An area of the Jewish cemetery at Lotnicza Street in Wroclaw, Poland, cleared and restored by Wright State students

Wright State University service project helps reclaim neglected Jewish cemetery in Poland

By Michelle Tedford, Special To The Observer

They were there to ensure the world will remember.

Wright State history major Josh Cummins

With each tree they cut, each clod of sod they dug away, each gravestone they revealed, the Wright State University students reclaimed Jewish history in Wroclaw, Poland, home to one of the nation’s largest populations of Jews before World War II.

“We are rolling back his (Hitler’s) victory inch by inch and revealing the people who lived in this world who Hitler tried to obliterate,” said Dr. Myron Levine, professor of urban and public affairs at Wright State, who this summer led a 15-day service learning study trip to Berlin and Poland.

During the class, students learned about Nazism, communism, Berlin’s reunification, and war politics. But Levine’s foremost goal for the course was to create “communities of memory,” a phrase borrowed from sociologist Robert Bellah, to ensure the Holocaust does not fall through cracks in the curriculum.

The cemetery work helped instill a sense of obligation in communities of the present toward those who came before us, he said.

“It is about getting the students to understand the importance of community, memory and giving back,” Levine said.

The service learning trip was modeled after one Levine joined at Albion College, where he taught for 23 years. Albion and Hope colleges, both in Michigan, have been taking students to Wroclaw since the late 1990s and have succeeded reclaiming a large portion of the Jewish cemetery at Lotnicza Street, on the western edge of the city. This cemetery was opened in 1902 and contains approximately 8,000 tombs.

The Jewish residents of Wroclaw were deported and killed during the war, and antireligious communism kept the cemetery from being tended. Levine first traveled to Wroclaw in 2001; this was his third trip and the first for Wright State students.

It was senior Josh Cummins’ first trip abroad. The history and international studies major was excited to experience places he had only read about in history books or seen in movies. Initially he was unsure about the service project.

It turned out to be one of the most powerful lessons.

“The experience changed the way I look at things,” he said of the trip. “Everybody needs to learn about the Holocaust. It’s something that happened to the whole world.”

The trip began in Berlin, where graduate student Alex Elkins saw the city’s sometimes uneasy attempt at reunification after the fall of communism. As a student of public administration and international comparative politics, he analyzed the city from the standpoint of things he had seen in China, Japan and the United States.

But during the students’ trip to Auschwitz and Birkenau, he also compared what he felt to his visit to Hiroshima. “It’s deathly quiet,” he said, “and you get this intense feeling of the death and sadness of the place. You’ve studied it and know what happened, but then you see the piles of shoes or the housing unit where they say a thousand people lived and you know there’s no way a thousand people could fit. That makes it real.”

The trip was also uplifting. In Berlin, they saw a thriving Jewish community well integrated with the city. In Wroclaw, they joined students from the local university who showed them the nightlife. They also learned stories about heroes, those who helped save the Jews and fight the Nazis. In Berlin, they visited the Rosenstrasse Memorial to the German women whose silent protests freed their Jewish husbands.

Wright State students at work

Junior accounting and finance major Amanda Hormann is focusing on such heroes in her final paper.

She is researching the White Rose Society, started by college students in Munich whose leaflets protested against Hitler’s reign. In histories of the Holocaust, these heroes are often missed, she said.

“They gave their lives for millions of people and they shouldn’t be forgotten,” Hormann said.

Only four students joined this year’s trip because of the poor economy, Levine said. He hopes to make the next trip in two years more accessible by finding donors to support scholarships for students (who must pay tuition), airfare and travel fees. Full-time enrollment at Wright State is not required to sign up for the course.

On their last day of work in the cemetery, Elkins gave himself a personal challenge to clear as many gravesites as possible in the little time they had left. He rushed to chop trees, dig sod, hack grass. He estimates that in four days, the students made 50 to 100 grave sites accessible to families and visitors, and succeeded in Levine’s attempt to create a community of memory.

On that day’s end, they were approached by the leader of the local Jewish community, which is small but beginning to thrive in Wroclaw. He spoke his thanks in Hebrew and Polish. He said they were performing a nejlepsie mitzvah — the most high commandment to God, by serving others.

“They were doing good for people who could not do anything in return,” he said. “This is the highest mitzvah.”