Holocaust Study Abroad Reflection

Ashes, Ashes They All Fell Down:
Expressing Through Pictures What Can Not Be Expressed In Words

We have all heard it a thousand times to justify dull, monotonous history classes: “If you do not know your history then you are bound to repeat it.” Study Abroad has shown that one can never truly appreciate why the mistakes of history should not be repeated until he or she has stood on the ground on which history occurred. The pictures displayed aim to communicate the significance and importance of The Holocaust victims and what they endured before they were murdered on the ground where the 2010 Study Abroad group stood on not long ago.

Experiencing the history of The Holocaust so forcefully has sparked a heightened awareness and interest in preserving the memory of The Holocaust in all of us. Many of us purchased souvenirs in the various cities we visited, but many of us also purchased literature specific to The Holocaust at the most significant sights. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girl Remembered is one book I purchased which tells a firsthand account of Ruth Kluger, a woman who survived Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Christianstadt concentration camps. In the forward, written by Lore Segal, Segal expresses Kluger’s worry that the “act of literature betrays what was experienced in The Holocaust: don’t words make ‘speakable’ what is not?” Thus the theme of this essay emerges. Words cannot express the severity of The Holocaust. Kluger, a survivor of the largest extermination camp—Birkenau, can only describe the fear she felt as “the psychological equivalent of epileptic fits.” Survivors can tell us their stories with the most potent language imaginable, but we can only make associations between things we know and things we can never imagine, in order to respond with shocks of muffled recognition.

All of us attempt to express to our own audiences what we saw and felt on this trip. We are well aware that this is impossible. For nothing we say, combined with any multitude of displayed pictures or souvenirs will ever translate our experience to an outside party. We have all gained knowledge of The Holocaust affairs that can only be gained from raw emotions evoked from first had exposure to the physical locations and remaining structures where the most brutal crime against humanity took place. How are we to express to family, friends, and colleagues what we felt as we walked in and out of concentration gates where not long ago the only route of escape for inmates was through the chimneys of gas chambers? We cannot. Kluger’s book asks what one is to do with knowledge that is “like a bullet lodged in the soul where no surgery can reach it.” This experience has given us this type of knowledge. Each returning study abroad student feels a personal responsibility to never settle, or allow our audience to settle, in whatever watered down attitude towards The Holocaust that we have created for ourselves. Today I challenge our audience to be discomforted—to revisit and rethink their understanding of The Holocaust—in order to help fulfill the responsibility we each have to knowing the history of The Holocaust, so these mistakes will never be repeated.

-Meagan Clark