This year I’ll be taking 12 wonderful Asbury students as well as Asbury Student Life Resident Director, Liz Louden, to Germany and Poland. Much of the tour will follow the tried-n-true route of previous years. But I will also be looking up new memorials in Berlin (thanks in large part to my friend, Christian Marx) and visiting the Freie Universität Berlin (Free University of Berlin) permanent exhibits exploring the dubious role the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics played in terms of mainstreaming and implementing eugenics and racial hygiene policy across Germany. We’ll be staying in the

Life, Suffering, and Faith in the Ghetto I was able to spend the last day of my visit to Germany and Poland touring the Warsaw Ghetto. Once again, my Aussie friend Damien was both taxi and tour guide. The only context I have to share is that there is so much more here than I thought. Below are some pics from just some of the places we checked out. One highlight, you ask? Well, there is so much we found to reflect upon (I will be processing this day for a long time), but maybe I would single out the

Today Damien and I visited and toured Sobibor, a remote camp that sits at the border of Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus. It functioned for about 18 months and the estimates of the number murdered here varies wildly. Conservatively, 180,000 is most often cited. It, along with Treblinka, is the camp where the use of deception was most successfully and most extensively practiced. It is also the location of the most successful escape from an Operation Reinhard camp – this event being most likely instrumental in its closure just a few weeks later. Below are some pictures. Tomorrow I will explore

No Words To Be Found It took a while, but all of the Asbury students are now back on U.S. soil. I, however, am staying over for a few days to do some more exploring. My good Aussie mate, Damien Stewart, now a full-time resident of Warsaw who is finishing up a Ph.D. focused on generational trauma, has agreed to zip me around to a few places over the next couple of days. First up, Bełżec – a Nazi extermination camp on the west side of the Bug River (the demarcation line that the Russians and Germans settled on prior

Last Day… Today was “free Kraków” for the students until our final meeting this afternoon followed by a team meal in the evening. Since most of us have to catch a bus to the airport at 3 am tomorrow morning, tonight’s post will be exceptionally brief. Our time of reflection and processing was, yet once again, so impressive. In addition to our experiences, I asked the students to watch the documentary, Weapons of the Spirit by Pierre Sauvage. It tells the story of the residents of Le Chambon during the war years, and how the simple people of this peasant

Auschwitz I and II (Birkenau) Today we traveled west out of Krakow to the Polish community of Oświęcim, a medium-sized city in the Silasian province of Poland that is known for its railroad crossings. The Nazis, after taking this town in the early days of the war, did what they did in countless other places, they sought to Germanize it by giving it a new name, Auschwitz. We were met at the camp by my friend and expert tour guide, David Kennedy. It was fantastic to see him again – and to introduce him to my friend Christian Marx. The