Published: August 20, 2008 09:26 am            

Teacher tours Holocaust sites

Sandra Runyon uses the word “priceless” to describe the five weeks she spent in Central Europe this summer studying the Holocaust.

Runyon, an eighth-grade English teacher at Cleburne ISD’s Wheat Middle School, was one of 30 secondary teachers from across the country selected to participate in a summer study trip sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“I said from the start that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity,” Runyon said. “But now that it’s over, and I think about the time spent in museums, my visit with a survivor of Auschwitz, seeing things that I’d only read about — this was a priceless opportunity.”

Her journey began June 25 when she joined her fellow travelers in Washington, D.C.

They began by spending several days of study at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

On June 30 they landed in Amsterdam and headed for Prague, the capitol city of the Czech Republic.

In Prague, Runyon and her fellow educators toured the Jewish Museum, which is housed in a former synagogue.

“Words can’t begin to describe my thoughts and feelings after seeing this old, old synagogue with the thousands of names of Holocaust victims written on its walls,” Runyon said. “We also visited an area that has a permanent exhibit of drawings and paintings from the children who were held at the camps at Terezin.

“I thought of my grandson, Grant, who is starting to love to draw, and seeing the drawings of children of similar ages and thinking ‘there, but by the grace of God ... ’ and how we are so blessed.”

In Prague the education delegation was broken up into small “discussion groups,” whose activities included conducting studies, book discussions and preparing presentations that would be shared when they were reunited.

“There were teachers from all over,” Runyon said, “New York City, Seattle, Florida, an educator from Arizona who taught Native American students. Everyone was there for more or less the same reasons and we would constantly get ideas which we would then bounce off each other.”

The teachers traveled in a bright pink bus, which became known as the “Komen,” in honor of the fight against breast cancer.

“We were together constantly and got to know so much about each other and the challenges and opportunities we face as teachers,” Runyon said. “We also discussed the similarities and differences in the curriculum we use in working with our students. I learned so much from them and feel I have made friends for life.”

Their journey continued on to Cesky Raj, on the Polish border, by a series of “windy and twisting roads for what seemed forever.”



Touring Terezin

There Runyon toured the Terezin, the site of a camp that is now a memorial. At one point, Terezin housed 150,000 Jews from Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Austria and Denmark.

Although not considered a concentration camp by the Nazis, more than 33,000 Jews reportedly died at Terezin because of its overcrowded conditions.

More than 80,000 of its inhabitants were eventually shipped to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. At the end of the war a little more than 17,000 people survived at Terezin, which also included a separate prison run by the Gestapo.

“The memorial at Terezin includes a new museum which houses numerous handmade items such as spoons, many dolls, things made by the Jewish prisoners to try to make their lives seem more normal,” Runyon said. “There is also a cemetery which is beautiful to look at from a distance because it has thousands of small, square headstones. Each headstone has a rosebush planted by it. If pictures could convey a scent, you would be swept away with the powerful fragrance of rose.”

The tragedy of the Holocaust hit Runyon the hardest at Ravensbrück, located two-and-a-half hours from Terezin, and just north of Berlin. Runyon’s group stayed in a hostel that was a converted SS guard barracks that housed the female guards who presided over the concentration camp.

“I had the hardest time at Ravensbrück because that’s where they had the largest number of women and children who were killed,” she said. “Living in a hostel that was once the guard barracks and only a few yards from the entrance to the concentration camp was very unnerving. It was an eerie feeling for me, knowing that there were women in charge of this camp who were so brutal, and even had the ability to choose life and death for the women and children held there.

“We were fortunate to spend many, many hours with the head of the education program at Ravensbrück. He is so profoundly knowledgeable about the subject of the Holocaust and gave us stories after stories that brought the camp closer to our hearts.”

The beauty of the forests, cities and villages through which they traveled, the food and the cool temperatures kept things on a bright note for the teachers in the face of the dark days in history they were studying.

“I found out from my stay in Europe that you just can’t get a bad meal anywhere,” Runyon said. “I remember going to sleep the night after we visited Terezin, with a cool breeze coming through the window, and hearing the sound of thunder in the distance, just beyond the forest.”

In Berlin, the group spent two full days at the German Jewish Museum which included lectures from experts and the opportunity to do research. At many of the museums visited by the teachers, they were able to access areas rarely open to the public.

“The survivors of the Holocaust are now dying, and many of those individuals and their families have willed their mementos, diaries and other items from that period to these museums,” Runyon said. “We were allowed to see such things, including paintings done by prisoners that are still being catalogued and will eventually be exhibited. The museums were all incredible.”



Berlin learning opportunities

Berlin was also the site of numerous learning opportunities for the teachers.

Their tours included the suburb of Wannsee, where Hitler and his senior officers developed their “final solution to the Jewish question,” which included a plan to use prisoners fit for labor in a series of road-building projects. If the work didn’t kill them, the prisoners would be shipped to an extermination camp once the projects were completed.

“Hitler’s meeting with his top officers was held at a beautiful villa, which is now a museum,” Runyon said. “It was there that they planned the ‘Final Solution,’ meaning ‘how do we finally get rid of the Jews that we don’t want around anymore.’

“Every morning, as I stood having coffee on the balcony overlooking the Wannsee Lake, I had a hard time wrapping my brain around the knowledge that Hitler had been doing that very same thing back in the 1940s.”

At Auschwitz, their final stop along the Holocaust’s tragic trail through Central Europe, Runyon saw what remained of the factory owned by Oskar Schindler, whose efforts to save Jews from being transported to German death camps, was chronicled in the movie “Schindler’s List.”

As the group walked around the Jewish ghetto, which included numerous locations where the movie was filmed, many took the opportunity to visit a flea market where Runyon made several purchases to add to her classroom archives relating to the Holocaust.

“My mind was going crazy with, ‘Will this fit in my suitcase?’” Runyon said. “I did buy some old photos and some postcards from the 40s as well as a man’s rations book from 1952, when the country was under the Soviet government.”

Runyon toured both the Auschswitz and Birkenau concentration camps, which were among numerous “reality checks” she experienced during the five weeks of what she terms an “incredible journey.”

“To see the phrase ‘Arbeit macht frei,’ work shall make you free, which Hitler had emblazoned across the entrance into his prison camps, which I had only seen in videos or in books, just took my breath away,” she said. “I kept saying to myself, ‘I am here. I am actually here.’

“It was a constant effort to make connections with my heart and mind,” Runyon said. “The Birkenau death camp was a huge place and very sobering. Most of the barracks and all the crematories that were there were destroyed by the Nazis before the Allies liberated the camp, but it was evident what had been there.”



One last look

Despite the aura of Birkenau, Runyon chose to pay a second visit to the camp, “just to be there one more time.

“I had this desire, knowing I would never be back there again in my lifetime,” she said. “All the camps were like sacred ground. How do you wrap your mind around the fact that millions were killed in those very places? Young boys, the same age that I teach, were there in those camps — separated from their family, sleeping on the floor, being trained to become brick layers for their captors.”

Now, back at home and preparing with her fellow Cleburne teachers for the first day of a new school year, Runyon admits she is still trying to process all the knowledge and experience she gained from her journey.

“Just to process it all will be something I will continue to do for a long time,” she said. “Professionally, this will have a major impact on how I present this piece of history to my kids, as we study the Holocaust, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ and other literature relating to that period. Working with this age group, there are many hard things that I will not be sharing with eighth graders. But I will still have much to share that I hope they will get a lot out of.

“I also hope they will get a little piece of what I have been feeling — and what I have experienced.”

        

• Click to discuss this story with other readers on our forums.