In Education we have a term which we like to use when we want students to talk freely about their feelings, without concern of judgement. The term we like to use is "Safe Space". Well, given the number of teachers involved in the organization of both the MRH trip and orientation activities, it was no surprise that this term appeared several times prior to, as well as during our discussion times.
After having about a half hour to get aquatinted with one another informally, Orientation began at 9:30am. Sitting in a circle facing one another, we tried to get to know one another quickly. One of the goals that the organizers had for us was to enter the room that morning as strangers, and leave that evening as friends. Given the emotional and mental challenges that this trip presents, having one another to depend on and feeling safe to share our feelings and thoughts was a vital component. In order to achieve these goals, the group was continually broken down into smaller groups of varying sizes. During each break-down we engaged in different activities, such as sharing details about who we are through the phrase "if you knew me, you'd know _______. But if you really knew me, you'd know______".
Additional "get to know you" strategies included reading aloud reflections we had written prior to the trip on an assigned topic. Through this forum, we shared our thoughts, feelings, gaps in knowledge, questions we had about the Holocaust, and points of interest. Working with different partners at each stage, it became easy to quickly put a name to each face, but also to gain a small glimpse into who they were as an individual.
In working with my peers, I quickly realized that we were all fairly different, but that our differences worked well together as we challenged one another in what we thought, questions we considered, and perspectives we took. Together, we developed questions and achieved mutual understandings, learning from one another. Below I note some examples of key ideas and questions that arose during our discussions. In particular, the pieces below challenged my way of thinking about the Holocaust.
1. We realize the importance of our voices when we are forced to be silent.
2. Was the Holocaust avoidable, or had society produced a path for it's eventual realization?
3. The Holocaust does not stand alone in the past or the present as an event of destruction, hatred, and genocide - rather, such atrocities continue on today all over the world, and too often in our own backyards.
4. The fundamental goal of Holocaust Education is "To Tell the story". However, we feel uncomfortable teaching these topics when we feel that the stories we tell are not ours, so these experiences are vital in coming to develop our own story from which we can draw on when teaching others.
After having such deep and meaningful conversations with people who, only a few hours prior were complete strangers, it was wonderful to see that this trip was going to be incredible not solely because of the historical sites we would visit, but also what I would learn from those around me as they shared their perspective and worldview.
In the afternoon we held a session of "World Café" - a discussion platform in which topics are posted at different stations and the groups rotate between stations, addressing relevant questions, sharing opinions, and reviewing information. In this session, 3 stations were posted:
1. Victims of the Holocaust
2. Anti-semitism
3. The paradigm (perpetrator, victim, bystander, helper)
At each station our group shared key points that we derived from our own worldviews and understanding of the Holocaust. I have summarized our points below:
1. Victims of the Holocaust
- Everyone has a different story, different way of telling their story, and comfort level in sharing their experience.
- Victims of the Holocaust were not only Jewish, as assumed by most and presented in the majority of media forums. Rather, victims included Gypsies (Roma & Sinti), Homosexuals, Disabled, Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, as well as those deemed "asocial", a broad category used as a "fill-in-the-blanks" for those deemed undesirable for the Aryan race. From this, the question arose: "How do we recognize each group of victims without detracting the stories of others?
- The victims of the Holocaust remain victims of oppression to this date.
- Trauma from these events are intergenerational. The effects had on the survivors of the Holocaust did not end with them, but affected their children as well on a deep level, just as we see with the struggles visible in the First Nations community as a result of the cultural oppression experienced.
- We cannot compare levels of suffering or oppression.
- If we remember the people in our lives - friends, family, loved ones - who would have been targeted in the Holocaust, the severity of it all becomes a lot more real.
2. Antisemitism
- There are a lot of myths about Jews that existed in society long before Hitler came to power.
- Hitler didn't invent anti-Semitism - he built upon long-developed hatreds and stereotypes already embedded in society.
- Antisemitism exists to this day
3. The Paradigm (perpetrator, victim, bystander, helper)
- It isn't easy to tell the 4 categories apart as people didn't always fit perfectly into a single category. For example, Schindler. He profited from the oppression and enslavement of the Jews, was a proud Nazi member, was a bystander for many years, and later became a helper of the people, recognized as righteous among the nations. Another example is the Judenrat, the Jewish council appointed in the Ghettos who were responsible for caring for the needs of the people, distributing work, food, etc. However, they were also responsible for sending individuals to the camps to be forced into labour or to be murdered.
