Albion College Holocaust Studies Service Learning Project

Hands-on Albion experience! Jim, Mickey, Rebecca, me, Anthony, Mary Ryneck of Wroclaw I wanted to do an overall wrap-up post of the trip and am finally getting around to it. We had a long day of traveling to get back to the US. I was able to do some lovely math homework before we boarded each plane and then did lots of sleeping and reading while on the flight.  Our group on the last day at the cemetery  (with the groundskeeper) Book Chairs outside of a mall in Krakow This trip was an amazing experience. The topic of the trip was difficult, but each and everything we did was rewarding and had a purpose. We spent days laboring in the cemetery, doing as much as we could in the little time we had to work there. We went on half a dozen tours to really explore the places we were visiting and learned so much about Jewish history in Poland. We were able to attend a community Shabbat service which was really really fun. We went to museums to learn about the his

One section of the Warsaw Ghetto Wall Today was our last day in Poland! We had a tour of Warsaw in the morning and a meeting with Warsaw Hillel, then we were free for the rest of our afternoon. Our walking tour was very interesting. We saw the last remaining pieces of the ghetto wall, buildings that survived the war, and many monuments dedicated to the people who perished throughout the war. Our guide told us that the ghetto was actually divided into a smaller section and a larger section and they were separated by a single street. The two parts were eventually connected by a bridge that went over the street. This tour was a really great way to learn about the history of Warsaw and see a lot of the city in a relatively short amount of time. After our 3 hour tour, we met with a person from Warsaw Hillel and she talked to us a little bit about what they do. One way that their services differ from in the US is that they get a lot of cases of adults coming in having been told that thei

Monument for Janusz Korczak We got to sleep in today! We left at 9:45 to walk a few miles to the museum that we would be visiting today, the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews. On our walk there, we passed a memorial dedicated to Janusz Korczak (Dr. Henryk Goldszmit) who was the director of an orphanage in Warsaw. When the Second World War broke out, Korczak stayed with his children rather than fleeing to another country. When his orphanage was forced to relocate to the Warsaw Ghetto, he went with his children. He stayed with his children until they were all forced to be sent to Treblinka, an extermination camp. He was witnessed walking through the town with all of his children, some as young as two or three years old, each carrying one toy to bring with them on their journey. He chose to stay with his children all the way until they were sent to their death at Treblinka. This story was told by one of our faculty members and it was very hard to hear. It was extremely courag

The entrance to the Muzeum Narodowe We reached our final destination! The first half of our day was spent traveling from Krakow to Warsaw. During the last 45 minutes of the drive, I started paying attention to the scenery around me. The buildings weren't very big and there were a lot of industrial businesses and a few companies that had Chinese as the primary or secondary language. That caught my eye because for the past week or so I have really only seen Polish, English, and occasionally German. I also noticed a large use of solar panels which is awesome! When we arrived in the city the traffic picked up a lot, there were many more tall office buildings and a huge shopping mall. After arriving at the hotel with one wrong hotel in our recent past, we waited for our rooms to be ready. While we waited, we were given a map and I spent the time figuring out where our hotel was and where the places I wanted to go to were. The transit map was very vague, so it was difficult to figure

Today we visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. I wasn't sure how to quite prepare for such an experience, and after being there, I don't think there was a way to. When we drove up to the entrance, it didn't feel like we were driving up to the largest concentration camp of the Nazis. There were food stands and gift shops advertising postcards and posters. There were a dozen and a half or so charter and tour buses parked and huge groups of people in line to take the tour. I'm not sure what I was expecting to see, but I didn't expect it to be as commercialized as it was. It is difficult for me to respond to a place that has that dark of history, and looking back on while I was there, I wasn't thinking much during the tour. The entire time I was there felt surreal. I did not take many pictures because I wanted to be in the moment absorbing the information, rather than taking pictures of everything. Throughout my visit, it was very hard for me to comprehend that there were ove

We had a very busy day with lots of walking. We had a 7-hour (primarily walking) tour. We went to Plaszow, Schindler's Factory, the Jewish quarter, a cemetery/Synagogue, and finally Wawel Castle. In total today, I walked 7.5 miles all around Krakow so you could say my legs are pretty tired and my feet a little swollen. A memorial for all of the unmarked people who were murdered here from 1942-1945 The guide we had for our 7-hour tour was very knowledgeable about Jewish history in Krakow and Poland and I think a lot of our group learned something new, whether it was something they already knew, but learned the meaning behind it, or simply something they had never been taught. For example, I knew about the tradition to place stones on the gravestone of someone who has passed, but I didn't know where it originated, or the reason for why flowers are never seen in Jewish cemeteries. I had a lot of different feelings at the Plaszow Concentration Camp. The number of prisoners,

