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elementary school. Um, you always see around you all kinds of soldiers there. We call it teacher soldiers. Um, so you always see soldiers also within the education system. Sometimes they even teach you something or they help you with your homework, and they're always around. So this kind of military becomes also a very, very strong part of the identity of the good guys. These are the people who, you know, who protect us, and they are good, and they are kind, and they're humanists.
And then when you get to high school, you start literally, uh, learning how to be a soldier already with the age of 16 because you are supposed to, once you finish high school, you're supposed to quite immediately, as soon as possible with 18, go to the army. It's obligatory. So the system is also very connected to prepare you for that, to be a good soldier. And one of the things that they are doing in the system is to first of all, give you one, so the, they, you're obliged to participate in one week at the, at the age of 16, 17, one week you go with your whole, um, age, age class to a milit, military base to be a soldier. You, you practice, and you even shoot the M16. You learn to shoot the gun. You're going through some kind of a shortened and a bit more light version of, uh, the, the, uh, the trainings that you then do really when you become a soldier and you put on the uniform. The, you have to, to do all the stuff.
I was really afraid. So I was, that's why I took it really seriously. And I remember all my friends in class and everything. They was telling me, "Ah, it's just a joke and everything." And I was, I was literally really afraid. First of all, they gave us guns to try to, to, to shoot. They were really training us to be soldiers. And I was still a kid. It was, it felt, it was quite, um, surrealist, I have to say. And we were sleeping in tents, like we were really experiencing the thing.
And in addition, another quite known thing that, um, the education system does is they take you to see the Holocaust camps in, uh, Poland. That's part of the system. You always have to pay for that, uh, extra because the system cannot, uh, really fund such a trip of so many children. So you, you, you, it's subsidized, but you still have to pay. So there was always a solution what to do with the kids who cannot afford it or the par, their parents cannot afford it. There was always some kind of a collecting money for them. So everybody can, if they want, they can go. And of course, it's, it's kind of, um, ending point or like a high point after studying a lot about the Holocaust. You study from history books what was done to the Jews. We talk about moral things. We talk about the Var, ghetto uprising, and you really learn quite detailed about the Holocaust throughout the years, and then you come to the point where you go and you see it with your own eyes. You, you experience it and you smell it, and they really want you to go through that process physically.
I didn't go. I didn't go with my class to Poland for different reasons. But later I became a teacher. I was a teacher in high school, and then I've came to see the whole process of what I've been through in, especially in high school, as a teacher. And one of the things that I joined my class to, to Poland to see the camps. We were lucky. I was lucky to be in a, in a quite left-leaning thinking team of teachers. Maybe otherwise, at that point, I was, I mean, at that point I was already quite aware, um, of some problematic situation of us as Israelis here, of Zionism. I was not declaring myself anti-Zionist. I didn't even think, it didn't come to my mind to, to talk like that. I was still very much in there, in the system, but I was very liberal and human rights kind of defender. So whenever there was, for example, um, um, some another assault on Gaza, and we would hear about it in the news, I would try to talk to my students and, uh, in high school and tell them, "Can we talk about, you know, the children in Gaza there? That, you know, let's, let's talk about the victims inside Gaza?"
Um, and that was always, I had to do it very carefully because sometimes people would, um, students would, uh, report me to their parents, and the parents would could, could tell it to my supervisors, and I might be either fired or put on some kind of a little trial they do inside the school, or some kind of sanctions or, or so I was afraid. I was afraid to really speak what I think as a teacher. I felt the responsibility, and at the same time, I couldn't play along with the, what I already understood that is going on.
So similarly, when we were going to Poland, I took it very much as, um, as a mission for me to not do it like everybody else is doing it. And what I mean by anybody else, everybody else, um, this trip, um, usually you, you come as, you know, first of all, you're in high school, you're 17, very wild and hormonal, you know, and you, you're excited to go abroad with your classmates, with your friends, and, um, there's a lot of experience beyond visiting the camps. But one of the things that is happening educationally, pedagogically within those tours is that there's always a guide who is, uh, practiced to do that. The teachers are just, you know, being there with them and following, um, the, the tour, but the guides are mostly trained. They're Israelis. The, they speak in Hebrew, and then they are trained to tell these kids who are going to go to the army next year, the connection between what was done to us and why we have to be soldiers in the army. So it's way beyond that it's just obligatory by law in Israel that you go to the army. You go there with your heart because you just saw what was done to the Jews.
And the methods, the methodologies in which very, very often, uh, those guys are showing children what was happening in the camps is through playing music, telling stories, making it very highly emotional. And one of the things that I find which is the worst is to let them physically experience. So they would tell, for example, "The whole class, now 30, 40 kids should go inside like a train wagon that was left in Auschwitz. You should feel how it is to be, you know, squeezed into this train like happened to our grandparents."
