The end of a journey, but we’ve made new friends…and we beat Princeton!

Today was our last and maybe our hardest day. I can’t explain enough to the world out there what a hard trip this is. Most people don’t get it. For most people at ODU, it’s one of many classes, and we have lots of hard classes at this university. And students probably don’t realize when they sign up for it how hard a class it is, intellectually, emotionally, and physically! So here are some of the difficulties and delights.

1. We often walk 10 miles a day. Sometimes it’s very cold and this trip and been cold and rainy. We’ve been drenched and cold. I’m cold by nature…look at my pictures, I have on a down vest, heavy jacket and rain jacket in most of the pictures! I bought new boots (in Krakow with Melonie) when my old ones leaked. My legs ache so much at night that I wake up with leg cramps. I’m in my 5th decade and have to carry on as if it were my 2nd or 3rd decade. I have to push myself sometimes when I’m just so tired, and that mean’s I’m pushing my dear colleague, Tom, and the wonderful students….who can all get put out with my obsession to see as much as possible. No one signed on for Annette’s trek into Poland’s past, but everyone held up mightily We are a hearty bunch! One guide told us that the Princeton students couldn’t make the Warsaw ghetto walk with her; they complained and she had to cut the tour short. Not us, not ODU, we pushed on!
2. There is always unpleasantness. One of our bus drivers made an antisemitic comment. The students were asleep, and I cut him off quickly. But… Our two African American students felt the pain of racism as well, as people stared at them and there was some unpleasantness.
3. We had to see and learn things no one ought to have to see and learn. Going to sites of genocide is never easy, but on this trip we saw in particular the desolation of landscapes like Chelmno and the killing sites tied to Holocaust by bullets where Jews were killed in forests and buried in mass graves. The pits moved for three days afterwards, we know. But seeing them now is really difficult. Vegetation grows heavily where bodies are stacked beneath. One learns these things over time, but it’s hard to inculcate. I learned things on this trip with regard to pregnant women that I dare not write about on a blog out of respect for those who suffered horrific deaths.
4. And then we have the delightful part of study abroad, new relationships and new friendships were made. Karerra Smiley did eventually…smile, and he and Logan became celebrities in Lodz :)! We had amazing guides, Maciek Zabierowski in Krakow, Pawel Sawicki at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Agnieszka Haska in Warsaw, Nina Krol in Warsaw, Lodz and Tomaszow Mazowiecki. And the incredible team of Michal Chojak, Renata Masna, and Hubert Buczak in Lodz, Piotrkow Trybunalski and Tomaszow Mazowiecki was beyond words. Hubert found the witnesses for us to speak with, Michal arranged and directed it all and led us to incredible places, and Renata taught us all the art of the interview in the context of oral history. They were extraordinary.
5. And now it ends and we head home, exhausted, richer, wiser, and more aware of our responsibilities as human beings.