"I really wanted to go on this trip," says Cara, a 17-year-old student from Kerpen, a town near Cologne, Germany. Together with peers from school, she traveled to Oswiecim, Poland, to the memorial site of the former German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. "Walking through the camp," Cara says thoughtfully and calmly, "I then realized that 80 years ago, the people who were imprisoned here and who were treated so horribly were standing on the same spot."
"Participation is voluntary. Students apply for this project, and sometimes there even has to be a selection process," explains Katrin Kuznik, a teacher from Kerpen who has organized such trips several times. It is a challenge for the teachers, she says, but the children demonstrate great commitment to "exposing themselves to the place" and are able to process the experience quite well, also through group discussions. "Accompanying them," Kuznik says, "is an enormous responsibility. But so far it has always worked quite well."
[
add
]
[
|
|
...
]