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Last Friday, Dr. Jeff Kleiman and his
wife, Kim, left for Germany and Poland with a four
UW-Marshfield/Wood County students and one Marshfield Senior
High student. The group joined students from
Canisius College, Buffalo, NY,
and will be pursuing studies related to Kleiman’s
class, “The Holocaust: Politics of
Peace, Nationalism and War.”
Studies in
foreign countries are always a benefit for students. To
reiterate the jargon of those who promote such programs,
these studies broaden students’ horizons and provide them a
global perspective. Depending on your viewpoint, such
studies/travel make one see the world as a bigger or smaller
place.
Naturally,
our Germany/Poland trip will accomplish all of that for the
participants. But I am hoping that its particular subject
matter will create an impression on these students like no
other. Students will visit former concentration camps.
They will walk the streets of the Warsaw ghettos where men,
women and children were forced to flee their homes at
gunpoint. They will visit Nuremberg and see where a form of
justice was meted out.
This is not a
pleasure trip. In fact, it could be described as a
“downer.” So much human suffering. So much cruelty.
Students will no doubt leave Dachau, the new Holocaust
Memorial or the Jewish Cemetery changed in some fundamental
way that no classroom, textbook or photograph could ever
accomplish.
My wife and I
visited Poland, but did not to go to Auschwitz. As students
of history, we reasoned that we already knew enough about
what went on in the camps during World War II. Maybe that
was a mistake. Can anybody know too much about man’s
inhumanity? It is the understanding of past mistakes – or
in this case past atrocities – that provides hope for our
future.
It is
students like those now in Germany and Poland who are
keeping that hope alive. They will graduate from
UW-Marshfield/Wood County, go on to other universities, get
jobs and raise families. But no matter what they do with
their lives, they will remember what they saw in Germany and
Poland. They will remember what they learned and what they
saw.
Dr. Andrew
Keogh is the dean and campus executive officer of
UW-Marshfield/Wood County, a freshmen-sophomore campus of
the University of Wisconsin.
