Standing inside a gas chamber, Natalie Francisco felt history — the darkest kind — come alive in a way no classroom lesson on the Holocaust could have.

Francisco, an 11th grader at Success Academy High School of the Liberal Arts–Harlem, told Jewish Insider that “witnessing Auschwitz-Birkenau, literally being inside a gas chamber, brought the horror of it all to me in a way that reading or studying history could not.”

“It was super emotional to think about the sheer inhumanity and the vast scale of it. I will carry the memories of the visit for the rest of my life,” she said.  

Fransciso was one of eight high school students who took part in the school’s inaugural six-day trip to Poland last month, which included visits to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the site of the Plaszów Concentration Camp in Krakow and the Warsaw Ghetto.

Success Academy, a network of New York City charter schools primarily serving low-income families, designed the new program as a way to give students “a direct personal connection and opportunity to understand this singular event in history,” Eva Moskowitz, the organization’s CEO and founder, told JI. 

While the trip to Poland came as antisemitic incidents reached record-high levels in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in Israel — and anti-Israel rhetoric has in particular surged dramatically in New York City K-12 schools, Moskowitz, who is Jewish, said the program wasn’t necessarily designed to combat the increase of antisemitism. 

“Even if there weren’t recent, horrific incidents of antisemitism, I would still want our students to understand [the Holocaust],” she said, adding that the trip was several years in the making, with logistics including obtaining passports for students, many of whom have never traveled outside of the U.S.

“At Success Academy, our students spend four years studying world history in middle school, and in high school students take both AP World History and AP European History,” continued Moskowitz. “Our curriculum is primary-source driven. But the ultimate primary source for the Holocaust is visiting an extermination camp.” 

Miguel Suriel, a student at Success Academy High School of the Liberal Arts–Manhattan, echoed that seeing the camps in person had a larger impact than learning about the Holocaust in class. 

“Nothing prepared me to witness where, and how, it took place. I am so grateful I got to see it with my own eyes. I will never forget it, and I am changed because of it.”

“It was the hair, the enormous piles of shoes, glasses and luggage that conveyed to me the 1.1 million people, mostly Jews but not exclusively so, that were deliberately and systematically murdered there,” said Suriel. 

Success Academy was founded by Moskowitz in 2006 to provide an alternative for students attending poor-performing New York City public schools. Nearly 90% of Success Academy’s 22,000 students are nonwhite, and 70% come from low-income families. Earlier this year, one of Success Academy’s schools was ranked as one of the top 10 public high schools across New York’s five boroughs, according to US News & World Report.

Ellie Miller, an AP U.S. history teacher at Success Academy High School of the Liberal Arts–Harlem, told JI that she could see from students’ faces “that this journey will leave a lasting impression, shaping their character and sense of moral responsibility.”

“While our students spend a significant time studying this singular event in the classroom, nothing compares to actually walking in the footsteps of this unimaginable history,” said Miller. 

Whether the trip will run again next year “is really a question of resources,” said Moskowitz. “I [think] it’s important to invest in our students’ understanding.” 

While funding only allowed for bringing eight students to Poland, those students presented their experiences to peers upon returning to New York. “We brought the entire high school community together to learn,” said Moskowitz.  

The American Jewish Committee called for a “swift political response” following the raising of plaques at the Jedwabne memorial site in Poland which falsely accuse Jews of being responsible for Soviets killing Poles during the pogrom that occurred there 84 years ago this week. 

At least 340 Jews were burned alive by their Polish neighbors in the massacre at Jedwabne on July 10, 1941. Marking the anniversary of the attack on Thursday, right-wing activist Wojciech Sumliński and his supporters illegally placed plaques in English and Polish several yards from the memorial, offering a revisionist account of what happened at the site. 

One of the plaques reads, “After the Soviets took over eastern Poland, Jews assumed administrative roles and, knowing the local realities, denounced Polish patriots who were then deported and murdered by the Soviets. Only the German attack on the Soviet Union halted these repressions. Then the Germans began killing Jews just as they had previously killed Poles by the millions.”

A separate group of right-wing extremists also disrupted a memorial ceremony at the site on Thursday with loudspeakers, screens showing a film denying the history of the massacre and threats to the Jewish community gathered at the memorial. 

“What happened today in Jedwabne is not only a disgrace to the memory of the victims, it is a test for Poland’s democracy,” Agnieszka Markiewicz, the AJC’s central Europe director, said in a statement. “The normalization of antisemitism, especially from elected officials like Grzegorz Braun, demands more than silence,” said Markiewicz, referring to Poland’s far-right lawmaker who on Thursday stated in a radio interview, “ritual murder is a fact, and Auschwitz with gas chambers is a fake.” 

“It demands moral clarity, legal accountability, and swift political response. Remembrance without responsibility is not remembrance at all,” Markiewicz said. 

The USC Shoah Foundation called the plaques “the most egregious perversion of [distorting] history, as it suggests that Jews collaborated with both Soviet and Nazi authorities against non-Jewish Poles. Such ahistorical, amoral claims are not only historically indefensible, but they are also a moral slander against the lives of those murdered during the Shoah and an affront to their memory.” 

Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, called for “the relevant Polish authorities to remove this offensive installation and to ensure that the historical meaning of the site is preserved and respected.” 

“Yad Vashem is profoundly shocked and deeply concerned by the desecration of historical truth and memory at the Jedwabne memorial site in Poland, where new plaques were recently installed in an apparent attempt to distort the story of the massacre of Jews.”