By Alexander Wilgocki Europe, specifically Central Europe, is full of memorials. Any capital or large city has its own monuments, statues, and plaques, to memorialize the tragedies of each nation’s past. Of all the memorials, the majority of them refer to the conflicts and atrocities of the 20th century. Of these events, the Holocaust is […]
By Raymundo Juarez My professors warned us against it. They said the potential for violence was too great. A moral panic ensued through our classroom. Some of my fellow classmates in Syracuse University’s Exploring Central Europe program and even a professor said they were shifting camp elsewhere for the weekend in order to distance themselves […]
By Autumn McMillan “In America, the color of my skin had stood between myself and me; in Europe, the barrier was down.” -James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (1952) Originally, I had the idea of writing a reflective piece on Black American identity in Europe. I felt the urge to write the piece when I […]
By Jay Skelton As our group traveled around Europe, the most common type of place we visited was a memorial of some kind or another. Most of those we saw were for the victims of Nazi genocide and the Holocaust, although some were dedicated to soldiers and those who fought and died for their country […]
By Meredith Conway I don’t believe our visit to the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews could have come at a more crucial time. The experience we had at the Warsaw Rising Museum the day prior is partly to blame; it was almost unanimous the museum was overwhelming with too much information and […]
By Aren Burnside When examining history, there is often a struggle between remembering people versus remembering facts, especially when it comes to tragedies. I felt this struggle when visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau. Growing up in the United States, my education about World War II and the Holocaust were focused primarily on these facts. We were taught to […]
By Kristen Varganova As we’ve traveled from one country to the next, the number of visits to mass murder remembrance sites increased dramatically. Aside from the painful history, most memorials that we visited on our trips were set alongside breathtaking scenery. From Lety to AuschwitzBirkenau, and the Sinti-Roma Memorial, I couldn’t help but notice the […]
By Abbey Metzler One. I had been in Poland for just over a month, when I suddenly found myself in the Poland I had always read about. Well, it never was called by the name Poland in those stories. It was just a place. Usually a dark place, with endless woods encroaching on the safety […]
By Clare Toner As I entered Auschwitz for the first time, I did my best to hold back tears when we walked through the gas chambers where thousands of Jews were brutally murdered and looked at exhibits holding shoes that were taken from Jews upon their arrival at the camp. It was an emotionally draining […]
By Edward You During my stay in Berlin, the experience in the African Quarter is certainly a unique one. The area’s name is tied to Germany’s colonial past. A rather inconspicuous neighborhood nowadays, there, one finds streets named after German colonies in Africa and infamous German colonizers. This site is much less visited by tourists compare […]