- Hindsight is 20/20.
- It is easy to judge and point fingers. It is more difficult to ask what role we would have played in their situation. Would we have been the oppressor? The bystander? The helper?
- The more power you have, the greater responsibility you have to bring about change - a topic that I will get into more in my later posts.
History lessons, discussions, reflections, group sharing, and stories from survivors were other items that were included in the orientation of the day. It was clear that the group shared a mentality which made us work together cohesively, a great feat to achieve in a mere 6 hours for over 30 strangers. It was true though, that by 3:30 pm when we left for the airport, none of us felt like strangers anymore. I can safely say that I am so excited to get to know each of these people better over the next 10 days!
I hope some of what I learned was maybe new to you, or caused you to ask yourself new questions; to be challenged in some form. I certainly know that these next 10 days will be life-altering for me as my perspective and knowledge change shape, growing through my experiences and the amazing people that I will share these memories with. I'll keep you all posted on the details as they come :)
Next Blog: Berlin Day 1
Thursday, May 22, 2014
Sleepless Nights and Toronto Flights - Pre-trip Experiences!
The following is not a blog reflecting my journey with MRH, but rather an unfortunate, but slightly humorous sequence of events that resulted in a sleep-deprived me:
In the days leading up to a big trip, you want to be sure that you have everything in order - Bags are packed, passport is in a known location, and especially on the eve of an early morning flight, that you have slept well. Unfortunately, the days leading up to my departure weren't as simple as I had hoped for due to a wonderful bout of food poisoning.
Not to turn anyone off of a particular fast-food chain, but Fat Burger and I no longer are friends after I spent all of Thursday evening doing little sleeping and instead evacuating everything I had eaten just hours before. Although this is preferable to E.coli setting up camp in my system, it was highly undesirable as it made my entire Friday completely useless as a prep-day for my trip and resulted in accumulating several hours of sleep debt. The thing with making up for lost sleep is that you always anticipate you will be able to catch a few winks here and there, and almost plan it into your schedule. The other thing about it is that you are almost always wrong, or at least I am. Saturday night evolved into late-night packing rather than an early-evening before my 6 a.m. flight to Toronto. Further, the flight which I believed would be an excellent venue for repaying my sleep debt turned out to be secondary in importance to the movies available on Air Canada's in-flight entertainment system. But, I told myself, it wasn't an issue. I'd have a nap and get a good sleep that evening to be ready for Orientation bright and early Monday morning. Well, despite an excellent nap in the middle of the day, my hopes and dreams of a blissful sleep on Sunday night were far from realized.
Rooming with another MRH participant from outside of Toronto, I was privileged to a brand-new experience which I hope to never replicate. After struggling to fall asleep, I finally found rest around 2 a.m. Toronto time (Midnight for myself back in Regina). However, my roommate came back to the room from a visit with friends at around 2:45. Not a problem, I figured. I'd fall back asleep in no time! How right I was! What I didn't anticipate was that this roommate was a particularly powerful snorer who, at around 3:45 awoke me from my sleep and, despite cotton in my ears and pillows over my head, drove me to do something I had never done before. Sleep in the bathtub.
Although the Delta Hotel in Toronto is nice, it isn't "Big-bathtub" nice. So, cramped in with my duvet and pillows, I tried desperately to find comfort in the ceramic box. Unable to fully stretch out, I fell in and out of consciousness for the next 3 hours, continually reminding myself that my chances of getting sleep were significantly better without snoring, even if I was physically less comfortable. I cannot be certain if "sleep" is an appropriate descriptor, though. Finally, around 7 am I drifted back into consciousness and realized that the snoring appeared to have ceased. Eager to make the most of the last hour of potential sleeping time, I relocated to my bed where I blissfully fell into a deep sleep. If only it had lasted more than 60 minutes...
Sufficiently exhausted, I questioned how the next few days would unfold. With the knowledge that we were going to be engaging in orientation activities throughout the whole day until we departed from Toronto at 6pm for Frankfurt, I knew that a nap was out of the question, and sleep aboard the plane was questionable. However, my excitement for the trip trumped my desire to nap and provided me with a second? third? fourth? wind that gave me hope that I could survive the day! After-all, I'd sleep on the plane... right?
