ELON COLLEGE – An Elon College professor is taking a group of students to his Polish homeland next month to show them how the Holocaust nearly decimated his family.
Twenty-two students are enrolled in the course, “The Holocaust Experience,” which is being offered for the first time during the college’s winter term. The class will be taught by Kathy Lyday-Lee, an English professor, and Lubling, an assistant professor of philosophy. The group leaves Jan. 4.
Lubling’s paternal grandfather, grandmother and aunt were murdered in the Treblinka death camp. Auschwitz swallowed up his mother’s entire family – two parents and seven brothers and sisters. His parents, teenagers at the time, survived as laborers for the Nazis and immigrated to Israel after World War II.
“Only until you go there, can you begin to understand the magnitude of the Holocaust,” says Lubling, who visited Poland with his parents four years ago. “The students will see the towns where my parents grew up and visit Treblinka, where my grandfather died in a revolt that he helped to lead. They will talk to suvivors of the death camps.”
Lyday-Lee, who teaches a course on the literature of the Holocaust, has been a student of the historical event since she first read “The Diary of Anne Frank” at age 12. “It is necessary as a student of the Holocaust to go there to understand it,” she says. “It is important to know it in a first-hand sense.”
She believes the trip will change her life and those of the students. “This trip will show students that the Holocaust was not some mythical event,” Lubling says.
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