[Special Issue] Bring a Stone: Interviews
Janine Wulz
80 years after, finding personal meaning in learning about the Holocaust is different for today’s young generation. As the fourth generation, they lack opportunities to meet survivors or talk to their own family members about their experiences. Place-based learning is one approach to bridge that gap, by emphasizing the history of a place and connecting the past with our lives today (Gregory, 2000, p. 38). Place-based learning as well as interactions with activists, scholars and survivors tied to these places (Gross & Rutland, 2017) impact students' academic interests as well as their trajectory and activities outside of academia (Clyde et al., 2005), especially when paired with detailed preparation, carefully thought-out pedagogy (Feldman, 2008), and reflective activities as journals or group discussions.
One of the experiential and reflective activities during our 3-week long field school to memorial sites in Europe with Canadian students was called “bring a stone”. It centers student engagement and the development of place-based and reflective learning methodology, enabling a connection between student's lives and the memorialization of the Holocaust: bringing a stone from home to a memorial site. The exercise aims for arts-based and individual reflection and to enliven the memory of the Holocaust in a post-survivor society and encourage personal and collective reflection and engagement in memorialization.
The following conversations provide an insight in the experiences students made during the learning experience of “bringing a stone”.
Interview with Kalea Palmer, University of Victoria
Janine:
Hallo Kalea, thank you for meeting with me! Can you tell me a little bit about the stone you brought to Europe?
Kalea:
I actually did not find the stone myself, but asked my mom to send me one from back home, from our family ranch, a big buffalo ranch in Merritt, BC. I wanted something that was a connection to home.
Janine:
So your stone traveled all the way from the interior of BC to Victoria and then to Europe! What kind of stone was that?
Kalea:
It was a medium sized stone and it had a light green kind of shine. I don't know what type of stone it was, though.
Janine:
And then you traveled with that stone all the way to Europe. Where did you leave it?
Kalea:
I left it at Auschwitz on the Hungarian plaque, the one at the big memorial in Buchenwald. The memorial had all those plaques in different languages. So, I left it on the Hungarian one. I chose that one because of the time I spent in Hungary and just because of the sheer amount of Hungarian Jews that were sent to Auschwitz. I wanted it to represent the time I lived in Hungary, during a youth exchange in 2017. The people I met while I was in Hungary, as I met people who their grandparents had survived Auschwitz.
Janine:
How did that feel then later on the trip, when we actually went to Hungary?
Kalea:
I think my understanding of what the stone meant kind of changed. I think that that's really the key to my perspective on things. Because I'd been to the different Holocaust memorials through Budapest, like the shoes on the Danube. I'd been there when I had lived there and there were rocks and stones, and I didn't really know what they were for. If I'm being honest, I probably thought it was just like the city wasn't maintaining the shoes. So, I didn't really realize the significance of it. So now, when we went back and saw the stones there, I actually was able to put meaning to why there were stones there. The thing that shocked me the most though about Hungary was that idea of non-remembering, that's still a thing I talk about with my classmates in my education program, the fact that Hungary had the largest deportation of Jewish people in the fastest way, and that still shocked me because when I was there, I didn't even know that. I learned it through this course and so it's just kind of interesting to see what they talk about and don't talk about.
Janine:
Now it is a year after our trip, is that something you're still thinking about?
Kalea:
I think it's really impactful today, the trip in general and because I'm in the teaching program now so I'm kind of planning social studies lessons. How can we ninety plus, eighty years later make history relevant to the kids? And I think doing the stone activity is a great way to do that because you can connect your home to a cultural practice and a different religious or cultural setting and then go and bring it to somewhere else and be able to make those connections. It was really meaningful because you actually had to think about where you were placing the stone. It was just knowing, wanting to place it somewhere meaningful, not just a random street corner in Vienna or Budapest somewhere. It was just being able to have that mindfulness and actual reflection as to, oh, why am I putting my stone here? So yeah, I really liked those. It added a deeper element to what we were doing.
Janine:
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts! Good luck for your studies!
Interview with Megan Klein, University of Victoria
Janine:
Hallo Megan, thank you for sharing your experience with me. Could you tell me about the stone you brought to Europe and where you found it?
Megan:
I brought a small stone that was kind of unassuming. There wasn't anything special about the stone itself, but it came from a very special place for me. My Oma, who had been a very pivotal person in my life, had just recently passed away, and so I took a stone from a place that her and I used to go together quite often. So, I was really trying to remember her and incorporate my own sense of identity and her own loss and mourning into the experience. I went to this little park, this little hill with this bench that her and I used to sit on and there were all these little pebbles and so I took one of those. And that was the stone that I brought with me.
Going into the experience, I wanted to really know a lot more about my family's past. On that special place on this little hill, we would have lots of conversations, but it never ended up being something about that specific topic.
Janine:
So you wanted to ask her about her family's history in Europe?
Megan:
Yes. She had Alzheimer's, so towards the end it kind of got harder to ask questions about the past. And when I was growing up, I did not ask difficult questions, as I did not know a lot about it until I got to university and started learning more about the Holocaust. My family is from Cologne, and I think there is this big responsibility for German families on how we reconcile with the past. But unfortunately, it was just too late at that point to have those questions answered. This is the reason why going on the study tour was really important to me.