Next post: Details on Orientation
In the days leading up to a big trip, you want to be sure that you have everything in order - Bags are packed, passport is in a known location, and especially on the eve of an early morning flight, that you have slept well. Unfortunately, the days leading up to my departure weren't as simple as I had hoped for due to a wonderful bout of food poisoning.
Not to turn anyone off of a particular fast-food chain, but Fat Burger and I no longer are friends after I spent all of Thursday evening doing little sleeping and instead evacuating everything I had eaten just hours before. Although this is preferable to E.coli setting up camp in my system, it was highly undesirable as it made my entire Friday completely useless as a prep-day for my trip and resulted in accumulating several hours of sleep debt. The thing with making up for lost sleep is that you always anticipate you will be able to catch a few winks here and there, and almost plan it into your schedule. The other thing about it is that you are almost always wrong, or at least I am. Saturday night evolved into late-night packing rather than an early-evening before my 6 a.m. flight to Toronto. Further, the flight which I believed would be an excellent venue for repaying my sleep debt turned out to be secondary in importance to the movies available on Air Canada's in-flight entertainment system. But, I told myself, it wasn't an issue. I'd have a nap and get a good sleep that evening to be ready for Orientation bright and early Monday morning. Well, despite an excellent nap in the middle of the day, my hopes and dreams of a blissful sleep on Sunday night were far from realized.
Rooming with another MRH participant from outside of Toronto, I was privileged to a brand-new experience which I hope to never replicate. After struggling to fall asleep, I finally found rest around 2 a.m. Toronto time (Midnight for myself back in Regina). However, my roommate came back to the room from a visit with friends at around 2:45. Not a problem, I figured. I'd fall back asleep in no time! How right I was! What I didn't anticipate was that this roommate was a particularly powerful snorer who, at around 3:45 awoke me from my sleep and, despite cotton in my ears and pillows over my head, drove me to do something I had never done before. Sleep in the bathtub.
Although the Delta Hotel in Toronto is nice, it isn't "Big-bathtub" nice. So, cramped in with my duvet and pillows, I tried desperately to find comfort in the ceramic box. Unable to fully stretch out, I fell in and out of consciousness for the next 3 hours, continually reminding myself that my chances of getting sleep were significantly better without snoring, even if I was physically less comfortable. I cannot be certain if "sleep" is an appropriate descriptor, though. Finally, around 7 am I drifted back into consciousness and realized that the snoring appeared to have ceased. Eager to make the most of the last hour of potential sleeping time, I relocated to my bed where I blissfully fell into a deep sleep. If only it had lasted more than 60 minutes...
Sufficiently exhausted, I questioned how the next few days would unfold. With the knowledge that we were going to be engaging in orientation activities throughout the whole day until we departed from Toronto at 6pm for Frankfurt, I knew that a nap was out of the question, and sleep aboard the plane was questionable. However, my excitement for the trip trumped my desire to nap and provided me with a second? third? fourth? wind that gave me hope that I could survive the day! After-all, I'd sleep on the plane... right?
Next post: Details on Orientation
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Pre-Trip Thoughts.
Well, I'm back on the blogging scene, but this time there are no bikes involved :) For those who are unfamiliar with the shenanigans I'm up to this summer, I'll provide you with a bit of background information.
This summer I will be spending 10 days with 31 student leaders from across Canada as we participate together in a Holocaust memorial tour. Entitled "The March of Remembrance and Hope", this journey will bring us through Germany and Poland as we visit numerous memorials, museums, and sites where the infamous concentration camps existed. What makes this journey quite unique, apart from experiencing it with 31 strangers, is that we are incredibly fortunate to be accompanied by Polish tour guides, Holocaust experts, and most extraordinary, a Holocaust survivor.
Visiting infamous sites such as Bebelplatz - the site of a massive book burning, The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, former Jewish Ghettos, as well as the concentration/death camps of Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka, the group will engage in learning the history of the Holocaust as well as factors that led to it's eventual realization over 60 years ago. In visiting the sites, we will be faced with visual reminders of the progression of hatred and intolerance. However, this trip is far from simply academic. Rather, apart from solely providing a historical education, the primary goal of the experience is a training exercise for student leaders. In the places we see and first-hand accounts we listen to, we are pushed to examine how injustice develops in society, where it was present in history, and where such injustice and hatred remain to this day. In understanding the presence and development of this intolerance, power differentials, and resulting oppression of these inequalities, we are challenged to apply our knowledge of the past as a tool to impact the future and combat the inequalities and oppressive practices which are built-in to our societies and cultures, so that the future may not be stained with the unsightly scars of our pasts.
