Poland Personally 2025: Day 2: Warsaw and Treblinka, June 23, 2025 by Kimberley Butler
Today would have been my Mother’s 81st birthday. After five years, it hasn’t become easier to live without her unconditional love, wisdom and guidance. Well into adulthood and well past my youth, her absence still cuts like a knife daily, but especially so on holidays. She wasn’t the victim of murder or genocide, so I […]
Time and History by Eric Graf
This poem is by Lucille Clifton, and I chose it because the poem suggests a cyclical nature of time and history. As I prepared for this trip, I could not help but feel that the dark forces that lead to the holocaust are emerging again in our century. The Mississippi River Empties Into the Gulf […]
Arriving to Warsaw
by Eileen Schmucker I traveled alone without my GROUP to Pittsburgh because I was not in Florida when they left. So I have many hours waiting in the airport for the Pittsburgh group to come. This is actually pretty good because I was able to kinda put myself in a zone for meeting new people […]
Reflection by Sarah Gordin
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 fabric of Berlin for these ten minutes. I wonder what my grandmother and […]
Final Thoughts by Fred Akman
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 to visit the concentration camps and other historically significant sights. That trip changed […]
Echoes of Silence and Sound at Grunewald Station Memorial by Adam Reinherz
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 German Jews negotiated cobblestone and ascended Track 17. Few people talked after we […]
Germany and the Liberal International Order by Andy Laub
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 and a visit to the foreign office to learn about Germany’s foreign policy. […]
Destroy. Rename. Or remove. By Josh Leib
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, in concrete terms, how the Germans have come to terms with their past, […]
Berlin’s Hidden Histories: A Journey Through Everyday Memorials By Jillian Korey
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 buildings were destroyed during World War II. For years, the city struggled to […]