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The decision of Steve Felton, a Princeton ophthalmologist, to join a summer mission to Poland and Israel with the Cantors Assembly, affiliated with the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, was a very personal one.

For Felton, who was born in 1942 in the Warsaw ghetto, this trip was an opportunity to reconnect with his first home; to visit Auschwitz, where his father and half-brother were murdered; and to spend time with descendants of the family that allowed him and his mother to survive. He made the trip with his wife, Barbara, and 18-year-old son, Jake.

For Ronni Ticker, her mother, and her three siblings, this trip was a celebration of her mother’s 80th birthday by way of a visit to her grandmother’s home in Krakow. For Ticker, it helped her understand the Austrian culture that had formed her grandmother’s identity as well as the terrible losses she experienced during the Holocaust.

For Leah and Joel Tenenbaum, the trip was a pilgrimage to reconnect with their European forebears. As Leah explained, “I always felt that I needed to go to that part of the world, to go to Auschwitz, to go to the concentration camps, and I always felt it was a trip I wanted to take with a Jewish group.”

Her husband’s reasons were similar. "One of the reasons I wanted to go was sort of a roots quest,” said Joel. “It was where members of my family had come from — members of my family that I never met because they didn’t get out. It was important for me to touch base, and it was very fulfilling.”

Cantor Murray Simon of the Jewish Center in Princeton and his wife, Tobe, led 21 Jewish Center members, who joined 65 cantors for a total of about 300 participants, on a musical trip to Poland and Israel from June 29 to July 12. Two years in planning, the trip was the brainchild of Cantor Nathan Lam of Los Angeles, the past president of the Cantor’s Assembly and current president of the Cantors Assembly Foundation.

“The concept was to build bridges between Poland and the Jewish community that was in residence in Poland for over 1,000 years, but unfortunately was lost in the Holocaust,” Simon said.

The trip was planned with the help of the embassies and governments of the United States, Poland, and Israel.

“It was not just a tour,” Simon explained. “It was a mission to do state occasions with these countries in an effort to build bridges through culture, through music.”

Despite the positive movement that Simon saw in the Poland of today and the mission’s efforts to make connections with the Polish people, Felton came in part to reaffirm bridges that were already strong between his family and the Poles who helped save his life. His own story began when his 16-year-old mother, Eva, moved to Warsaw, where her oldest brother was a lawyer, to study nursing at St. Joseph’s Nursing School.

When Eva finished school, she married Felton’s father, a widower with a son, Stasha. They did well economically, his father an industrialist, and the family was well known as Zionists. In 1941 they had to move into the Warsaw ghetto, at about the time that Eva was trying to find out what had happened to her parents and family.

“A Polish person made contact with her and told her they all were shot in the woods,” said Felton. She lost six siblings, and her parents, and one sister saw her child killed before her eyes.

“My mother was really depressed and wanted to kill herself,” said Felton, but a doctor in the ghetto recommended that she get pregnant as an antidote to the depression. “It was kind of a silly thing to do under the conditions that existed there.”

Yet she followed his advice, and Felton was born in 1942; he was two months premature, but his father managed to put together an incubator.

At this time, the Germans were starting to round people up and take them to the Umschlagplatz, the gathering place where trains loaded up people who were told they were being resettled when they were actually going to Aushwitz. Felton’s father was trying to arrange for papers to go to South America, but was able to get his wife and young son out of the ghetto through smuggling contacts.

Felton and his mother were taken to Krakow, where his mother barely talked her way out of being arrested by the Gestapo — by claiming to be a Polish woman whose husband was at the front. The fact that Felton was not circumcised was helpful, but the suspicion they aroused forced them to leave Krakow and hide out for awhile in the woods. Eventually they returned to Warsaw, because his mother wanted to go back to the ghetto to be with her husband and other son — but the guards wouldn’t let her in. With no food, in fact with nothing, she was desperate and went looking for the policeman who was her teacher’s brother. Going from station to station, she finally found him.

“As soon as he knew who she was, he said, ‘Come home with me’,” Felton said. The policeman took them into his home, and then he and his brother, a resistance fighter, organized where Felton and his mother would go and how they would proceed from one place to another without raising suspicion. This continued from the spring of 1943 until the end of the war.

His mother posed as a Polish woman and got work on the outside, and Felton was left in the care of family members; one of his longer-term caregivers was 12-year-old Helenka.

Felton visited Helenka and her husband in 1988 with his mother and daughter, but it was difficult to stay in touch afterwards because no one in the family spoke English. Once his mother died, he lost complete touch with his Polish saviors. But when Felton joined the cantors’ mission, he knew he wanted to get together with them again and introduce them to his wife and son. He did have several phone numbers, and a Polish colleague kept trying them until he finally connected with Michal, Helenka’s grandson, who spoke English.

While in Poland they spent a couple of days with Michal, his mother Maria, and Helenka’s husband. Felton had brought along a book with pictures of him and the Polish family as well as a manuscript of his mother’s memoirs that he gave Michal to read. He also told Michal, “I would really like to know your side of what happened.”

“You always hear that the Poles were as bad as the Nazis,” Felton said, “that they turned in Jews and got rewards. But significant numbers didn’t.” Felton still finds himself wondering: Why did they do what they did? Why did they take the risk? What was their motivation?

Michal’s grandfather offered a succinct answer to Felton’s questions: “Because we had to.” But Felton would like to know more than that. “This Polish family were my saviors,” he said. “For sure, they risked their lives to do what they did.”

The Feltons’ presence on the trip added a special dimension for everyone from the Jewish Center — not only that he was a survivor and had come back in part to meet with the family that saved him, but because of the group’s shared experience at Auschwitz.

The group got permission to hold the first-ever Torah service at Birkenau, on a Thursday morning. During the Torah service, they unwrapped the entire Torah, one saved from the Holocaust, and “wrapped” it around the 12 survivors in attendance and their families. “It was the most moving, unbelievable moment that I have ever experienced,” said Tenenbaum.

For Ticker, who had been Jake Felton’s teacher during his bar mitzvah year when he had written his “hero report” about his uncle who had been in the ghetto, the experience was very special.

“During the Torah service, they opened up the Torah the whole way and it was just remarkable. They asked everybody with a tallis to walk up, and Steve and Jake took my tallis so they could have their hands on the Torah, helping to hold it up,” she said. When Barbara Felton came up to her afterwards, Ticker said to her, “Now I know why I was here.” Felton responded, “You needed to be here for us.”

Ticker had her own family experiences when the group visited Krakow. She and her mother and siblings were able to visit her grandmother’s house in Krakow. When her grandmother was a teenager, she collected rents for her father, a butcher who owned the buildings on either side of their apartment house. Because some of the apartments were being renovated, Ticker’s family were able to see some of the rooms where her grandmother and her six sisters had lived.

Later while the Tickers were in the Remuh synagogue, whose ark was carved in 1558, they found a memorial plaque with her grandmother’s last name — Molkner — and in the cemetery nearby they found a number of Goldfingers, which had been her great-grandmother’s last name.

At Auschwitz, Ticker found that her grandmother was very present for her, and she came to an understanding of who her grandmother was.

“My grandmother never recovered from the pain of the Holocaust,” Ticker said, “and people judged her as a cranky, angry, sad, difficult woman because of it. What I realized in Auschwitz is that we can’t possibly judge another person without knowing what they lived through.”