By Angela Marshall
Rebecca Skolnik, Pam Wren and Elissa Masin, all Rockville Centre teens, were selected to participate in Project Understanding, a program designed to help young Jews and Catholics learn acceptance and tolerance. Each year 12 teenagers from Nassau County are sent to Israel to learn about both religions and each other.
Last year, the trip was canceled due to the state of affairs in Israel. But organizers felt the program was too important to let another year go by. They moved the trip to Rome and Eastern Europe and decided to combine participants from last year's canceled trip with those selected this year, 25 in all.
Rebecca, Pam and Elissa were soon told that their pilgrimage of understanding would take them to the home of the Pope at the Vatican and the gas chambers used in the greatest mass murder in history at Auschwitz and Birkenau.
On Feb. 13, they began their journey.
Although Rebecca, Pam and Elissa had grown up in the same village, they barely knew each other or the rest of the group. But these virtual strangers soon found themselves leaning on each other as they struggled to understand the horrors of the Holocaust.
Together they prayed at Auschwitz's wall of execution where over 20,000 were murdered during World War II. They prayed again at the ponds, still flecked with the white dust of human bones, located near the crematoriums in both concentration camps.
That day you didn't even dream of smiling, said Elissa, a South Side High School senior.
The barbed wire fences, once alive with 6,000 volts, were neatly rolled on the ground allowing the teens to walk in and out of the camps at will. Many of the barracks and crematoriums were destroyed, but the evidence of horror still lie all around them
