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In Poland, Kentucky State Students Learn About the Holocaust

Photo credit: Robert Lewis Kentucky State students assemble before their departure for Poland. Back row: Ashantye Jones, left; Joe Kelly; Nancy Fain; Bernadette Woodyard; Deborah Byers. Middle row: Sherri Coles, a mental health counselor; Serretta Thompson; Jessica Cranfield; Sarah Risch. Bottom row: Phillip Stacy; Ollie Jones Sr.; Aaron Terrell and Christopher Hogan.

By Anthony Anamelechi
Black College Wire

Ten students from Kentucky State University have returned from a trip to Poland intended to teach college students about the Holocaust, calling the journey powerful, emotional and one that provoked comparisons with their African American heritage.

"It was an intense trip," said Aaron Terrell, a public administration major from Aurora, Ill. He could still recall the look of the former concentration camps. "It looked like a big booby-trap," he said of one, describing the barbed wire and the towers. "It looked like it had been planned for years."

The Kentucky State students participated in the March of Remembrance and Hope: A Student's Leadership Program and Mission to Poland, an educational program about the torture and murder of millions of Jews by Germany's Nazi regime during World War II. Germany annexed parts of Poland, where it established Auschwitz, the largest death camp of World War II, and other such camps.

The program was originally intended for Jewish students, but was opened to college students of different religious and ethnic backgrounds to teach them about the dangers of intolerance and to promote better relations among cultures. "It was like going back in history . . . in a time capsule," said Nancy Fain, interim director of global education and programs at Kentucky State. Fain accompanied the students.

After seeing the Holocaust sites and the marks still borne by surviving Jews, Terrell said he could not believe that people "still deny that it ever happened," speaking of the Holocaust. "I've learned to be grateful for the things I have," he said. Students complain, but "we've never been through these horrific things," he said.

Fain agreed that "it was an emotional trip." She said her most memorable moment was seeing a blanket used by the Nazis that was made out of human hair. "It just floored me," Fain said.

Serretta Thompson, a social work major from Lexington, Ky., said the trip made her "think about strength and faith." Thompson said she saw these traits in the Jewish community through the many memoirs read to the students and the speeches they heard from survivors.

Thompson recalled walking into Auschwitz and seeing the barracks. She and her classmates saw a movie on the former concentration camp's horrific past. "It was intense," said Thompson. "It allowed us to have a higher definition of what the Holocaust was."

After seeing the determination of the Holocaust survivors and their "continuing a tradition and a legacy of people who had to be strong," Thompson related their struggle to her African American heritage, including slavery and the civil rights movement. Just like the Holocaust survivors, "we can still sustain and be strong if we keep faith and persevere," she said.

Columbia Gas paid for airfare, hotel and meals for 75 Kentucky students, at a cost of $2,250 per student. The students were responsible for their passports, insurance and transportation to Newark.

Before departing, the students took a three-hour special-topics course on the Holocaust. They learned basic Holocaust terminology and watched such movies about the event as Steven Spielberg's 1993 film "Schindler's List" and Roman Polanski's 2002 "The Pianist."

The program began in Newark, N.J., where the students met almost 300 other students from more than 20 other schools in the United States and Canada. Kentucky State was the only historically black college or university.

Here is their day-by-day chronology:

• May 22 – The students attended seminars in Newark that touched on topics related to the Holocaust. Seminar leaders spoke about tolerance and such issues as what they said was a lack of attention given the Holocaust by international and American journalism.

• May 23 – Seminars discussed the Nazis' medical atrocities, learned about victims who were not Jewish, discussed martyrs and heroes, and viewed a documentary on Jewish children who were separated from their parents and hidden. The group met Maud Dahme, one of these hidden children. The students left for Poland that evening, arriving the next day.

• May 24 – The group visited Lodz, Poland, the second-largest Jewish community in prewar Poland, and Czestochowa, a city in southern Poland known for the Paulite monastery, Jasna Gora, home of the Black Madonna painting of the Virgin Mary that draws Catholics from around the world.

• May 25 – The students visited Auschwitz, whose administrators killed the largest number of European Jews during the war.

• May 26 – The group headed to Krakow to see the ghettos where many Jews lived in harsh conditions. Oskar Schindler, who became well-known through "Schindler's List," employed Jewish workers in his factory and protected them from extermination.

• May 27 – In Warsaw, the group visited Jewish monuments and cemeteries. They visited a former Jewish ghetto where remnants of the walls still stood.

• May 28 – In Warsaw, the students saw Lublin, a former center of Jewish life, commerce, culture and scholarship. They visited Majdanek, site of "Erntefest," code name for Operation: "Harvest Festival," where a one-day massacre of 18,000 Jews occurred on Nov. 3, 1943.

Students on the trip were Deborah Byers, an applied information technology major from Dunbar, W.Va.; Jessica Cranfield, a biology major from Chicago; Christopher Hogan, a public administration major from Dayton, Ohio; Ashantye Jones, a social work major from Macon, Ga.; Ollie Jones Sr., a physical education major from Louisville, Ky.; Sarah Risch, an elementary education major from Owenton, Ky.; Phillip Stacy, a history major from Shelbyville, Ky.; Terrell; Thompson; and Bernadette Woodyard, an elementary education major from Corinth, Ky.

Anthony Anamelechi is a student at Florida A&M University.

Posted June 12, 2006