This March break, 11 students and two faculty members are traveling to Berlin, Prague, and Krakow to explore the idea of monuments and memorials and their role in public memory, and learn more about the Holocaust and how Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland responded in the late 20th century and early 21st century to the study of Holocaust memory, public art, and their fusion in contemporary life. Please enjoy the blog post below from Gianluca ’27 where he reflects on the power of photographs to preserve history, sharing how a visit to Krakow’s Jewish Quarter and the Galicia Jewish Museum brought the stories of the Holocaust to life, culminating in an evening of klezmer music that symbolized resilience and hope.
A picture is worth a thousand words. As a kid, I always heard that saying, but I never thought much about it. Pictures were merely snapshots of reality. They were frozen, still and unchanging. In a world that is constantly changing, why do we long for something still? The answer is that pictures tell the stories that words sometimes cannot.
While walking through Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter of Kraków, history felt alive in every street thanks to our tour guide Grzegorz (Gregory). The remnants of a once-thriving community were inspiring to see. The restoration and repurposing of multiple synagogues in the area gave us hope that the Poles are remembering and honoring the past. The ten synagogues in the district that remain, now silent, had once been filled with prayer, laughter, and life.
At the Galicia Jewish Museum, pictures filled the walls, each one helping us put together the dots to uncover the mystery of the Holocaust. Images of loss, horror, and remembrance glared back at us. We saw photographs of mass graves hidden deep in the forests, places where the Nazis hoped no one would ever find the evidence of their crimes. The more we saw, the more we realized how little the German socialists thought about the Jewish people. The way they tried to erase them as if history could be rewritten, as if lives could simply disappear, shows their malintent. But thanks to these pictures, memory endures.
That evening, the klezmer music at dinner brought everything full circle. The harmony of the clarinet, viola, and accordion created a sound of joy, sorrow, and resilience all at once. Even after all that was taken from the Jewish community, their culture remains. Their traditions remain. And in that, there is hope.
