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Local educator takes "trip of a lifetime"

Earlier this month, New Rockford-Sheyenne High School educator Jordan Brown was selected for the opportunity of a lifetime. This international teaching liaison trip took Brown and 11 other North Dakota educators to Europe.

Their first stop was in Amsterdam, where they visited the Anne Frank House, a biographical museum dedicated to Jewish wartime diarist Anne Frank. During World War II, Frank hid from Nazi persecution with her family and four other people in hidden rooms at the rear of the 17th-century canal house, known as the Secret Annex. Frank did not survive the war but in 1947, her wartime diary was published.

In 1957, the Anne Frank Foundation was established to protect the property from developers who wanted to demolish the block. The museum opened in 1960, and still to this day preserves the hiding place. It addition, it has a permanent exhibition on the life and times of Anne Frank, and has an exhibition space about all forms of persecution and discrimination.

The story of Anne Frank is such a well known one. But as Brown describes, nothing prepares you for seeing it all in person. There was so much hope and despair in those walls.

The next stop on their trip was to Dresden, in East Germany in Saxony State. The city of Dresden is best known as the recipient of target of a British and American aerial bombing attack during World War II. The resulting firestorm destroyed over 1,600 acres of the city center.

When asked whether the impact of the firebombing was apparent in Dresden's architecture today, Brown said, "I'll tell you what the tour guide told us: 'If anything looks new, it is old. If anything looks old it is new." It is a bit of information that reflects how sparse resources must have been in the war torn country.

While much of the trip focused on aspects of World War II, Brown said that in general, the people they met in Germany didn't talk about it freely. Pressing for information didn't often yield results either. "The older generations don't talk about the war, and neither do the young. It's like a scar." Brown said.

After their time in Dresden, the group made toward their next destination, a university and mining town of Freiberg. Until the late 60s, the town was dominated by 800 years of mining and smelting industries. In recent decades it has restructured into a high technology site in the fields of semiconductor manufacture and solar technology, part of Silicon Saxony. Today, nearly 2,000 km or 1,250 miles of mine tunnels--mostly abandoned--zigzag through the hard stone beneath the town of Freiberg.

The group took the opportunity to tour the older mines, an experience which was not at the top of Brown's list. He reflected on seeing the tunnels, saying, "I'm just glad I wasn't a miner. Even with increased safety, I wouldn't want to be that far under the ground."

At the Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg, or Freiberg University of Mining and Technology, the group visited with a number of professors regarding the similarities and differences between the German and American education systems. "We had the chance to visit with some German school students," said Brown, "it turns out, they're just like our kids. They just want to enjoy life being a teenager."

The final stop on their trip was that of Buchenwald, the remnants of a Nazi labor camp. Literally meaning beech forest in German, Buchenwald was established near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937.

Prisoners from all over Europe and the Soviet Union-Jews, Poles and other Slavs, the mentally ill and physically disabled, political prisoners, Romani people, Freemasons, criminals, homosexuals, and prisoners of war-worked primarily as forced labor in local armaments factories.

The insufficient food and poor conditions, as well as deliberate executions, led to 56,000 deaths of the 250,000 prisoners who passed through the camp. The wall clock there remains stopped at 3:15, the time the camp was liberated by the United States Army in 1945.

"It was a gloomy, overcast kind of day that we visited Buchenwald. I thought I had a good understanding of what happened there, at least until I walked through there." Brown said. "You can't help but experience a storm of emotions. You can just feel it. I don't know how to describe it."

When asked how he plans to integrate some of what he learned into his classroom, Brown simply replied, "I got 10 years worth of information in one week. Where to I begin?" He then went on to say, "You know, I'm a knowledgeable person. But when you get up close you realize how little you really know."

Brown teaches world history, American history, problems with democracy and current events.

 
 
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