Every visitor to Poland arrives with a different story.

Some come as students. Some come as historians. Some come because their grandparents survived. Others come because their grandparents never left.

Each deserves to remember in their own way.

Before we arrived, I carried questions I had wrestled with for years. Knowing that some Poles had collaborated with the Nazi occupation, I wondered what it would feel like to travel through Poland. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I carried those questions with me as we entered Birkenau.

For most visitors, Birkenau is a place of unimaginable horror.

For me, it is a sacred place of remembrance for the families in my congregation whose loved ones were murdered in the Holocaust. Over the years, I have had the privilege of listening to survivors and their families tell their stories. Standing there, I felt the weight of those stories.

The one-minute prayer was not planned. Once I stood there, I knew I had to recite El Malei Rachamim—the traditional Jewish prayer for the souls of the dead.

It almost didn’t happen.

At the site of one of Birkenau’s crematoria, where so many Jews were murdered, I respectfully asked the Museum-assigned guide leading our group if I could recite a brief memorial prayer. It would have taken about a minute.

She told me it would be better if I prayed somewhere else—somewhere........

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