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MAYFIELD - Mayfield High School social studies teacher Jennifer Wasserstrom tells a story about her trip as a Fulbright-Hays scholar this June, one that, she says, should encourage people to travel outside of their comfort zones, because the benefits of doing so are endless.

Her group's flight to Warsaw, Poland, was canceled, so they had to board a bus from Washington, D.C., to Newark, N.J., to get on a flight that would take them to their destination.

The Fulbright trip was designed to allow American teachers to travel to the new democracy, which broke from Communist rule only two decades ago, to learn about its government, and to also allow them to see the camps throughout Poland where Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.

A man on the bus asked the group where they were from, and they told him about the Fulbright-Hays program. The program provides grants that allow individuals to travel internationally and participate in educational programs in the countries they visit.

All expenses were paid for by the Polish government. Wasserstrom was one of 16 teachers nationwide selected to be a part of this particular trip after a lengthy application process, and she represented the smallest district of any of the teachers.

The group willingly told the man what it was doing. The man began talking, and it eventually came out that he had worked to prosecute Nazi war criminals as an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice. He told them about his experiences, and the trip, which allowed participants to see firsthand what Nazis had done to so many Europeans during World War II, began in earnest.

Such stories, Wasserstrom said, show the value of travel. Wasserstrom said she has learned more in her travel than she has doing many other things.

"Where would I have ever met this man but on an hour bus ride?" Wasserstrom asked last week as she sat in her classroom recounting her trip. "You meet the most amazing people."

Some of those people included members of Poland's parliament, as well as the Polish minister of education and deputy minister of foreign affairs for the United States. Poland, she said, is a country in transition-when Communism ended there in 1989, many of the government-sponsored factories in its small villages and towns closed and people were left out of work.

In that way, Poland resembles Detroit-or Gloversville, not so long ago.

Because teachers visited Holocaust concentration camps-Wasserstrom teaches a course on Holocaust history at Mayfield High School-the trip sometimes got emotional. Every person had their breaking point, Wasserstrom said, and hers came early in the trip, when the trip's guide told the teachers about a Jewish person who had operated a concentration camp death chamber.

Now, she said, her job is to bring the material back to her students.

"It's still a work in progress," Wasserstrom said. "I think I'm still going through the process of understanding the trip and how I want to bring it in [to the classroom]. Every day, for four weeks, was a different lecture or a different tour. It was such an immense amount of information, so I'm still filtering."

She said the trip will help her during her Holocaust history class because it made her realize how much Americans view the genocide as a German phenomenon. Poland was destroyed by the Holocaust, she said, and the majority of the murders happened in the country.

She also said it has allowed her to put things here in perspective. This area, she said, is very similar to Poland in a lot of ways.

"New York complains that we have a huge brain drain-students who get educated here and then they leave because it's too expensive," Wasserstrom said.

Poland has people who study physics, and chemistry, and are incredibly smart, she said, and they leave Poland because they see better opportunities elsewhere, so it resembles upstate New York.

Wasserstrom said she is thankful to the Mayfield Central School District's administration and Board of Education, who allowed her to leave school 10 days before graduation to go on the trip and supported her application for the program.

Because of that, she can forever be known by the prestigious title of "Fulbright-Hays scholar."

"I love it when people say that," Wasserstrom said.

Zach Subar covers rural Fulton County news. He can be reached at ruralnews@leaderherald.com.