Local teachers prepare to take students to Europe to visit Holocaust sites

REXBURG, Idaho (KIFI) - David Reeser is a history teacher at Madison High School. One of the many courses he teaches is about the Holocaust and its legacy on Human rights, a subject that has earned a lot of passion from Reeser. A passion he is trying to pass on to his students.

"Students know the name and they know that it was a bad thing, obviously, and they know those basics, but they don't know the details. And what I try to do when I bring out some of those details is to connect it to them as a human being. So we learn not just about the enormity of the Holocaust, the overall picture," Reeser said.

Reeser does this by having his students watch films depicting the Holocaust, read individual diary entries, and documentaries about the Holocaust.

"We talk about choices that people make every day, that in the context of the Holocaust, that would make somebody's life easier, somebody's life worse. That could literally be the difference between life or death," Reeser said.

Reeser is now preparing to take some of his current and former students along with some students from Rigby High School and their students on an opportunity of a lifetime. That opportunity is to take these students to some of the important Holocaust sites.

"One of the goals that I have for this class are objectives that I have for this class is if my students do get that opportunity to travel and to be in some of these places, whether it be a museum about the Holocaust or in an actual location where some of these events took place is for them to have that foundation of knowledge that they can truly appreciate what happened here, and then they can add to that knowledge based on what they learn while they are on-site," Reese said.

A collaboration between the two rivals will allow them to bring those students to those sites in the summer of 2024.

"The students are going to be able to have that firsthand experience of standing in the space where these things took place. So as we then give them additional information and additional insights while we're there, we know that it will be more powerful because they're literally standing in the place where these events happened," Reeser said.

The tour will take these students through four different countries. Germany, Poland, Austria and the Czech Republic, all in the space of 13 days. The students will be able to visit many of the ghettos on the journey and visit Dachau and Auschwitz.

Reeser adds that will be much more impactful than anything that he can do in the classroom.

"We're going to be walking down the streets of several European cities and we're going to see the pockmarks in the buildings from the shells in World War Two, from the rifle fire, from the tanks. And we're going to see some of the repairs that were made. And then we're going to be able to go into some of these places where either it's been recreated faithfully, according to the historical record, or some places that have been kept up to date, kept the way it was during the Holocaust. And we're going to be able then to try to have a better understanding of these events, why they're important, and why they need to be preserved."

The tour is one of the options from E.F Educational Tours. It is open to all students at Rigby High School, and Madison High School. Some adults will also be going on the trip. Reeser says the trip will also take them to some very important cultural sites.

"If you go on a tour of Europe and some of these European cities and you focus on just the Holocaust, it can get really heavy, really fast. And this tour does a good job of balancing that. Like we'll learn about the Holocaust one day and see some sites and then we'll go to Salzburg, Austria, and we'll see where Mozart was born and we'll see where the Sound of Music was filmed in the beautiful gardens," said Reeser.

Reeser said if you have a student who may want to go on this trip you can email Mr. Reeser at reeserd@msd321.com or Laron Johnson at ljohnson@sd251.org or Mr. Thomas at kthomas@sd251.org. You can also find more information here.