Today’s journey and visit to Terezin was a very emotional and educational experience. Today was a day to honor and celebrate the strength and resilience of the Jewish people that were subject to the Holocaust. The history and places we were shown were absolutely bone chilling. I described the concentration camp as haunted, and with each step you can hear the cries of the ghosts from those years ago. Learning about the Holocaust in school is one thing, but experiencing the somber atmosphere in person made it feel uncomfortably real. I truly believe that this history should be preserved so that the world never forgets what happened, and that every person should visit a concentration camp to better understand the magnitude of hatred that occurred not too long ago. This is something that must be learned from, for what is hatred if not love persevering?
The town of Terezin was just as off-putting. The streets were practically empty other than some tourists. The ghetto is designed so symmetrically, the streets and buildings don’t even seem real. I described it as being in “The Matrix”, where this was all just a dystopian-novel level simulation. Cars lined streets, but there were barely any people, restaurants, or frankly anything. I cannot even imagine actually being forced to live in this area in even worse conditions. One of my peers described it as feeling like a movie set, and I completely agree. It truly feels like a stage, once used for the performance of the worst genocide in history. Our tour guide in the concentration camp did a beautiful job honoring the victims of this ghetto and camp, tears being choked down during our tour while sharing a horrifying story about propaganda. This must be such a difficult career, and I appreciate her strength to never let this history die.
Swanson School of Engineering 