On a side note, I would say that not all these kids are Holocaust survivor descendants. I happen to be one. I have four grandparents who survived the Holocaust from Poland and from Hungary. And I think there was something always for me already as a, as a young ch, um, as a youngster that it was a bit unclear to me what is going on. Why everybody is supposed to feel sad like I do hearing the stories from my own grandma and seeing what happened to my parents as second generation because the trauma continues, and why people who came from North Africa are supposed to cry now in the camp in Auschwitz because of what happened to the Jews. I, I found my solution was that they cry because it's just horrible as a human being, you cry. But the guides, the guides of those tours would make them feel as if it's their story, and that's what bothered me. That's what bothered me. It's not their story. And they are, they might be Jewish, but they're not European Jewish descendants. And there was something in that, you know, it's the kind of the things that you experience where you, you, you, you bring a lot of questions.
So as a teacher, um, we, and and my team, we decided to, to sign up for another guiding company which is a bit more, uh, relaxed, more liberal, and more academic. So that we are going through the tour by not doing all these experimental kind of experiences and we try to keep it more academic to tell the story and to, to let them see it more like adults would do. It's never perfect. Even our guide, who I found quite, uh, professional, there was always this kind of thing of adding some music, trying to color it a bit more so they really experience this thing. And I remember something that had an influence of on me and two stories I can tell. One of them was that the students, so that's now as a teacher, um, being with my students, so I was 27 maybe at the time. One was that between the two, between the break, like in the break, the, some of the kids would say, "What is wrong with me? I'm not crying." They felt really, really bad that they don't feel sad because they see their friends, some of them are crying because it's horrible stories being told to them or experiences or pictures. And and that was, uh, quite a realization for me. The status quo, the expectation is that you come to this trip and you're going to break in tears and feel, you know, feel the story, not only listen to the story.
Another thing that was an eye-opening for me was that we were sitting in, um, at the edge of the camp of Birkenau, I think, next to, it's called Auschwitz-Birkenau. And we were sitting on the grass, and it was also a beautiful day, beautiful scenery in Poland. And the guide was, um, talking about, "Look, this is the edge of the camp. What do you see?" He asked the kids, because you see the fence. And the kids were saying, "Yeah, we see that, you know, there's a field, and they could see that there's a little town or some little hut of people are living around it, but it's in a, in a distance of, of, it's a seeable distance." And the kids, there was a discussion starting to happen. The kids were saying, "These people have lived here, right? They've always lived here also then in the 40s. Why didn't they do anything? They could see what was happening, or they could smell, they could smell the flesh from the crematorium of people being burned alive. They could hear maybe screams. They must have known what's going on. It's also, it's, it's been happening for, for a few years." And the kids were really asking that. And I was, I couldn't not think of specifically Gaza and generally the Palestinian situation. And I felt like this would be the right connection, um, educationally with the kids, not to tell them, "Yeah, you see, they didn't do anything because they are all anti-Semites," which is a voice that you hear often in Israel generally, not, not only in the education system. This feeling of growing up as a victim who became strong. So I'm a victim, and I will always stay a victim in a way, but at the same time, I have a strong army, and I am a humanist and democratic. That's, that's the education you get. Whether it comes from the education system directly or indirectly, from your home, from parents who are not so educated, from the street, from the media, it's, it's all around you. And it's really just about making this, this small connection between, um, seeing, you know, the victims of one story and seeing the victims of something happening in the present to make this small connection. That was the process for me, just through learning so much about the Holocaust, that it was so easy for me to just clearly see that how come we are doing something very similar to other people, different methods, different technologies, different times, different, uh, capacities, but we are literally oppressing, humiliating another people who are living across the fence from us.
Anti-Zionism was a term that when I first heard it, I was afraid of it, and I never had in mind that I would call myself as such because I didn't know much about it. And then I figured that I don't know much about Zionism, actually. And especially since the 7th of October, which really changed my life and many people's life, um, I started digging fast and, um, into books, into, uh, interviews, into testimonies to fastly understand what is really Zionism apart from what we learn in school. Zionism was the salvation of the Jews from the Holocaust. Um, and it's, uh, it's not completely wrong, but it's a very, very minor.
Since 7th of October, I, I dived very fast into history books, into testimonies and texts to relearn Zionism because up until a very late point in my life, I didn't really understand what Zionism was. And once you read the text, it's all out there. That's the amazing thing. You look at the text of even important people in Zionism like Jabotinsky and Pinsker, and of course Herzl himself, and you see that it's colonialism. They are also talking in those terminologies up until I actually looked at the texts. I never thought about it like that, and I didn't realize that there was something inherently in Zionism which was violent and not humanist like they tell you in school. And therefore, it was quite quickly when I understood, "Okay, now I understand what anti-Zionism is about." If we really want to live in the same land in Palestine, and I wish I could do that, I have to live together with the other people. I, I just, it cannot be anything else, and it cannot be Zionist. And I don't even care how this land is going to be called. That, that was how the story.