One of the images etched into my brain from the 1987 visit is of the Umschlagplatz — the point near the ghetto from which those 300,000 Jews were loaded onto trains bound for hell. There was a gas station on the site when we visited, cars coming and going with nary a nod to the brick wall displaying a few words of acknowledgement and some flowers. Thirty-five years later, I needed to see what had become of the place.

Today, the Umschlagplatz is one stop on what our tour guide called the “Path of Heroes and Monuments,” where stone markers throughout the old ghetto commemorate its history, culminating at the memorial to the uprising outside the POLIN Museum of Jewish History. It turns out the serene gray stone Umschlagplatz memorial was erected in 1988, just one year after my teenage self was horrified by that gas station.

Designed by a Polish architecht, Hanna Szmalenberg, and sculptor, Władysław Klamerus, the memorial’s walls enclose about 1,300 square feet of contemplative space. Above the entryway is a frieze depicting a shattered forest, a Jewish funereal symbol of premature, violent death. The back wall has a vertical gap through which you see a tree that grew after the war — a symbol of hope and rebirth.

That back wall is etched with names in alphabetical order. Aba, Abel, Abiel, Abigail, Abital, Abner, Abraham through to Zakkai, Zachariasz, Zanwel, Zofia, Zuzanna, Zanna. Our guide said they were 300 typical Jewish names in pre-war Poland, each meant to represent 1,000 of the people taken from the site to Treblinka. The Wikipedia entry about the memorial says it is 400 — each commemorating a thousand victims of the Warsaw Ghetto — and that they are a mix of typical Jewish and typical Polish names, to “highlight several hundred years of coexistence of the two nations in Warsaw and the overlapping of their cultures and religions.” I’ll have to go back again someday to count.

A quote from the Book of Job is inscribed on a building adjoining the memorial: “O Earth, cover not thou my blood, and let my cry have no place.”

I’m thinking about the Umschlagplatz and Poland generally, of course, because yesterday was Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the annual March of the Living from Auschwitz to Birkenau. Some 260,000 people from 52 countries have joined the the march since it started in 1988. Thousands more have visited the camps, and probably the Umschlagplatz, on summer programs like mine, on school trips most Israeli Jews make at least once, or on family roots tours.

This year’s march, as our Nora Berman and others have written, might be the last to include actual survivors of the Holocaust, since they are rapidly dying off. That’s part of why I was so proud to publish yesterday an interview of a survivor, Ruth Hass Meissner, by her 17-year-old nephew, Nathaniel Schmidt.

“You really can’t explain what it is like to be really hungry,” Meissner said of her three years in Theresienstadt. “It’s funny, my son used to come home from school and say he was hungry, and when I would offer him something, he would say he doesn’t feel like it. So I said, so you are not really hungry, because when you are hungry, you will eat anything.”