind invents this stuff? The part that was the worst for me was not the crematorium’s walls that just seeped with pain, or the isolation cells in Block 11, the death that lingers in the air sixty years later, the unnatural cold, and not even the gallows. What hit me like a giant school bus were three things:

At Auschwitz there is this room with a glass encasement full of hair. You’d never guess how haunting a mountain of human hair can be. The huge mound of human hair sits behind the glass in one of the exhibits. I’ve never seen such an ungodly amount of human hair as was preserved behind this glass. The Nazi’s had kept it to sell to factories or to use for other sick purposes. I walked into the room that held the hair and took in a sharp breath. The amount of hair gave a really tangible estimation of just how many people were murdered at Auschwitz. It was like a wall of hair. I walked up and down it trying to wrap my brain around all of this hair. There were so many different textures, lengths, but the colors had mostly faded into the same deadened brown, save a few red and blonde pieces. They say a woman’s hair is her crown and countless women had been stripped of their crowns. I stood there staring at the pile of crowns that would never again find their owners. A woman’s hair is something intimate. For a woman, it’s not just dead skin cells that hang around her face. Rather, it’s that thing you fidget with when you’re nervous, or hide behind, or that other people run their fingers through to show affection. Even when a woman is completely naked she still has her hair to wrap around her but the women at Auschwitz were not permitted to keep even that. The Nazi’s literally took everything. For what? To make blankets from the hair, to sell to factories for a few paltry dollars, or to completely strip their victims of any semblance of humanity? It seemed it was to completely break the human spirit.

Just like the mountain of hair, there was a huge mound of shoes behind another glass wall. I’d wager there were a few thousand pairs of shoes in there. Some of the most fabulous shoes I’ve ever seen were in there and each was a haunting reflection of the lives people had led before Auschwitz. Shoes tell you a great deal about people and their values. The style of the shoe shows if they value comfort above all, if appearance is number one or if they have a nice balance between the two. They give clues to where their wearers are going and where they come from. There was a pair of cream and red flowered pumps, a pair of cream and green wedges, ballet flats, and worst of all, shoes small enough for a child.

These traces of humanity made the rest of the time at Auschwitz much more powerful. These traces turned the experience into something more personal because now I couldn’t help but think about real, individual people, not just an ambiguous mob of prisoners. Trying to imagine what it would be like to have someone take everything from me in order to kill my spirit before murdering me was almost impossible. I couldn’t picture anyone living that way. It’s almost like they exterminated the spirit so they could more easily kill the body and throw it out.

The part that spoke the loudest to me was the covered windows across from block 11, right above the execution area. The windows hid the experiments of a gynecologist who used young Jewish girls to test contraceptives and other such things. What more could they take from these woman? They had their family, their possessions, their freedom, their hair, everything, yet now they would take the last semblance of femininity and treat it like a Petri dish. Taking shoes is one thing but taking a woman’s uterus is on a whole other level of depersonalization: No love but pure torture—complete and total objectification. The girls became like “its.” The screams that came through those windows must have been gut-wrenching.

The only comparison that came to me was the image of the indigenous people who used every bit of the animals they killed. They wasted nothing and got as much out of each kill as possible. The Nazi’s used every bit and left close to nothing for their victims to clutch in the aftermath.

After learning about incommunicability, depersonalization, and the “I” each person possesses in Philosophy of the Human Person, it was so clear just which elements of the person were violated during the Holocaust. Yet, as our group ended the day at the death camps with the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, I realized that these crimes leave no more room for hate but only mercy. A lack of mercy and an abundance of hate are what propelled the Holocaust to begin with. I didn’t leave Auschwitz angry, though. I couldn’t. It would have been an injustice to the memory of those who suffered. I left with a better understanding of humanity and the need for love as our only motive. The atrocities I witnessed in that one day were a call to love, not just for me but for everyone. Let’s love.

