abroad in order for them to connect and feel connected to the subjects and events we teach about during the academic year.
Our study tours have brought us to some incredibly beautiful and inspiring locations around Europe
and Central America, experiences that in some cases alter my students’ perception of the world by offering them a small glimpse of the very real truth that this world is a beautifully strange place filled with wonders that are just waiting to be explored. And I dare say that one of the most important lessons I hope to teach them is to recognize that as Americans, our way is not the only way, and that we must celebrate our human diversity with respect, peace, and love.
In 2014 and again in 2017 we offered something different from our normally jovial and culturally significant student tour. Both years were focused on humanity’s darkest chapter, the Holocaust. As a culminating experience for these trips I took my students to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial that preserves the authentic remain of this largest Nazi concentration camp and extermination center.
I knew that a few hours at this location would do more for their understanding of the enormity of what the Nazis did than the weeks we spent studying in class. There is a heaviness at Auschwitz unlike any place I’ve been, a heaviness that is difficult to describe, which of course is the point.
There is something about the physicality of experience and the realness of tactility that offer a deep sense of understanding, perspective, and at least a chance at total clarity. To feel something or someplace gives that thing or that place an identity which is no longer abstract and allows us to become a living part of that thing or place.
It is why people walk 500 miles to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, why Muslims perform Hajj, why Americans visit Ground Zero in New York City, and why I brought my students to Auschwitz. I did not want my students to only see the Holocaust through the relative safety of a textbook or memoir.
In this realm Auschwitz can remain an abstract. It gets housed in the recesses of the student mind, far away from the lived and connected human experiences that demand attention. I wanted them to feel the heaviness, to feel the darkness, for there is no better way to place the Holocaust in a proper human, emotional context.
In preparation for this visit, my colleagues and I attempted to prepare students for the possible emotions they would feel as they walked through the Arbeit Mach Frei iron gates which stood at the entrance of a few German concentration camps.
We did our best to help them understand that “being there” and being present at the location where more than one million people were murdered would be like nothing else they had experienced. These students knew the history of what happened here.