Janine:
So where did you decide to leave your stone?
Megan:
I had no idea where I was going to put it. It felt like a very big thing for me because the loss of my Oma was still pretty heavy and the study tour was intense, there was a lot of very emotional content. I remember we were going through Auschwitz, and we were walking past, I don't remember which crematorium. They had those headstones there and it was where they would scatter the ashes. So, at the foot of those headstones, that was where I put my stone. There were quite a few stones accumulated, and to me, I don't know what it was, I just felt that was the right place to put it. Mourning the loss of my Oma was something that I felt kind of alone, with but going there and connecting to that space was almost a communal site of mourning, the loss of all of these people and this real heavy sense of emptiness. I marked it as a pin on google maps, if I ever wanted to return to that space and feel that feeling again.
Janine:
It's almost a year after the program. Do you still think about it?
Megan:
It's something very present and I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently. Coming back, I was so overwhelmed by how intense it was, it took me a couple of weeks to get back and to start working through it. I took a photography class in the summer after I came home, where I did an assignment about empty space that's left behind after loss, which was a way of processing what I had learned and all the things that I had seen. Then, going into my last semester of school, in my cognitive psychology class, I incorporated it, because that was all about memory and belief. If I go forward into my master's that's something that I want to continue as well.
But also, at the interview for my new job, one of the things was showing cultural agility and so I talked about my experience on the study tour and the things that I had learned and I shared with them some of what the discussion was when we met the Holocaust survivor, which was really special to me.
Janine:
Thank you so much for sharing this with me!
Interview with Ana Paula Santana Bertho, University of Victoria
Janine
Hallo Ana, thank you for meeting me. Could you please let me know about the stone you took to Europe?
Ana:
I found it on a walk at Cadboro Bay Beach, close to the University [of Victoria]. I was walking and thinking, where should I take this stone? Cadboro Bay Beach was probably the first place in Victoria that I visited when I moved to Canada. And then I yeah, I took it [from] there.
Janine:
How did the stone look like?
Ana:
It was a medium stone. It was kind of a gray, bluish stone. A very beautiful stone, not too big, not too small. It reminded me of some kind of stones that we have in Brazil. That's why I took it.
Janine:
Then you traveled with your stone to Europe. Where did you put it?
Ana:
I put it in Auschwitz, in Birkenau, where the second gas chamber was. There are three tombstones. Each one is to some specific group. I remember that I chose to put it on the tomb of the Roma people. All the time I had this stone with me. And then I was thinking, okay, when I feel it, where my heart like calls to put the stone, I'll put it. And then I think my, our experience in Birkenau was very powerful. Because it's interesting, I didn't have the same feeling in Auschwitz I, maybe because it's smaller, but it's a lot of people. And then in Birkenau, you just walk, walk all the time, you have space to breathe, I think. And then when we went to Birkenau, the size of the place and how the murder machine worked. And also, throughout our trip, we discussed about different groups that were targeted by the Nazi regime. And I felt like how the Romani people were a minority group, but they were also very different from country to country. I didn't really know much about the Romani people, like how the family camp was used to make propaganda, saying, look how all these families are here, everything is fine. And one day they just sent all the Romani people to the gas chamber. So, I was very emotional when I put that stone. And then I chose to honor them for this. And then also later, we went to Krakow and the tour guide also explained to us the meaning of the stones. It was very interesting to me, to learn about the culture of the Romani people. The Romani culture of being always walking in different places. I think it matched a lot about the meaning that I gave to that stone and how I felt about them. This is also something that I really want to do, find out more about Romani people, because there are Romanis in Brazil.
Janine:
Such an interesting connection to Brazil!
Ana:
I didn't know about Roma communities in Brazil. They're invisible in our society. So, I think, when we put a stone, a material, something visible, some concrete, we can make this history, this memory visible.
Janine:
So now, a year later, what did this trip mean do to you? Do you still think about it?
Ana:
I have the best memories. Like, to be honest, this trip changed my life a lot. What I want to do in the future, where I want to be. I had the opportunity to go to places that I have read for many years. I'm considering applying to study in Europe, to make connections between like what is happening in Europe, what is happening in South America and the United States. About how memories like connected, the far right, but also how activists are engaging in these memories.
Janine:
Thank you very much for your insights!
Literature
Clyde, C., Walker, D. A., & Floyd, D. L. (2005). An Experiential Learning Program for Holocaust Education. 42(3). https://doi.org/10.2202/1949-6605.1511
Gregory, I. (2000). The Holocaust: Some reflections and issues. Teaching the Holocaust: Educational dimensions, principles and practice, 37.
Gross, Z., & Rutland, S. D. (2017). Experiential learning in informal educational settings. 63(1), 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-017-9625-6
Bailer, Brigitte. “Aspects of Austria’s Dealing with Her National Socialist Past.” Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW), 2009, https://www.doew.at/cms/download/ehq6e/bailer.pdf
Picture: “Drawings of Middle Palaeolithic Tools: Points & Scrapers” by Adrien de Mortillet and Gabriel de Mortillet (via Wellcome Images). Licensed under CC BY 4.0. No changes have been made.