Poland: At Home in Mercy

A blog post by Dan McNally, Spring 2011

After a week of study which seemed to last forever, Thursday night we boarded the buses for Poland. We prayed for a safe trip, and started the movie Karol: The Man Who Became Pope. I had seen it before, but in preparation not only to see the places where he grew up, became a priest, and became a cardinal, but also in preparation for the horrors of the concentration camps, the movie provided a powerful perspective which stayed with me the whole weekend. The movie was very long, however, and on a bus ride into the morning, few people got adequate sleep. Before we realized it, it was 5:45 A.M., and we were sprinting to the shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa to be present for the unveiling of the image kept there. Tradition holds that the icon of our lady of Czestochowa was painted by St. Luke the Evangelist on a table that Christ built for his mother. We made it on time, and with trumpet blasts and drum rolls, the image appeared. It was beautiful, and such a powerful connection to the early church. Not only that, but with Mary as queen of Poland, our connection to the sufferings and joys of the Polish people and heritage began the moment we set foot in their country.

After a morning of reflection and prayer, we prepared ourselves for the journey into the mouth of hell at Auschwitz. The weather could not have been more fitting. It was very cold, and the sky was an intimidating and oppressive heavy gray. Walking on that ground, I pictured the thousands and thousands of feet that had trod in that very spot, many of them walking unwittingly to their deaths. We saw things I'd rather not repeat; we saw things no one should see, much less of which to fall victim. In the emotionless state in which I found myself after just a short time, the thought occurred to me that this was not just murder. I had always seen the holocaust as a horror and a terrible event of evil and malice, but being there, walking those paths, hearing how many died every day seeing where they died, seeing how people had become statistics, how the Nazis made up for lack of killing resources and time by expanding their daily operations, I saw that it truly was a universal extermination: Hitler had a goal, a quota, and given more time and resources, he would have met it. It was utterly “efficient” depravity. Romans 5:20 tells us “...where sin increased, grace abounded all the more...” The palpable darkness of this atrocity underscored and highlighted the virtues of the just who gave their lives, and showed that love is more powerful than death. Standing in front of Maximilian Kolbe's cell, one could not deny that the grace of God's love living through Him was infinitely more potent than the poison that was pulsating through their captor’s veins.

Saturday was spent in Krakow. In the afternoon, we ventured to the Shrine of Divine Mercy. We venerated the relics of St. Faustina, and in the chapel there, prayed a Divine Mercy chaplet in five languages, the unity of which brought happiness to my heart. This joy continued and grew all weekend. It continued at the Shrine, where we celebrated the Mass. Going up to communion in this place of mercy, after a few days of darkness and doubt of God's love, I looked up at the image of the loving merciful Christ above me, I felt a sense of peace I could not shake. I was reminded of the advice of a priest and friend back home, who had encouraged me to pray for Christ's Divine Mercy every day, and I felt at home once more. That night when we returned to the hotel, I stayed alone in my room and prayed, and found such peace in the Divine Mercy, it's difficult to describe or relay, but all I can say is pray to Jesus, realize his love and mercy, and put your trust in Him. He is with you at all times.

The next morning we celebrated a Polish-Latin Mass at JPII's cathedral in Krakow. I was struck by the first mark of the Church, that of unity and oneness. Though the language was completely foreign to me, I always knew what was being prayed, and I softly spoke the prayers in English to myself. Though it was in a foreign country and language, it was the same liturgy, the same Mass, as if I hadn't left my home parish. After Mass, we visited Nowa Huta, the town made for Communism and Atheism, and saw how Christianity could not be kept out, and saw where many died defending the cross against the oppressive regime of the time. At the conclusion of our time, we visited Wadowice, John Paul II's hometown. We walked through his parish, saw Mass being celebrated and entered into the timeless universal sacrifice, as he did so many times there. One could feel the quiet holiness of this humble place.

Poland is a country of great culture, history, suffering, and resurrection. The Polish people are a rock of faith, and they are proud of their history, their pain, and their renewal in Christ. It was an honor to be a guest to their wonderful part of the world. We keep Divine Mercy in mind as we prepare for midterms this week!

John Paul the Great, pray for us. Jesu Ufam Tobie.

Trust: A Simple Word

Trust. A simple word— a lifetime of struggle. This is one of the main messages that St. Faustina received as a nun living in Krakow, Poland. Three bus loads of students made their way to Poland February 12^th and stayed for several days visiting the Marian Shrine of Czestichowa, Auschwitz, the Divine Mercy Shrine and touring downtown Krakow and Wadowice, the Pope’s home town. It was an emotional weekend full of God’s graces that many of us will still be processing for years to come.

