Students and community members gathered in Dartmouth Hall Tuesday evening to view a documentary of the Dartmouth Hillel's Project Preservation's trip to Lunna, Belarus in June 2005. The screening was followed by a discussion panel with students who were part of the project.
The goal of the trip was to connect students to the past and allow them to take responsibility for it by restoring a cemetery that was the staple of the Jewish community that thrived in Lunna before the Holocaust.
Students visited the remains of Auschwitz concentration camp as part of their trip and described their reactions.
Yamini Rao '06 said she felt a sense of detachment, "almost as though what had happened there hadn't happened, it looked so peaceful."
Although members of her family died at Auschwitz, Elysa Corin '08 agreed with Rao,
"You do feel indifferent, you feel numb. It's a lot to take in," she said.
Bennat Berger '06 had the opposite reaction. "I've never been so angry in my life as when I was there," he said.
The documentary, filmed by Tucker Foundation representative Rebecca Boraz, includes interviews with Auschwitz survivor Aaron Welbel, as well as Zina Ida Glod, a present day Lunna resident. Glod related her memories of German occupation with the help of a translator, remembering that all the men who owned carts and horses were ordered to report to Lunna before 6 a.m. one morning in 1942. The carts were then used to carry Jews to holding camps, from which they were then transferred to Auschwitz.
According to the documentary, the death camp Auschwitz operated from 1942 to 1945, during which time 5,000 people were either gassed or cremated daily. An estimated total of 1-2 million were murdered there, although numbers are unverified because camp records were destroyed by the Nazi forces as they left.
The film shows the students in heavy gloves struggling in groups to re-erect tombstones, pausing to decipher the Hebrew inscriptions. Some of the headstones were over 350 years old. Curious local children with an interest in the project were shown helping the volunteers to clean the stones. Students expressed the hope that the town, which once had a major Jewish population, would come to learn this aspect of its past.
Cordelia Zukerman '06 compared the removed way current Lunna residents see Jews to the way present day Americans view Native Americans.
"They see Jews with an aura of mystery about them, not as people who were their neighbors," she said.
At the filmed cemetery dedication ceremony, Rabbi Edward Boraz read a prayer for the many dead whose families can no longer mourn them. Only six survivors of the Holocaust are left in Lunna today, meaning many of the families whose names are recorded on the headstones had been wiped out or relocated. But student volunteers have hope that their efforts were not wasted on Lunna residents.
Student volunteers spoke candidly about their experiences restoring the cemetery at Lunna and interacting with the non-Jewish present day residents of the town. Faced with stories of Lunna residents who did not hesitate to take furniture from emptied Jewish houses, they were forced to wonder what they might have done in a similar situation.
Shots of the cemetery at Lunna before restoration efforts show that it was nearly unrecognizable, with only a few tombstones visible through overgrown weeds. The volunteers discovered that there were actually at least 250 stones in what looked like an abandoned field, and was more or less treated as one by local residents. Students described cemeteries that had been ignored or even used as pasture land for livestock or trash dumps.
Nora Ward '08 received correspondence from her host family in Belarus telling her not to worry about the cemetery, that it was "okay."
"Even if they don't physically take care of it they have that awareness," Ward said.
To document the project, a website has also been created which catalogues the headstones of the Lunna cemetery. The website provides a general history of the Jews in Lunna as well as information about and a map of the cemetery. The site allows visitors to search the catalogue of headstones by translations of family names and find out dates of death, as well as view a photo of the headstone and its location within the cemetery.
According to Rabbi Boraz, the site has "received international recognition for its uniqueness and accessibility." He continues to receive e-mails from the descendents of Lunna Jews who were able to locate the graves of family members through the website.
Project Preservation volunteers emphasized that there were equal numbers of Jewish and non-Jewish volunteers on the trip, and that the experiences were universally applicable.
"Issues such as genocide have persevered throughout history," Rao said. "The trip helped me understand what it takes for something of this magnitude to happen."
"Going with a Jewish group helped those of us who weren't Jewish, and hadn't heard it from that perspective" Ward added.
In addition to the restoration of cemetery, Project Preservation strove to gather documentation of Lunna's history as a prosperous trade town, before it was stripped of its Jewish population.
"All of us gained an awareness of the vibrant Jewish culture that existed in Europe," student trip leader Lydia Gensheimer '06 said.
Project Preservation makes one trip a year; past projects have restored cemeteries in Indura and Kamenka in Belarus. Last year's volunteers prepared for the trip during the spring term prior to it by attending two-hour weekly meetings and learning background history. The trip lasted from June 12 to 23, and included five days of work in the cemetery as well as a one-night stay with host families. Students also met with Belarus students who were studying English in school.
"It's an intense trip but you have fun," Corin said.
