Daily Archives: December 28, 2013

An update from Patricia, a graduate student in Perkins School of Theology: On Christmas Eve, we went to Belzec extermination camp, where in the course of 9 months, a typical course of time for one child to form, grow, and be born from a mother's womb, over 650,000 people were murdered in a gas chamber from carbon monoxide. There are only two survivors from the 9-month period. All of these innocent people were sent to death, simply because they were Jews. At the museum portion of the site, there is a room about the size of a gas chamber. It is empty and only has three or four lights. We were told by Dr. Halperin to go in alone. As [...]

An update from Forrest, a sophomore human rights and journalism major: The Gross Rosen concentration camp isn't your typical concentration camp. Yes, many things that happened here happened at the other camps, but that's not what made this camp particularly deadly. The camp has a huge quarry; a cut in the side of a hill larger than anyone could possibly imagine. This is the camp's unique feature. It stretches out in front of you, at least 100 feet deep, and not all of it even visible. Stone walls line the perimeter. The guide told my group that the water, which covered the bottom of the pit, hid another 20 meters (about 65 ft) of excavated quarry underneath it. The tall [...]