Visiting the Shrine of Our Lady of Czestichowa was many students’ first encounter with Poland. There, a centuries old image of Our Lady is venerated with masses and prayers by the many pilgrims who seek her intercession. We celebrated Mass in English in front of the miraculous image. The time spent here was life changing for one student who had their first real connection with Our Lady. The devotion and faith of others inspired students in their own walk of faith.

Next, we took the busses to Auschwitz. A very empty feeling washed over me as I walked over the same soil where over a million people lost their lives. I had a very hard time believing the words our tour guide was saying. The buildings were normal enough- there was no apparent warning of the evil that permeated the place. I could not envision the events that took place here, nor did I want to. The same difficulty of imaging the horrors was experienced with many other students… until a certain exhibit in one of the blocks. The Nazis were efficient at creating a profit off of their prisoners- to the last detail. A large bin the length of a long wall displayed an extremely small percentage of the braided human hair collected from prisoners. The Nazi’s goal was to package this hair to sell to a local textile company to make hair cloth. For some students, it was various other material items that reminded them of family members- a thermos, eyeglasses, shoes, the list is long. I walked away convicted of the very real, sanctifying suffering that occurred on that ground. And as Lent is just around the corner, the small sacrifices I attempt will be nothing like the suffering of the victims at Auschwitz.

The next day, we visited the Divine Mercy Shrine where Saint Faustina walked her path toward sainthood. We arrived in time for a chaplet of Divine Mercy prayed in Polish and English, followed by a talk by Sr. Guadia on trust. She pointed out that in the Bible, Jesus never asked us to understand. When questioned, His simple response is to trust: “follow Me”. In a world where Auschwitz can exist, where many concentration camps still do, where pain and suffering can be found everywhere, it can be terribly easy to look out only for one’s own good- to trust in one’s own strength. While I am still tackling the significance of what happened at Auschwitz and many other places before and during the Second World War, I find comfort in the words of Our Lord. I don’t believe I will ever understand suffering, but the good news is that I don’t have to understand. Jesus only asks us to trust- and to follow Him.

Some free time in Krakow let students explore centuries old architecture, walk in the footsteps of Pope John Paul II, and experience local fare. Pierogies were high on many students’ lists of things to try. We were pleased to be surprised at how large the serving portions were at restaurants, for a relatively cheap price. A few students stumbled upon one of the best jazz bars in the city and enjoyed visiting with a native Polish man who lives in Australia and was visiting his home town.

A brief excursion to Wadowice before the long, eight hour bus ride back to Gaming proved to be one of the highlights of my trip. The plan was to tour John Paul II’s birth house and a museum. When both of these were closed, most of the students stepped into the church next door where Karol Wojtyla was baptized. About fifty people from the local community were praying in front of the Blessed Sacrament. While they were praying in Polish, we could tell they were praying the Rosary, the Divine Mercy Chaplet or the Litany of the Sacred Heart. It was refreshing to sit in the presence of Our Lord, to soak up His rays and to thank God for His mercy.

Poland is all too familiar with suffering. Yet from this suffering, many saints have emerged. While the Lord’s ways are all too mysterious for me to ever understand, I am grateful to know that I don’t have to. And while it is completely contradictory to many modern ways of thinking, and while suffering may be used to help me grow, I pray that I may always have the courage to say: Jesus, I trust in You.

Post written by Monica Rust, Spring 2010

Unforgettable Poland Impressions

Just returned from a 9 day trip to Armenia so the blog will be updated regularly going forward.

I’d like to offer a few thoughts about this past weekend’s pilgrimage to Poland, but I hardly know where to begin; it was a time that is as difficult to describe as it was to experience. I suppose I will just begin with what we did and then work in my own impressions, thoughts, emotions, etc.


