USF HONORS STUDENTS TRAVEL TO EASTERN EUROPE TO EXPLORE THE
LESSONS OF THE HOLOCAUST
Thomas W. Smith, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and Campus Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences Odd as it sounds, it was a beautiful June morning at Treblinka, in eastern Poland. The sun was shining and birds were singing in the pine forest nearby. There was no sign of the gas chambers the Nazis had used to exterminate some 925,000 people in the course of thirteen months in 1942 and 1943. Instead, a garden of 17,000 stones represented all the cities and towns that had once been home to the Jews, Poles, Roma and others who were murdered at the site. Our visit to Treblinka took place on the first morning of the Judy Genshaft Honors College’s summer 2023 study abroad class, “Confronting the Holocaust.” Over the course of two weeks, eighteen Honors students traveled across Poland, the Czech Republic, and Germany, contemplating the horrors of the Holocaust in places where it happened. We toured the Warsaw Ghetto, the Jewish Quarter of Prague, and a variety of synagogues, museums and memorials. In Krakow, we stayed in the old Jewish neighborhood of Kazimierz, and visited the factory owned by Oskar Schindler, made famous by the movie “Schindler’s List.” We devoted an entire day to exploring Auschwitz-Birkenau. In Berlin, we visited the lakeside villa where the Final Solution was conceived, and toured the German Reichstag, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and the Topography of Terror Museum.
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Students experienced the sites in many ways. At Treblinka, a group of students joined hands and prayed. At Auschwitz, several students decided not to take photographs or post on social media out of respect for the dead. A student whose great-great grandfather was active in the Polish resistance shared her family’s story with her classmates. Students reeled, literally, at the Jewish Museum in Berlin where the walls are slanted and the floor is inclined to suggest that in the wake of the Holocaust the rational world no longer makes sense. The class learned how centuries of antisemitism foretold the killing of Jews, how racism and dehumanization pitted neighbor against neighbor, and how modern propaganda propelled state terror. But students also noted the persistence of art and music in the Terezín concentration camp, countless acts of courage and kindness in the midst of the terror, and the recent resurgence of Jewish life in Kazimierz. At the end of the class, students felt a renewed responsibility to embrace the lessons of the Holocaust and to uphold the promise of “never again.” As the Holocaust survivor and theologian Elie Wiesel put it, “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”