A challenge I recognize as I enter into this experience is one of the Log and the Speck. To state simply, it is simple to enter this tour with a mind focussed on acknowledging the horrors of the past, with fingers pointed at others for the unthinkable crimes committed against humanity; It is simple to shame those of the past and label them as monsters, all the while placing ourselves on a pedestal of righteousness as we believe we would never stoop to such evils. However, it is much more difficult to come down from our high perch and reflect on the ways in which society continues to perpetuate inequality, feeds oppression of the "other", and most disturbingly, our own participation in these vicious cycles. For myself, this is not only one of the primary objectives of the trip, but perhaps the most important one. If we can begin to use the past as tool to shape the future, we can truly begin to create a society in which equality and acceptance are not just words which we say, but ideals that we embody in our everyday actions. Only when we can use the lens of the past to change our perspective of the present, will we be able to create a future in which equality is something experienced by all, regardless of age, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or race.
As I embark on this journey, I plan to keep note of my thoughts, points of discussion with my peers, and stories of remembrance from the survivors, as well as pictures. I anticipate that the stories and information I relay in this blog will serve as a method by which the message of this trip can be passed on to many, beyond the confines of our group.
For more information on the March of Remembrance and Hope, visit the link below:
http://www.remembranceandhope.com/
Stay Tuned!
This summer I will be spending 10 days with 31 student leaders from across Canada as we participate together in a Holocaust memorial tour. Entitled "The March of Remembrance and Hope", this journey will bring us through Germany and Poland as we visit numerous memorials, museums, and sites where the infamous concentration camps existed. What makes this journey quite unique, apart from experiencing it with 31 strangers, is that we are incredibly fortunate to be accompanied by Polish tour guides, Holocaust experts, and most extraordinary, a Holocaust survivor.
Visiting infamous sites such as Bebelplatz - the site of a massive book burning, The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, former Jewish Ghettos, as well as the concentration/death camps of Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka, the group will engage in learning the history of the Holocaust as well as factors that led to it's eventual realization over 60 years ago. In visiting the sites, we will be faced with visual reminders of the progression of hatred and intolerance. However, this trip is far from simply academic. Rather, apart from solely providing a historical education, the primary goal of the experience is a training exercise for student leaders. In the places we see and first-hand accounts we listen to, we are pushed to examine how injustice develops in society, where it was present in history, and where such injustice and hatred remain to this day. In understanding the presence and development of this intolerance, power differentials, and resulting oppression of these inequalities, we are challenged to apply our knowledge of the past as a tool to impact the future and combat the inequalities and oppressive practices which are built-in to our societies and cultures, so that the future may not be stained with the unsightly scars of our pasts.
A challenge I recognize as I enter into this experience is one of the Log and the Speck. To state simply, it is simple to enter this tour with a mind focussed on acknowledging the horrors of the past, with fingers pointed at others for the unthinkable crimes committed against humanity; It is simple to shame those of the past and label them as monsters, all the while placing ourselves on a pedestal of righteousness as we believe we would never stoop to such evils. However, it is much more difficult to come down from our high perch and reflect on the ways in which society continues to perpetuate inequality, feeds oppression of the "other", and most disturbingly, our own participation in these vicious cycles. For myself, this is not only one of the primary objectives of the trip, but perhaps the most important one. If we can begin to use the past as tool to shape the future, we can truly begin to create a society in which equality and acceptance are not just words which we say, but ideals that we embody in our everyday actions. Only when we can use the lens of the past to change our perspective of the present, will we be able to create a future in which equality is something experienced by all, regardless of age, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or race.
As I embark on this journey, I plan to keep note of my thoughts, points of discussion with my peers, and stories of remembrance from the survivors, as well as pictures. I anticipate that the stories and information I relay in this blog will serve as a method by which the message of this trip can be passed on to many, beyond the confines of our group.
For more information on the March of Remembrance and Hope, visit the link below:
http://www.remembranceandhope.com/
Stay Tuned!
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