Department News

Mar 11, 2008 - Faculty and students from four colleges and universities, including Union, will join together in May for a Holocaust-themed tour to Berlin (Germany), Prague (the Czech Republic), Cracow [Krakow] (Poland), and Warsaw (Poland). They will leave the United States for Berlin on May 18 and return from Warsaw on June 1. In preparation for the trip, students are taking classes this spring either on the history or the ethical implications of the Holocaust.

Dr. Alice-Catherine Carls, the Tom Elam Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Tennessee at Martin, is the course/tour coordinator, and she has been working on its development for close to two years. Dr. Stephen Carls, chair of the history department at Union, is responsible for those participating from Union; he has seven students in his spring-semester History of the Holocaust course. Seven students from Rhodes College in Memphis, under the leadership of Religious Studies Professor Dr. Stephen Haynes, will also participate, as will Dr. David Gushee, Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, who is leading a group from his school. All told, twenty-nine people will participate on the Holocaust tour to Europe.

Dr. Alice-Catherine Carls moves through the tilting stones of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, Germany, on June 13, 2006.

St. Mary’s Church, on the main square of Cracow (Krakow), Poland, will be one of the sites that Holocaust tour members will visit in May.

Dr. Stephen Carls, Dr. Alice-Catherine Carls, and the Reverend Dr. Manfred Deselaers stand together at the Center for Dialogue and Prayer in Auschwitz on June 17, 2006. The Holocaust travel group will spend a day at Auschwitz, including a time with Dr. Deselaers to discuss the many faces of the Holocaust.

Dr. Stephen Carls enters the Auschwitz concentration camp outside of Cracow (Krakow), Poland, on June 17, 2006.

The Birkenau Death Camp, located a little more than a mile from the Auschwitz camp, was a site of mass executions during World War II. Tour participants will visit there the same day they travel to Auschwitz.