BY MARY WICOFF
Commercial-News
WESTVILLE — Scenes of beauty, just a few miles from sites of horror, struck a Westville group touring Eastern Europe this summer.
“Some things were breathtakingly beautiful and some things were heart-wrenching,” Cindy Hall said.
In the morning, the group left Krakow, Poland, and gasped at the castles, cathedrals and other scenes of grandeur. An hour and a half away, they arrived at the gates of Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps, where more than 4 million people died between 1940 and 1945.
The trip was arranged by Robert Lehmann, social studies teacher at Westville High School, who also teaches a class on the Holocaust.
Other members of the group were Hall and her daughter, Kathy Carroll, a former Westville High student who will be a sophomore at Danville Area Community College; Kay Pierce and her daughter, Kelsi Wilken, a sophomore at Westville; and Aubrey Falconio, a senior at Westville.
The group took a nine-day trip (not counting travel time) to Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Germany through Educational Tours.
Lehmann, who said the trip was in the planning process for two years, had two goals: to give the students and parents an understanding of the Holocaust and aspects of the Cold War, and to introduce them to different cultures.
This was Lehmann’s third trip to Auschwitz, he said, adding, “Every time I see something new and learn something new, and it reawakens my passion for teaching this.”
For the others, it was their first time overseas. They joined five other groups from the United States, making a total of 43 people in their group.
The other Westville people were touched by the unimaginable horror of the camps, especially the room with babies’ and children’s items.
“That’s where I got goose bumps,” Falconio said. “That’s where I lost it.”
They also visited the factory where Oskar Schindler saved the lives of thousands of Jews, and a Jewish quarter where the movie “Schindler’s List” was filmed. They also saw the Theresienstadt camp in Prague.
Hall said visiting the camps changed her life, saying, “Here in America, we have everything right here. We don’t want for anything.” But the Jews in the camps lacked the basics, such as food and water to bathe with.
“It made you more appreciative of what you have,” she said.
Pierce couldn’t find the words to describe her feelings about the unbelievable things that happened. One of the most memorable sites was a memorial in Budapest, with bronze shoes of different sizes, honoring the 600,000 Jews killed along the river bank.
Carroll was touched by seeing the place where the Jews were given numbers — where they lost their identity.
The group also walked through the camp, along the route where the prisoners were headed to the crematorium. Falconio got chills as she tried to imagine how many people took that walk.
Hall took the walk with her own daughter and thought of the Jewish mothers being separated from their children. “How do you do that and not want to stop existing?” she wondered.
Outside of the history lessons, the group enjoyed the trip.
Carroll said her late grandmother was Polish, and she was the first grandchild to visit her ancestral land. She brought back a rosary for her younger sister.
Krakow was everyone’s favorite city, citing the street entertainers, the shops and the memorials. They also enjoyed a cruise on the Danube River in Budapest and changing of the guard in Prague.
Along the way, everyone was friendly and spoke English, they said, and the weather was perfect.
Wilken said the trip made her appreciate American food and free restrooms. The group had excellent bratwurst in Berlin, but didn’t care for the salads with octopus tentacles in Krakow and the chocolate-chili gelato (ice cream) in Budapest.
They did visit Subway and McDonald’s.
In addition, the group said they appreciate their freedom even more. They visited the Berlin Wall, and noted the graffiti on the wall about freedom. In Budapest, there’s a collection of Soviet-era statues.
All of the travelers said they felt safe overseas, although they were warned not to talk to the gypsies. They also had to learn the difference among the four currencies.
Everyone said they would do it again.
When they returned, Lehmann sent a thank-you note to each, telling them: “It meant a lot to me as a teacher, to share what I learned. That’s what being a teacher is — opening people’s eyes.”