We drove all through the night and arrived Friday morning at the shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa in time to see the unveiling of the Black Madonna image (done every morning at 6am with trumpets and drums and gongs). The devotion of the Polish people to Our Lady of Czestochowa I can only compare to what I experienced several years ago at the shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe - grown men weep and the elderly and crippled fall to their knees before this sacred image, so much a part of their heritage and faith. Visitors circle past the image on their knees and the marble floor is worn smooth in two tracks by centuries of pilgrims doing this same, reverential gesture.


I felt moved to tears by the devotion I witnessed - the peace within the walls of the shrine and the utter abandon of the pilgrims to their mother - the Black Madonna. The holiest and simplest of men have prayed there (Pope John Paul II being one of them) and you can feel it in the walls, in the air - see it in the eyes of the people around you. It is a beautiful, humbling thing to behold. And there, sitting mere feet from the image that has survived so much so miraculously, we celebrated Mass: how does one describe that? Only as heavenly, I suppose.




Our next journey was very different, though - in the afternoon we went to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The emotions there ran no less deep, but in such a striking, aching way, I'm sure you realize. Silence was the only proper response as we walked through gas chambers and blocks and rooms where prisoners were tortured, experimented upon, sterilized, raped, robbed of any scrap of dignity to which they had managed to hold. The inhumanity of it all disgusts you when you look at piles of human hair - waiting to be sold, made into nets or lampshades. As you look at rooms of shoes, no larger than your little finger, once belonging to the children who were the immediate victims of the gas chambers because they were not useful - not able to slave and mine and work and starve to a skeletal state before their deaths.



One block is filled with pictures of prisoners and the basic information the Nazis gathered at first - occupation, date of arrival, date of death - before they stopped keeping records altogether. You walk past, looking into the eyes of each, knowing they are dead long before you do the subtraction - 1 month, 1 week, a few days, a year or two for the luckiest...but the luckiest, you start to think, are the ones that died right away - who didn’t suffer this inhumanity, this horror for longer than a few weeks. You start to hope that the dates will be close together - that the man or woman whose picture you are looking at died quickly. It mixes up the soul to see such things.



But the stories of the heroes help - they restore your faith in humanity, remind you what each life is worth, of the dignity even the Nazis possessed because it is the dignity of personhood - a mystery and a gift, in my eyes. For I saw the starvation cell where St. Maximilian Kolbe spent his last days and I knew then that it is true what Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl wrote in his book Man's Search for Meaning: "Love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire...The salvation of man is through love and in love..." And as for mankind - I understood, at last, what he meant when he wrote: "Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips." It changes you for the better and demands you change the world.



A friend of mine said to me as we watched a car drive by the camp: "Imagine driving past this every day on your way to work." I said: "I can hardly imagine." But I can, can't I? In America, we drive past abortion clinics and think so little of the fact that we are treating humans the same as the Nazis. We are no better than Nazis if we imagine for one moment that human life can be rationalized away – the Nazis reasoned that for the good of the German people, the Jews must die; and we reason that for the good of the mother, the child must die. But doesn't this scream of un-truth? Love is the only answer;l we are too blinded (by culture, by politics, by our own ideas) to try.



Our next visit was to the Shrine of Divine Mercy and Sister Faustina's convent. How do I even start to explain that peace? There is no way to do so. It is a home for Love, itself. The grace and forgiveness and mercy there are tangible - they touch your heart and lift it out of your chest and wring it out. Then you sit back and soak in joy and love like you've never felt before.



All the while I was reminded of our last festival of praise when the FOP leader told us a quote from a saint who in a state of ecstasy asked Jesus what He did with Judas and to whom Jesus replied: "If the world knew what I did with Judas, they would abuse my mercy." Being there at the Shrine of Divine Mercy, located just miles away from Auschwitz (coincidence? - no way!) put everything back in order for me - I felt like I could understand how God can forgive and love mankind even after all we have done, and all the evil that remains in the world. It was an intensely emotional weekend – a pilgrimage that demanded much of us pilgrims – yet for many students it was the highlight of the semester so far, and I am sure I speak for all who went to Poland when I say that what we experienced there will remain with us and in us for the rest of our lives. Difficult to explain and describe, but no less life-changing for that – the Poland pilgrimage was truly all grace and blessing and I am sincerely grateful for the entire experience.



Blog post written by Cara Weiss, Fall 2009