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In the small village of Veliucionys, Lithuania there lies a piece of history that is hidden away deep in a forest. Down a dirt path, over a quarry, through swarms of mosquitos and thick bushes one might come across a single stone marker commemorating the murder of over 1,159 Jews–a stone marker that reads in […]

On the 31st of December 1941, Abba Kovner, who later became the head of the FPO (United Partisan Organization), attempted to rally the Vilnius Ghetto population around armed resistance against Nazi perpetrators by revealing the extent of the Nazis’ plan and actions to make Vilnius, Lithuania and all of Europe “Judenfrei”. He was aware that the […]

Upon arriving in Vilnius, Lithuania I could immediately sense the city’s old feel. Having come directly from Warsaw, a city that was mostly destroyed and rebuilt after WWII, Vilnius had a very different feel. On our first night in Vilnius many of us decided to walk around and explore the city after dinner. Many of […]

Visiting the Green House Museum in Vilnius was very illuminating and provided important details about the Holocaust in the Eastern Territories.  Much of the positive experience can be attributed to our tour guide, who was well versed in Holocaust discourse and had a passion for Holocaust studies. While we covered the Holocaust in the Eastern […]

Our video showcases various physical viewpoints on the memorial that now stands at the site of the Treblinka extermination camp and its surroundings.  As one of the Operation Reinhard camps, somewhere between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews were murdered there. Our group of eighteen students and two professors of Holocaust history and memory explored the memorial […]

On an area formerly part of the Warsaw ghetto, directly opposite the POLIN museum, sits a monument much bigger than it appears in pictures. Designed by Nathan Rapoport, a Jewish sculptor from Warsaw who had fled east to the Russian zone to avoid Nazi persecution and was eventually repatriated back to Warsaw in 1946, the […]

After visiting Warsaw, I feel that certain aspects were very consistent with what I expected, while other aspects were very unexpected.  Before arriving in the city, I was aware of the absolute and utter destruction. Due to the ghetto uprising of April 1943 and the Warsaw of 1944, there was very little left from the […]

A summary of our visit to POLIN, the Museum of Polish Jewry, is available here. Group 1: Madeline Alburtus, Shayna Finkelstein, Ryan Nordheimer, Katie Hayes

Decades after nearly all of Krakow’s Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, the Jewish Community Center (JCC) Krakow is one organization pioneering Jewish revival in the city. We were lucky enough to sit down with two leaders of the JCC Krakow to hear what they had to say about topics such as the history of […]

Visiting Auschwitz II-Birkenau was a powerful experience for our entire class. Upon our arrival at the site, it was eerie to find that we were the only people there, an enormous difference from Auschwitz I. This was later contrasted by the masses of other tour groups who begun to arrive about halfway through our time […]