Project Atlantis: Journal of a Trip to Poland in the Search of its Jewish Past

For 1,000 years preceding the Holocaust, what one could call a Jewish civilization existed in Eastern Europe. The language widely spoken by this community, Yiddish, practically vanished with it. Poland was an important center of this civilization, being the European country housing the largest number of Jews. Part of my ancestors used to live in the country, before migrating to the New World in the 1920s, escaping pogroms and poverty.
A lot has been told about the death of this community at the hands of Nazi Germany, but not much has been written about its life. Who were these Jews, how did they live, what was Jewish life like in Poland? Where exactly did my ancestors come from? What were the struggles that pushed them to cross the Atlantic, even before the Nazis came to power? What was their shtetl like?
Those were some of the questions I have asked myself over the past years, from time to time, and I have now decided to look for answers by traveling to Poland. I am publishing what was initially supposed to be a personal journal in order to share this experience with family, friends, and people who would like to learn more about this practically lost civilization and its history.