In the 1970s, I opened my heart to an understanding of the Holocaust.  I traveled around Poland in 1975, taking various conveyances or simply walking toward the darkness, some places marked in remembrance and most hoping to be forgotten.  I stood before the ovens at Auschwitz.  I encountered a drunken man who squired me through the Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw.  It was an awful bog of forsaken headstones slumping helplessly upon each other. Neither history student nor tourist, mine was not a carefully planned trip.  The people I encountered living under communist tyranny stared at the way I was dressed – not because it was immodest, but because it was different.  The closest I got to Treblinka was a dank roadhouse.  When I tried to communicate the purpose of my travels, nobody would speak to me or even look at me. Now I will describe the shards of a nightmare, but it really happened.  I have never written this, and almost never spoken...(Read Full Article)