This is a music class. Our main goals are to 1) see a bunch of really cool concerts, and 2) immerse ourselves in the culture of the area. Unfortunately, it is impossible to learn about German culture without bringing up the Nazi's, and we have been blessed with amazing guides, who have been excellent teachers for us.
Our first experience learning about the Holocaust was touring Theresienstadt, a jewish ghetto that the nazi's set up and deported jews to before sending them to extermination camps like Auschwitz. Our tour guide was a man by the name Pavel Batel, a historian, author, and former trainer for the Czech special forces who has written 4 books on Terezin, and has spent years interviewing Holocaust survivors. He told us stories of Terezin and the awful things Nazi's did to their prisoners at the small fortress nearby (in rather disturbingly graphic detail). I had grown up hearing about Holocaust, I knew the statistics about how many jews were murdered, but I had no context of what horrendous things the Nazi's did to their fellow human beings. We have heard about the concentration camps, but until you see the tiny box, barely a 20ft cube, where the Nazi's would house 70+ jewish workers as they tortured them to death over a period of 5 days (at the longest), the horror doesn't strike home.
This trip to Terezin was the beginning of the holocaust studies portion of this trip, and while the storie are shocking and disturbing, I feel like it is by far the most important information we will learn on this trip.
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