“If humanity had prevailed I wouldn’t be here as a tourist” I thought when I arrived at Warsaw Chopin Airport. I was the first of my family to return to Poland after what happened. While I breath the same air that my ancestor’s breath I also thought that the 70 years ago I couldn’t be even be breathing here. The story of my home country is a tale of diversity, survival and coexistence. Argentina received more than 5 million immigrants between 1880 and 1930. Many of them escaping poverty and persecution. I live in Argentina thanks to the intolerance of those times. All of my family were from different parts of the Polish Republic, many of them from the city of Lodz. They fled because of hate, discrimination: antisemitism. As a human rights activist and a committed world traveler I think that the only way to tackle down prejudices and stereotypes is to travel, to know other cultures from within and trying to build bridges instead of walls. That’s why I returned to Lodz, not because there was I time that I was there but in the name of my family. Lodz it’s a post-industrial town that is still recovering itself from the many occupations that the Polish Republic had over the last centuries. The wars and the communist years shaped a city that has a main street with ancient and elegant houses of the end of the 19th century and rationalist soviet buildings in the city outskirts. Before 1939 Lodz was an example of coexistence between members of different communities. An industrial haven were everyone could work and thrive despite their differences. My family had a small textile company and they could practice their religion in peace attending the many synagogues that in those times were still standing. I arrived the fist days of July 2019, it was an atypical summer. A lot of rain and some wind were my company during the journey. While I walked the streets of the city I never forgot that I could be steeping on my ancestors’ path. Nowadays Lodz is growing, it has an interesting cultural environment and an important student community. Many companies are stablishing themselves. Everything is changed except Bałuty, a nowadays working-class neighbor that used to be the Jewish ghetto during the occupation. After spending many days visiting its grand and new museums, walking trough its main streets eating local treats such as Pączek and Zapiekanka and visiting their reconverted factories I decided to trip down memoy lane. The 16th of July of 2019 i took a tramway from Manufaktura, the trendiest shopping of the city built in an old mill, to Radagast Station. My journey under the rain was trough the streets of the old ghettos area. Radagast Station was built by the Nazis to transport Jews and Roma a Sinti from the Ghetto to concentration and extermination camps After visiting the station, I walked a few miles to the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe. That holds 18.000 graves. When you walk inside the graveyard its clear that sometime there was a vibrant community that nowadays doesn’t exists. There no rocks our traces of movement near the graves. Then I started my trip inside the old Jewish neighborhood, nowadays full of old soviet buildings. While I walk trough the alleys of old guetto I searched for “The Children of Baluty”, pictures of Jewish children that were deported posted in some walls of the neighborhood. I looked upon the Children Martyrs monument in commemoration of the many orphans that were locked down in what nowadays is the Szarych Szeregow park, thinking about the cruelty of war and genocide. The rain stopped while I walked trough the Survivors Park, where I visited the Righteous Among the Nations Monument commemorating the poles who helped save Jewish lives during the second World War and the Decalogue Monument that maked the post were a former synagogue was standing. The soviet buildings of Baluty were fading away while I past the ghettos border and returned to the 21th century. I walked the path of my ancestors. Traveling its not only leisure its cultural understanding, its memory, its history. Is so much more.