I am just back (last night) from a January term trip about WW2 in Europe. Twenty years ago, I took students on my first Janterm study trip at Austin College, a a WWII trip (several of you FB friends know about that one pretty well, since you were on it!!! (and others know the trip from AC WWII trips 2 and 3--you know who you are!). We went from London to Paris to Normandy to eastern Belgium (the Bulge) to Amsterdam to Dresden to Berlin to Krakow to Vienna. In one stretch, we slogged through battlegrounds (it was snowing at Bastogne!), cemeteries, and related sites for a week without staying anywhere more than one night, except once (two in Bastogne). We had some relief from the momentous history of these places a couple of times: for example, the students had a snowball fight at a German bunker deep in the woods at Heartbreak Crossroads (Wahlerscheid), a piece of the West Wall, just north of the famous Twin Villages. No trivialization, though. In spite of needing to blow off steam now and again, most of my students were locked and loaded when it came to understanding the importance of seeing these places, just as in the past. The big cities of the war were easier in a sense, but still complicated. Auschwitz was… well… what it is. We visited the two cities intimately connected by relentless bombing, Coventry and Dresden. At the end of the trip, we studied some good history in Vienna close up, but partly we just tried to recover a bit from what was for many a deeply emotional study experience. On this trip, as on all the others, I was struck keenly and often with the thought that helping a group see and imagine some of the important and tragic and terrible events of World World II on the very spot where they occurred has been a wonderful privilege for me.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 22:13:45 +0000
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