Holocaust trip being planned for local high school students
Above, high school students recently visited Costa Rica with Spanish instructor Rhea Cano. A 2017 trip to Germany is being planned. (Photo submitted)
By Molly Moser
Berlin, Warsaw, Krakow, Prague, Nuremberg, Munich and Salzburg: These are the stops planned for a 2017 Holocaust trip now accepting reservations from Clayton Ridge High School students and their parents.
Louis Cook, instructor of American history, U.S. government, economics, and current events, is co-hosting the trip with American lit and freshman English instructor Valeria White and her husband, Dan.
“The students will be able to make some connection with what they’re studying in school – from world geography and world history to American history and WWII, plus they’ll study some Holocaust literature in American lit,” said White. “The audience is specifically students who will be entering eighth grade this year through kids who will be graduating next year. I encourage parents and students to talk about it together, and contact us.”
The journey begins in July of 2017, with a flight from Chicago to Berlin. In Berlin, a coordinator from EF Tours will meet the group and will remain with them throughout the entire 13-day trip. “We will be visiting several concentration camps, several Holocaust museums, and the Warsaw ghetto,” White told The Press. “We will also have a fun day where we will go to Salzburg, Austria to Mozart’s birthplace, driving through the Alps, which are absolutely gorgeous and cold that time of year.” White lived in Germany herself during her childhood, and still has relatives there – including a Berlin native who was 11 when the wall came down. “I’m hoping she’ll be able to meet with our group and talk about how life in the East compared to life in the West, and about her experiences there,” she said.
“We welcome parents coming with us, too,” White reminded. “The thing people have to remember is that the trip is geared toward high school students, with lots of walking, riding on motor coaches, and sharing hotel rooms.”
The cost of the trip covers all expenses from flight to flight, including breakfast, dinner, transportation by plane, bus and train, museum admission, hotels, travel insurance, a full-time tour coordinator, and expert tour guides working solely with the Guttenberg group. Lunch, souvenirs, and snacks are the only exclusions. Adult prices are slightly higher than student prices, as some museums charge lower rates for student admission.
White and Cook hope to bring 24 students and parents on the journey. “The sooner they sign up, the sooner they can start making payments and the smaller the payments will be,” explained White. Payments are made through EF tours and are broken into installments with three different methods available. “If you tried to do this on your own, it would be at least $2000 more,” White estimated.
Cook and White have organized several fundraiser opportunities already, including a Edgewood Locker meat sale in the spring and a bobber draw at the Stars and Stripes celebration in Guttenberg. “We’ll be doing another bobber draw at GermanFest and another one at 2017 Stars and Stripes,” said White, noting that one student was able to raise nearly $275 selling bobbers alone. The group will also begin selling smoothie cards in August.
Safety is a top concern of EF Tours. “We don’t stay at hotels right in the middle of the city, which would be soft targets for terrorists,” said White. “We stay at hotels that are off the beaten track.”
White lived outside of Mainz for three years in elementary school, and on Hertzo Base near Hertzogenaurach for her junior and senior years of high school. One teacher took the students on a tour of Berlin and into East Germany. “I will never forget going in and getting off the train in the East German station and seeing guards on the catwalk with machine guns trained down on us, and thinking just play it cool, don’t stare, pretend like you’re a native,” White recalls. She remembers the sterility of new construction after the war in East Berlin versus the flower boxes and warm, old architecture on the west side.
“I remember walking by a very old church that had to have dated back to 1000 to 1200 AD, and it was completely boarded up. And then there was the radio tower with a globe on top: The east German government had confiscated funds from a bunch of churches to build this radio tower and the architect designed it so that when the sun shines on it, it reflects a cross. It was taller than any building in Berlin,” said White. “And that’s just from a four-day trip to Berlin.”
Parents and students participating in the 2017 trip will surely make their own lifelong memories. “That connection to what they’re learning in school is always nice, but it goes beyond that because you’re experiencing a completely different culture. Even in the four countries we’ll be in, each country has its own culture,” White told The Press. “I think it makes our students much more globally minded, more accepting of people different than they are, and much more interested in cultural differences. The way people act and react makes so much more sense if you can put their reaction within their own cultural context.”
The journey is not a school sponsored trip, so interested parents or students may contact White through her personal email, keysandcords@hotmail.com. An interest meeting (location to be announced) is scheduled for Thursday, August 25, at 6:30 p.m., with all parents and students invited to attend.
