Students visit Holocaust memorials, clean-up cemeteries

Students spend many hours each semester reading about major historic events, but it is an entirely different experience to be in the presence of the areas where the historic events actually took place.

Recently, a study group traveled to Ukraine, Poland and the Czech Republic to visit former Holocaust camps and ghettos, as well as museums and memorials at Babi Yar, the Treblinka extermination camp and Majdanek concentration camp, among others. The group consisted of Rob Franciosi, professor of English, Grand Valley honor students, nine faculty members from educational institutions in the U.S. and Canada, two Air Force cadets and a doctoral student from London.

"The vastness of Auschwitz-Birkenau can be stated in a text or illustrated via maps, movies and photographs, but encountering the physical geography brings an entirely new dimension to one's knowledge," Franciosi said.

Franciosi added that during expeditions such as these, students learn that history is not only the story of what happened, but also how we choose to remember what happened in the past.

"At every turn in the trip, they confronted layers of historical memory and commemoration," Franciosi said. "Indeed, in the Ukraine, recent events illustrate this process at work. We could see evidence of how the Soviet Union imposed a form of memory on Ukraine. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukrainians acted to recover their own historical memory."

The study trip was sponsored by the Holocaust Education Foundation of Northwestern University, and was underwritten by Grand Valley's Joseph Stevens Freedom Endowment.

Created to honor its namesake, a Holocaust survivor who often spoke to classes at Grand Valley, the endowment not only sponsors lectures about the Holocaust and other human rights topics, but it also assists Grand Valley students in their travels to Europe.

Ariana Martineau, a junior who is majoring in history and education, said visiting the former camps sent her on an emotional roller coaster.

"The memorials left you speechless as you stood there overwhelmed by the realization that this was and is so much bigger than you could have ever imagined," Martineau said. "This trip was a life-changing and eye-opening experience; you can't really see the world in the same way afterward."

A portion of this trip also consisted of traveling to various neglected Jewish cemeteries to clean them.

Martineau said that although the Holocaust is a heavy topic, the sadness and pity typically associated with the subject should not be the primary focus for students.

"You see all of these terrible things that humans did to other humans, but what should be taken from studying the Holocaust is to learn from other people's mistakes and to make sure they don't happen again," Martineau said. "This trip really affected the way I look at some world issues because sometimes I can spot similarities to some things going on in our world now."