Category: Blog

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 […]

Oświęcim is a town in the southern part of Poland which is known as the place where Auschwitz is located. Apart from its connection to the notorious camp, this town has a seperate history of its own. The history of Oświęcim dates back to the 12th century when it was an important centre of the […]

Around 1.5 million people were murdered in Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Since then, the camp has become one of the most recognizable symbols of this genocide.  The infamous “Arbeit macht frei” gate, the rows of identical bunks, and the gas chambers have all been cemented in the minds of millions around the globe.   In 1940, the […]

Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp  was opened on July 12, 1936, after being built by prisoners. Located in Oranienburg, Germany, near Berlin, it was initially used by the Nazi Party to imprison political prisoners. Soon enough, “asocials,” homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Jews,  many of whom were arrested during Kristallnacht. After the camp was liberated and the war […]

I appreciated the opportunity I had to research the Berlin Jewish Museum before attending it; the process helped me conceptualize how a museum could teach me about the repression, violence and memory of the Holocaust with its physical structure more than with its historical content.  As a result, I could critique— rather than merely identify– […]

On the morning of May 17th, our group visited the Topography of Terror Museum. Located at the location of many important former Nazi buildings, the exhibits here focus on a perpetrator perspective by trying to explain how the Nazis logistically committed a genocide. The museum did this by explaining events in a thorough, chronological way, […]

The House of Wannsee is the location of the notorious Wannsee Conference, the meeting where Nazi officials discussed and decided how to implement the extermination of European Jewry in January 1942. When you drive up to it, you are greeted with a large iron gate containing a beautiful mansion overlooking Lake Wannsee. It is located […]

Our first city, Berlin, was a great introduction to the remainder of our trip. As the center of the Nazi empire and place where many important executive decisions about the “final solution” were made, the city has a unique history in relation of to the Holocaust. In Germany and Europe, there was a history of […]

“The Federal Republic of Germany shall erect a memorial in Berlin to the homosexuals persecuted under the National Socialist regime.  With this memorial, the Federal Republic of Germany intends: to honour the victims of persecution and murder to keep alive the memory of this injustice, and to create a lasting symbol of opposition to enmity, […]

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe stands in the center of Berlin. It consists of 2,711 concrete blocks of varying heights and widths that cover 19,000 square meters of space in the center of the city. This memorial consumes a large piece of real estate in a part of the city and intersects […]

We visited the “Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered Under National Socialism” on our first day in Berlin.  The memorial commemorates the 220,000-500,000 victims of the Porajmos, which is the Nazi genocide of the European Sinti and Roma peoples. Since this was our first day in Berlin and on the trip, my […]

Students gathered at Newark Liberty International Airport and boarded a flight with United Airlines to Berlin.  Graduate assistant Hannah Dinkel is accompanying them on this transatlantic flight. Professors McGlothlin and Walke will be waiting for the students at Tegel Airport on Tuesday morning.