Connecting with family: past & current, far & wide
Has it been that long? Apparently. So here goes something -- a random smattering of some of what we've been up to since we last wrote. We've posted some new albums for you to peruse, as well (Barbados, FASPE: Germany & Poland, and Road Trip).
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Benny wrote this entry back in November, and is only getting to posting it now, so we'll spare adding anything else for now. We just got back from a trip to Portugal and Spain, and you can see the pictures from that trip here.
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This past summer, Benny went to Germany and Poland on a program called the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE). FASPE is intended to give students in professional disciplines, including law and medicine, an opportunity to reflect on their ethical obligations through the historical lens of the Holocaust. The law program that Benny participated in had 15 fellows from diverse backgrounds, and from law schools across the country.
View FASPE in a larger map
After a brief orientation in New York, we (the FASPE fellows, sans Alison) traveled to Berlin. There, we learned primarily about the bureaucratic structures that allowed Nazi Germany and its leaders to conceive of, and ultimately implement, the Final Solution. Given our orientation as law students, we focused largely on the 6a00d834548fdd69e20147e019d141970b-500wiunderlying political and philosophical theories that allowed Nazi ideology to flourish, and on the bureaucrats -- many of them lawyers -- that played a central role in the helping the machinery of death to move inexorably forward.
Despite the personally challenging nature of the material, Berlin is an amazing city, full of energy, amazing sites, and quite surprisingly, excellent food. We were also there during the World Cup, and were able to watch Germany playing Ghana from a traditional outdoor beer garden.
After Berlin, we went to Oświęcim, Poland (the town that we know as Auschwitz). We spent a few days there, both touring the camps (which lie on the outskirts of town), and spending time in seminars. Visiting the camps themselves -- Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II (commonly referred to as Birkenau) -- was an emotionally challenging experience. Auschwitz I was, a former Polish army barracks, not as difficult as Birkenau. While the former was well-manicured, with handsome architecture and built to a human scale, the latter was the exact opposite: expansive, industrial, and bleak.
Stepping through Birkenau's gates, and into a landscape marked by hundreds of brick chimneys, the only remnants of hundreds of wooden barracks that have since decayed, it is immediately clear that the place Bwas designed for death. For most of the FASPE fellows and staff, this was, I think, the most emotionally difficult part of our trip. No matter how much you have read about the Holocaust, no matter how many movies you have seen, nothing quite compares -- for better or worse -- to confronting Birkenau's gas chambers and ovens. Though they now lay in ruins, destroyed by the retreating Nazis, experiencing the physicality of the crematoria reminded me that the Holocaust was, at its core, a human tragedy, perpetuated by men and women who, designed them, laid their foundations, and constructed and set into action its machinery.
The starkness of Auschwitz and its surrounding landscape was lifted once we arrived in Krakow, our last stop as part of the two-week FASPE program. Krakow, it has been noted by many, is like a small version of Prague, and I think that this is a fair characterization. It has a stunning, immaculate square, bounded by cafes and restaurants on all sides. It's narrow streets are filled with immaculately restored buildings that belie Krakow's recent tumultuous history. Before World War II and the Holocaust, Krakow was a center of Jewish life. Although those events decimated its Jewish population, Judiasm has experienced a resurgence in this corner of Poland. While we spent our time in Krakow, as during the rest of the FASPE program, in seminars and tours, we were also there during the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, which was much larger than I had anticipated.
FASPE, as I noted in the blog entry I wrote for Northeastern, raised as many questions for me as it did answers. Primary among these is to whom, as attorneys (or future attorneys), we owe our loyalties.
I ended up extending my staying in Poland to I could visit my grandmother's hometown of Dąbrowa Górnicza. Referred to simply as Dąbrowa, as the place of my mother's mother birth and childhood, lies closer to Oświęcim than it does to Krakow. I went there with a couple of local tours guides who, although they are not Jewish, have taken an abiding interest in preserving the legacy of the Jewish community there. I had scant information about my grandmother's family, although I did have an Houseaddress. The house pictured here is the building that she likely grew up in. However, because the building is an apartment complex, I was unable to figure out exactly where she grew up.
All in all, the town was much nicer than I had anticipated. Many of us, perhaps unfairly, have preconceptions of what small Polish cities will be like. Lying in Poland's industrial heartland, I expected Dąbrowa to be run down amalgamation of post-Communist apartment blocks and abandoned factories. Much to my surprise, it was quite attractive and pleasant. The main shopping street had plenty of shops and restaurants and active street life, and although some of the concrete apartment blocks looked tired and worn, they were few and far between. What I will remember most from this part of the trip, though, was the overwhelming hospitality of both my tour guides, as well as the family that hosted me.
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We also took a road trip to Chicago in August, stopping in Canada (Ottawa, Toronto, Niagara Falls) and Michigan (Detroit, Ann Arbor) along the way, with a stops in Cleveland, The Bing (a.k.a. Binghamton) and Albany on the way back. We'll skip providing a description of the trip for now, but in the meantime here are some pictures.
