A year ago, I planned a three-generation family journey to Poland for April 2026: my Polish-born father, my husband and me, and our two teenage sons.
We would visit Warsaw, where my grandparents’ families had lived for generations until they escaped during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and hid in an attic in a house in the forest. We would bear witness at Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau, then travel to Łódź, where my father was born.
But four weeks before departure, the skies to and from Israel suddenly closed due to war.
My older son was on a gap year in Israel. As a British citizen, he might have been able to scramble onto a flight to London and then on to Warsaw. But with flights back to Israel cancelled, there was no certainty he could return. He chose to stay.
Having spent two and a half months there by the time the war began, he insisted he did not feel stranded. He wanted to remain in Israel and experience Pesach there as a free Jewish young person. Despite weeks of broken sleep, sirens, and repeated trips to the safe room, he had come to know Israeli society in a deeper way. It was where he wanted to be.
So the trip went ahead. My father, my younger son, my husband and I landed in Warsaw.
Walking through Warsaw or any waking moment, for that matter, while your child is in wartime Israel, is not for the faint-hearted parent. As we moved through the city, I checked my phone constantly to see where he was. At one point, the location app showed him near Ahad Ha’am Street in Tel Aviv.
Ahad Ha’am differed from Herzl over whether a Jewish homeland should be primarily a political refuge or also a cultural centre of Jewish life. Today, Israel is both.
In Warsaw, we passed the words of Chaim Nachman Bialik inscribed on the wall of the POLIN Museum, from a 1903 letter to his mentor, Ahad Ha’am: “It was a time of primeval chaos… of end and of beginning… all the silent feelings of our heart looked for a prophet.” Bialik was writing after the Kishinev pogrom. He understood that for Jews in Eastern Europe, security could vanish overnight. He also sensed that out of catastrophe something new might yet be built.
As we walked the streets of Warsaw, Kraków, Lublin and Łódź, inherited memory filled the spaces around us. It was impossible not to feel how precarious Jewish life in Poland had always been, even in its flourishing periods.
As we walked through the Warsaw district of Praga, my son called from northern Israel, where he had spent several days with a family of Australian olim and joined their Seder. Once home to many of Warsaw’s Jews, Praga is now fashionable and vibrant, with little visible trace of those who lived there before. While we wandered streets where Jewish life had all but vanished, my son reflected to us that the Pesach story felt different when retold in Israel, on the land the Israelites left slavery to head towards.
Our next stop, Auschwitz-Birkenau, is overwhelming in its scale, and more so in the bitter cold wind of a season that should have been spring. After two hours at Auschwitz, we stood outside a barracks at Birkenau when my phone rang.
I smiled to see my son’s face, grinning at me from my phone with the stones of Jerusalem shining behind him. As we contemplated the destruction of Polish Jewry, he was in a market, calling to ask what size t-shirt to buy for my brother.
The poetry of speaking to him in Israel while I stood in Birkenau was profound.
As Yom Ha’atzmaut begins, I think about the distance between where I stood and where he stood. I was in Birkenau, where Jewish life from across Europe was meant to end. He was in Jerusalem, sunlight behind him, choosing gifts for his family.
My grandparents escaped the Warsaw Ghetto on April 19, 1943, with nothing, and hid in an attic for fourteen months. Three generations later, their great-grandson feels at home as a Diaspora Jew in a Jewish state, speaks Hebrew slang, and chooses to remain there even in difficult days.
There are many ways to measure independence. Sometimes it is found in the hard work of building a society, sustaining democracy, and arguing over the country you want to become. Sometimes in the ability to defend Jewish life, and in remembering and mourning those who died doing so. It is there in the weight of Yom HaZikaron as it bleeds into Yom Ha’atzmaut, grief and celebration held in the same national breath. And sometimes it is found in public holidays and street names.
And sometimes it is found in something smaller: the ordinary freedom of a teenager calling his Diaspora-dwelling mum, from Jerusalem, about something as mundane as t-shirts.
Adele Stowe-Lindner sits on the boards of the Zionist Federation of Australia and Maccabi Tennis Club Victoria, Australia. She has a Masters in Leadership, and has worked in the community sector, managing change, for over 20 years.