Study Abroad Reflection 5

The most striking visual image of my travels does not come from Berlin, but from my weekend trip to Krakow where I got the chance to visit Auschwitz. During the rest of my travels, I was constantly asked what the best place I visited was, or the coolest thing I saw. It’s hard to say Auschwitz was the coolest place I saw, because it isn’t what you typically think of as a “cool” European travel spot, but I cant think of anywhere else I’ve been in my life that has had such an impact on me.

Upon our return to Berlin, I was asked by my other classmates how the weekend was; at first I decided I wasn’t quite ready to talk about it, that I had yet to process what I saw. But I’m still not sure how prepared I to reflect on the experience. By now the lines are a little blurred; the images of human hair shaved to make Nazi officer outfits, the ruins of the gas chambers that could kill thousands at a time and the now barren grounds where so much injustice happened are becoming less clear in my mind, but the feelings they evoked are still the same.

Auschwitz was an extreme example of what happens when people are alienated and things go array with the world. Although I encountered a lot of other striking examples of Holocaust in Berlin and across other European countries I visited, they almost all moved me in a different way, but I don’t think anything will compare to what I experienced at Auschwitz. It is an eye-opening visual expression of the lowest point of the human experience and what can really happen when hatred and alienation occur. One of the worst parts about Auschwitz was realizing how applicable it is to even the world today. As we learned in Berlin, and as is apparent when reading the news of all the suffering around the world, everyday people are still attacked for their differences.