To start the Germany trip, we departed campus at 11:45 to drive up to Boston! The first stop in Boston we made was the Museum of Fine Arts. After arriving, we all had lunch together and started to get to know one another. We went to the MFA to go to the Intentional Beauty exhibition that displayed Jewish Ritual Art from the collection. This exhibition was interesting because it showed me how intertwined religion was in the everyday life of Jewish people during World War 2. It also showed the survival of the religion and how Jewish people persevered despite the cruelties inflicted on them. One of the most interesting aspects of the pieces was the lions in some of them. They were often holding the 10 commandments. To me, this represented the strength and power that Jewish people had during the genocide (since lions are often represented in this way). In the museum, there was lots of silver and gold to display the Torah. There was often silver making in Jewish communities, and there was one piece that said something like “Germans sometimes let Jewish people continue silver making.” This represented how controlled Jewish people were, but also how resilient they were, since many of their religious objects continued to be made of silver despite the oppression from the Nazis.
After the MFA, we visited The New England Holocaust Memorial on Boston’s Freedom Trail. This memorial had six towers that represented each of the main internment camps. The tall towers were made of glass with ID numbers that had been tattooed on the arms of Jewish people who were forced into these camps. On the walk through the towers, there were quotes from survivors and victims, and statistics on what happened in these camps. Throughout the walk, there was also fog that rose to represent the trains that Jewish people were taken on unknowingly to be sent to a concentration camp, as well as to represent the gas chambers that killed so many Jewish people. To include this in the memorial was significant because it allowed people to be aware of the impacts during the whole walk through of the memorial, and it created a lasting and impactful memory for me.
After walking through this memorial, we learned a long German word that Mr. Leistler said: “distills the entire trip.” The word is Vergangenheitsbewältigung. It means “struggling to make sense of history.” This word is interesting to me because it represents how difficult it is to uncover first what really happened in history, and the impact on the people. Each story in history is unique and has affected everyone in many different ways. On this trip I hope to understand the lives of Jewish people during this time and how Germany chooses to represent the atrocities that occurred. I am also interested in how the surrounding countries remember it.
