It's always different, learning things from text or instruction versus sight, sound, any of the senses. It's a detatched, indifferent education. In elementary and middle school, when we read in social studies books about World War II, about the Holocaust and the concentration camps, this knowledge doesn't affect us much. First, perhaps, because we're too young to fully appreciate the magnitude of the situation - too young to really comprehend the millions of deaths involved and the horrors and atrocities attributed to the time. In high school, we recognize the profound sadness that clings to any mention of the Holocaust, but we don't quite feel it.

On Tuesday we felt it. At least, I know I did. We visited a museum on the relocation of people in France during World War II, which focused especially on the constant nationality changes frol French to German, then traveled a ways more by bus to walk through the Struthof Concentration Camp. Later, Anne's dad told me that it wasn't the original camp because it had been burned a number of times, but the experience was still profoundly disturbing. The prisoner cell block corridors were narrow, the cells lifeless and small and thankfully lacking the odor they must have been teeming with decades ago. When I peered into the isolation cells, it wasn't hard to imagine what Miss Kidwell read to us - that in the few days before they're scheduled deaths, prisoners were forced to squat in the miniature cell, unable to sit or stand or eat or drink until they died. It was chilling standing in such close proximity to a place that hosted such acts of human cruelty.

We walked through the crematorium, too, whose center still held the stove with it's cyndrillical opening - some one placed flowers there, now, instead of bodies. The walls on the left bore plaques with names of resistance members who were shot in a room off the main entry. It looked just the same as all the other rooms, except in the center where the stone floor sloped into a single drain - an easier clean up, the sign outside the door read.

After that somber visit we went through the museum on the grounds there and because most of us were too restless to walk around and read through everything, we wrote a short reflection on our day. When we returned to the school we hung around the courtyard then met our French host students in the cafeteria for a Rotary club meeting, where our teachers presented them the flag we made.

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