By Bessie King
Over 100 students applied, but the Greyhound bus only had room for 52 students and a handful of chaperones to go to Baltimore, Md., and Washington, D.C., for a weekend trip some travelers said opened their eyes.
The bus was parked outside the Egan Center Friday night, ready to head south. Those who showed up were all Northeastern students coming from different age groups and racial backgrounds.
The purpose of the trip was not so much a vacation from class or from the working world, but to learn how hate crimes, racism and the abuse of power can destroy a nation. For the second year in a row, Jasen Cooper, assistant Resident Director of West Village B and C, and Mark Harvey, program coordinator for the Office of Special Support Services, organized the trip with the goal that students learn how understanding the history of slavery and the Holocaust can help stop future tragedies.
Students said they had personal reasons for applying for the limited spots.
“I really wanted to come because I had heard that last year’s trip was very emotional and worth experiencing,” said Chanelle Mars, a freshman physical therapy major.
After driving for more than six hours, the bus arrived in Baltimore at 6 a.m. The group’s first stop was the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum.
An old three-story firehouse was renovated to house the museum, which was established in the 1980s and is publicly funded. More than 140 wax figures, posters, documents and artifacts are displayed throughout the museum.
Scenes of torture met the group’s eyes as they began the tour. Some of the figures showed torture devices and how they were used during slavery. One of them was the “iron mask,” which, after being placed and fastened to the head of a slave, was fastened to a wall to paralyze the victim. There were barely enough holes in the mask to allow normal breathing. The slave would asphyxiate, starve or die from exhaustion.
Other exhibits displayed slaves being “branded” by their owners and a life-size scale of a ship’s slave quarters to show how slaves were held during the slave trade period.
“This makes me want to crawl out of my skin,” said Nate Hartwell, a sophomore pharmacy major.
However, Harvey said witnessing such atrocities gets people talking. He said it starts the dialogue necessary for society to progress and for communities to evolve.
“The desired effect is for students to think, feel, interact and communicate on sensitive issues that are projected in the museum,” he said.
The group of students next made their way to Georgetown, where they prepared for their next tour at the Holocaust Museum.
As they entered the museum, each student was handed a recreated passport containing the information of a person who lived during World War II. When the self-guided tour began, students were told to read a page of the passport as they left each floor to follow the chronology of events from Hitler’s rise to power to the end of WWII. By the end of the tour, the visitors would learn if their given person had survived the Holocaust.
“What shocked me the most was the things they did to children and the cruelty they used,” said Sergio Morrero, a middler industrial engineering major. “It was just mind-boggling.”
Videos were shown to visitors in the museum where German doctors used children, especially those who were mentally disabled, in lab experiments. The doctors tested the children to see how long they could survive in freezing cold water and with high amounts of air pressure, and the results were used to figure out how long German pilots could survive in similar condition.
Videos, documents, uniforms and two original bunks from Auschwitz II-Birkenau, one of the concentration camps where more than one million people were killed, were among the historical objects in the building.
Throughout the tour the group fell silent, only murmuring at times about the statistics, including how two out of three European Jewish people died during the Holocaust.
“It’s depressing that although this moment of history has dissipated, the same type of genocide is going on around the world. The mentality hasn’t changed, just the self-restraint,” said Jessica Juarez, a sophomore English major.
After returning to the hotel, the group discussed the possible reasoning behind these crimes.
“The Holocaust was somebody else’s wrongdoing and slavery was America’s wrongdoing and many people don’t like to talk about it for this reason. Maybe that is the reason why the museums are so different in appearance,” Hartwell said.
Students also discussed how at The Great Blacks in Wax Museum, figures of black leaders who fought for equality brought hope and encouragement. And after the night’s discussion, the group of students who gathered in their hotel rooms said they thought of how they could come back and change not only Northeastern, but their society as well.
“We should work on helping others with how to leave that hate behind,” said Miles Turner, a freshman business major.
