By Matthew Piasecki For nearly 230 years, Poland has struggled to be a nation. Ever since the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was dissolved in 1795 in the third and final partition of Poland, the Polish identity has been defined by a history of struggle and resistance. Whether it was the suppression of Polish culture under Tsarist Russia, the […]
By Katya Kauth On the night of June 10, 1942, in the quaint town of Lidice in what is now the Czech Republic, tragedy struck as Nazis invaded and wreaked havoc upon the town. Anti-fascist resistance had been growing in occupied Bohemia and following the murder of Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Reich Security Main Office[1], […]
By Danny Alpers No city in my mind has been more affected by the Cold War than Berlin. While military conflicts within the Cold War came and went, Berlin remained a city divided between East and West by the allies after the defeat of Nazi Germany for more than four decades until November 9th, 1989, […]
By Winter Cameron “We created our freedom within. That’s the best thing about it. It was like they did in prisoner-of-war camps, where they held Olympic games, sporting competitions, poetry recitals and had theatres performing, while they knew they did all of that behind the barbed wire. Yet, doing it all they felt free. That’s […]
By Emma Poper The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 was the largest urban insurrection in Nazi-occupied Europe. Instigated by the fighters of the Home Army, the underground resistance movement in Poland, the Uprising ended in approximately 200,000 deaths, the majority of which were civilians. During the Uprising, the civilians of Warsaw encountered extreme brutality committed by […]
By Nicholas Wilkerson During our trip to Berlin, we visited what was a major Jewish neighborhood in Berlin prior to the Second World War, known as the Bavarian Quarter, where famous Germans of the Jewish faith such as Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein once lived during the days of the Weimar Republic. The Bavarian Quarter was […]
By Emma Poper Walking along the streets of Europe is one of the most treasured activities among tourists. The streets are akin to the veins in a human; they lead to all the vital parts of a city. Traveling by foot you can stop and take in the atmosphere around you, whether that is the […]
By Katya Kauth THE EVENT In July of 1946, eleven guards – six men and five women from the Stutthof Concentration Camp – were hung at a public execution site in front of 200,000 Gdańsk citizens. The attendees, some being survivors of the Stutthof camp, chanted and cheered as the former guards were transported to a […]
By Nicholas Wilkerson When our class visited the former East Prussian stronghold, known as Malbork Castle, it was safe to say I was in total awe. As a dedicated history major with a focus on the medieval period, I knew there was no historical site like Malbork Castle, home and capitol of the Teutonic Order, the […]
By Danny Alpers When I decided to study abroad, I chose the Syracuse University Central Europe program because I knew that we would be traveling all over central and east Europe as opposed to other abroad programs that would spend the vast majority of their time in only one city. But I knew that a […]