I am currently sitting in a park on the grass in Berlin. It is the last day of the Germany Close Up program. The sun is shining and I hear beautiful opera music coming from one direction. I feel apart of the…
As a PhD in the Holocaust field and a teacher, it was only natural when presented with the opportunity to take this trip that I jumped on it. The previous summer, I traveled with a group of North Carolinian teachers to Poland…
Traversing crushed gravel generates noise. So does walking on a platform. Eyeing departure dates, destinations — Lodz, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz — and tallies doesn’t, but wind gusts and intermittent storms do, as does a nearby train, which still runs 80 years after 10,000…
The last time I wrote a blog post I talked about the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic Konrad Adenauer setting the template for a modern day Germany. Today that all came full circle in our seminars about antisemitism, contemporary German politics…
Destroy. Rename. Or remove. In America, memorializing difficult parts of our past falls into three categories. Three categories fail to represent the intricacies that the memorial likely represents. A major goal for me as I came on this trip was to understand,…
Today we arrived in Berlin, emerging from a stunning, modern train station into the vibrant hustle and bustle of a major metropolitan city. I had to take a moment to remind myself that less than 100 years ago, about 80% of Berlin’s…
On our train ride to Berlin from Nuremberg, spans of green and tan fields flashed by my window, decidedly different from the expansive sand-colored mountain landscape of my home in southern California. Fluffy, verdant green trees lined the tracks and began to…
Today we travelled to Nuremberg. Our first stop was the Nazi party rally grounds. Not the ones that have been finished and used (though we saw that at the end of the tour) but the new ones in progress and then abandoned…
The last thing we saw before leaving Dachau was a Russian Orthodox chapel. Its modular structure was erected shortly before the Soviet Union crumbled, Gerd Modert told us. The tour guide, who trains Dachau’s tour guides, said the Soviets wanted a record…
Today we visited the memorial at the former site of Dachau Concentration Camp and the Munich Documentation Center for National Socialism. What strikes me the most is how so many similarities can be seen between what occurred in the years leading up…
The Resilience of Survival and Reconciliation for the Future: I was incredibly moved by todays DAAD/Classrooms without Borders visit to the Dachu Memorial. I was at first struck like any human being by the raw of emotion thinking of the lives senselessly…
Today was the first day for the Classrooms Without Borders cohort’s Germany Close Up Fellowship. Our group of over two dozen Jewish young professionals from all over the United States and Canada have gathered in Munich to begin our journey, reflecting an…