Ryneck of Krakow We left for Krakow today at 8:30 in the morning, and after a three-hour drive, arrived at our hotel. As we were told, Krakow is very different from Wroclaw. The city itself is not only bigger but much more urban and has a much higher population. The traffic didn't flow as efficiently and there were fewer people walking in the outer parts of the main square. There is still a lot of public transportation, though I am not sure how it is compared to Wroclaw. Since today was used as a travel day, we had most of the afternoon to ourselves. After checking into the hotel, we got ready to walk to the main square. The walk was a lot longer than in Wroclaw, roughly a 30 to 35-minute walk to the heart of the square. We stopped at the Jewish District to see where we would be meeting up for our group dinner. The faculty person that walked with us there told us that Krakow was largely undamaged by the war, so most of its buildings and the Jewish District are original, but i

The stone I placed on the bottom left-hand corner of the first stone I uncovered Today was our last day in the cemetery which was very bittersweet. We worked for about two hours then we stopped and said goodbye. Judaism has a tradition where they leave stones on a gravestone in remembrance of that person, so our faculty gathered a bag of stones, and we were able to take a few and place them where we wanted. I chose to leave mine three stones on the first headstone I found, the headstone of the professor from the second day, and the last stone I worked to uncover. My experience over the two and a half days that we were able to work at the cemetery is difficult to put into words. I was overwhelmed with so many different emotions, but overall, I felt at peace and honored to be a part of what I was able to contribute to the relatively small area we were working on. Our field on our last day! The first day was impactful because we uncovered an absurd number of headstones, t

TJ Maxx in the mall Today we were rained out of the cemetery, which was very sad, but it allowed for us to have a big chunk of free time to do what we wanted. I took advantage of the later morning and slept in a little bit, but made sure that I was at breakfast by 8:30. After breakfast, I went with a few girls to the Magnolia Park Mall. To get there, we had to be adults and figure out the Tram on our own, which wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. We spent about two hours there walking around and I bought two shirts! We came back to the hotel a little bit before 12 and learned that the Synagogue that we were supposed to tour had lost power, so we weren't able to tour it today and we aren't able to attend the Shabbat dinner that we were supposed to have tomorrow. The Old Jewish Cemetery We had a 4-hour walking tour around Wroclaw which was very interesting. We walked, took a bus, and a tram, all around Wroclaw to see different Jewish sites. Our tour guide was

Me in the process of pulling a sapling Today was very similar to yesterday. We woke up and went to the cemetery, came back and relaxed for a little bit, and then went to dinner (only this time as a group). The weather was much warmer today than it was the past two days which was nice. The main focus of today's work in the cemetery was more of the groundwork, so I spent the vast majority of my time pulling saplings (oak and maple) and picking up branches, with the occasional spotting of a headstone or plot that I was able to uncover. As I was working, I started thinking about the amount of time and effort I was putting into finding these saplings and whether my time would be better spent clearing the brush and looking for more covered gravesites. It wasn't until one of our faculty said that it's the trees that do a lot of the damage in the cemetery because the roots will push the stones up or cause them to break completely that I realized this simple job is just as impor

After a good nights rest, a yummy breakfast, and some coffee, we were off to our first day working at the cemetery. To get there, we had about a 7-minute walk to a tram station, where we rode for probably 15 minutes, then a short walk to the entrance. The tram is a popular form of transportation in Poland and is known for being very efficient. I was able to sit and observe the buildings and cars that drove by. All except one of the cars that I have seen have a manual shift, which was surprising to me because, in the States, most of ours are automatic. Our Plot before we started working on it We got to the cemetery and it was amazing. It's a huge area with huge trees. The front of the cemetery has a lot of new, polish catholic styled gravestones, whereas toward the middle and back was more german influenced headstones. While we waiting for the groundskeeper, Dr. WcWhirter gave us a quick tour of the fields. A German restoration group that works to restore Jewish cemeteries an

Wroclaw Cathedral It's 7:30 pm in Poland, and finally, I am able to lay down and get some sleep! It was a crazy travel day, with one very close-called connection flight. We  arrived in Wroclaw around 10:15 this morning (about 4  am in Detroit) and settled into our rooms by 11:45. We were given a quick tour of how to get to the Ryneck (City Square ),  then let loose to explore! Wroclaw is a very cool area with a lot of restaurants, stone roads and walkways, and tons of churches. I had  pierogies  for lunch at a traditional Polish restaurant, then followed along with a group to explore Wroclaw beyond the square. We saw the River Oder,  a little bit of the University of Wroclaw campus, and the restored Wroclaw Cathedral which was very badly damaged during WWII. After those few hours of exploring, I finally went back to the hotel to relax and take a short nap. We were allowed dinner on our own as well, so I went to a Kebab shop which was very good! Tomorrow will be more structure