(Jewish Group) Reporters' notebook: An intensely personal trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau

This week, we traveled to Poland to help commemorate the 80th anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews revolted against their Nazi oppressors, who had forced them to live behind barbed wire walls in horrific conditions.

We also participated in the March of the Living, an annual two-mile walk from the Auschwitz concentration camp to Birkenau, where Nazis brought Jews from all over Europe to be starved, humiliated, terrorized and murdered in gas chambers.

For both of us, this trip was intensely personal.

I thought I knew what was in store for me visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau. I had been there some years back when I was working on a report for CNN about my family history – I’m the child of Holocaust survivors. I had heard my parents, both Polish Jews, speak of their painful experiences surviving the war. But I never knew my grandparents because all four of them were rounded up by the Nazis and killed during the Holocaust.

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