Well, I am getting more and more excited all the time. In mid-November, I received my flight arrangements, and today, I completed all my travel and medical release forms. This trip is becoming more and more real all the time!
When my trip gets underway in January, I will be flying from Huntsville, Alabama, to Houston, Texas, on a commuter plane. I will then fly an overnight flight from Houston to Munich, Germany. After a short stop in Munich, I'll head to Warsaw. Hotel arrangements haven't been sent out yet. I believe we will be spending the bulk of the trip in Warsaw before heading to Auschwitz and Krakow. On the way home, I'll fly from Krakow to Frankfort to Dulles (Washington, D.C.) to Huntsville.
I have been able to connect with several other educators through Twitter. Our hashtag is #pastispresent. I resisted Twitter for a long time, but I am really enjoying it. I primarily use it for professional reading - I follow lots of education folks - but I am so thankful to be able to "meet" my colleagues be for we begin our journey. This weekend, we also got a link to the group Wiki. All of the group biographies are posted there, so we can learn about each other prior to the trip. That's been fun to read. Staff bios are coming soon, and with those we will learn more about our companions from Discovery Education and the USC Shoah Foundation. I look forward to meeting and working with this amazing group of educators!
Additional preparations are also underway from an academic perspective. All participants have been asked to watch video testimonies from the iWitness website. This website houses thousands of testimonies told by survivors themselves. It is an unbelievable database of stories. I am so thankful that their accounts will be available for generations to come. I registered my classes for this website as I was completing the application process for the trip, and we used it some to complete research as we wrapped up our Holocaust study. Over Thanksgiving weekend, I was able to watch an entire (2 hours) testimony of one survivor.
I chose to watch the video of Erna Anolik, a Jewish survivor. She was born in Czechoslovakia, and was taken to Auschwitz as the end of the war approached. She spent time at that camp, where many of her family members were killed, before being moved with her sister to a work camp in Essen where they were used as slave-labor at the Krupp ammunition factory. She, her sister, and four other young women later escaped that camp, hid out for a few days, and were then housed by a German sympathizer. She was called to testify at the Nuremberg Trials. I was so impressed with her story; she was so articulate, and she recounted her life story in a powerful way. She wasn't particularly sad or upset. She was matter-of-fact, and she made connections to things that I never considered. Watching her was like watching a dear older-generation friend tell her life story. It was very present; it was very real; it was completely captivating.
After watching her story, I am as eager as ever to watch more testimonies and learn more and more about the people who actually experienced this tragedy first-hand. I look forward to watching the testimonies of people who were at Auschwitz at the time of the liberation. I want to learn more about the liberators. I want to learn more about survivors in the period immediately following the war. Mrs. Anolik never returned to her home. . . that just seems unimaginable, but I feel sure that there were many survivors who knew that nothing would be there to make the place "home."
As each new travel plan, or connection to a colleague, or piece of learning comes my way, I am more and more excited and honored to have a chance to be part of this experience. I know it has already made me more globally-focused. I am sure that I will be forever changed.
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