Penn State students study Holocaust history in Baltics through embedded program

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Over spring break, students in the course HST/JST 426: The Holocaust, traveled to Latvia and Lithuania to explore the Holocaust’s devastating impact on Jewish communities in the Baltics. Led by Tobias Brinkmann, Malvin and Lea Bank Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History; Robert Jones, assistant director of the Jewish Studies Program; and Sharon A. Myers, assistant teaching professor of English, the group examined the lasting importance of remembrance and the preservation of memory.

The experience was one of the three embedded programs offered by the College of the Liberal Arts over spring break. These programs give Penn State students immersive, short-term international experiences tied to semester-long courses, deepening their understanding through hands-on learning abroad.

“It was an incredible educational opportunity to go to the place where all the things we talked about actually happened and also just seeing that part of the world for the first time,” said anthropology student Joshua Reiff.

Since 2017, the Jewish Studies Program in the College of the Liberal Arts has offered four embedded programs on Holocaust history in Eastern Europe, made possible by the support of the Gene and Roz Chaiken Endowment for the Study of the Holocaust. The program hopes to offer another embedded experience in 2027.

Several students also received enrichment funding to help cover travel expenses and make participation more accessible. Hope Butler, a third-year Paterno Fellow double majoring in psychology and advertising/public relations, was one of those students.

“I received enrichment funding from the College of the Liberal Arts through the Liberal Arts Career Enrichment Network, as well as additional funding from Schreyer Honors College and the Jewish Studies Program,” Butler said. “This opportunity would not have been possible without that financial support.”

The program began in Riga, Latvia, where students visited the Jews in Latvia Museum. There, they were guided by the museum’s director, Ilya Lenkin, who is a member of the Riga Jewish community. That was particularly significant given the relatively small Jewish population in Latvia in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

During the tour, the director took the group through the history of Latvia from the 1300s to the 1960s, with a focus on the Jewish experience, including the Holocaust. The museum offered a detailed exploration of the history of Jews in Latvia, from their arrival to their tragic experiences during World War II.

Next, the students visited the area of the former Riga ghetto, where Jews from across the city were forced to live. Approximately 25,000 Jews from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia were brought to the ghetto in 1941 and 1942 and also murdered in the outskirts of the city. As they toured the site, the students witnessed the places where Jewish people had once lived and the remnants of their synagogues.

“It felt really powerful walking through the old ghettos because a lot of the buildings are still around and you just have to think this is the exact place,” Reiff said. “These are all the walls that witnessed all of that atrocity that happened.”

Ashley Onega, a third-year student majoring in secondary education with a social studies teaching option, said there was only one synagogue standing while the rest had been demolished.

“It’s the only one standing because it’s located directly in Old Town Riga, so there are apartment buildings and shops that are built right up against the synagogue,” Onega explained. “If they were to have destroyed this synagogue, everything else around it would have been destroyed.”

Onega also explained that this synagogue was used by the Nazis as storage and a place for meetings.

Savannah Fox, a sixth-year student double majoring in history and forensic science, described that the last remaining synagogue “demonstrated a sense of strength.”

“The fact that this still stood and they still have this piece of history that they still use today was really strong to see,” Fox said.

Katherine Dee, a fourth-year student majoring in history, shared one of her favorite moments, which was a visit to the site of a former Nazi labor camp, where a museum and memorial called Salaspils Memorial now stands. The site, marked by impressive Soviet-era statues, commemorates those who were imprisoned there by the Nazi regime, including Soviet prisoners of war, Jewish people and Latvian civilians.

“The memorial was amazing, and it was very emotional as well because there were kids there and people would leave little candies and stuffed animals to remember them,” Dee said.

Butler reflected on the profound impact of the memorial.

“While you're standing in the field where this all happened, they set up a structure so it sounds like a heartbeat, and it started to hit me,” Butler said.

The following day, the group traveled to Vilnius, Lithuania, by bus and made a stop in Kaunas, the second-largest city in Lithuania. Brinkmann said the students visited the Ninth Fort in Kaunas, where Schutzstaffel (SS) units and Lithuanian collaborators killed more than 50,000 Jews from the Kaunas ghetto, but also from Germany and France, between 1941 and 1944. Much of the site has remained unchanged since World War II, allowing the students to witness the haunting preservation of history in its rawest form.

“You were in that building and experienced it exactly like the people who were imprisoned in their worlds. It was extremely heavy. You feel like you’re a prisoner there,” Dee said.

One of the key takeaways Fox shared involved a particular monument they visited, which notably fails to mention the Holocaust.

“They do not mention the word one time while you’re there,” Fox said. “Much of the monument itself focuses on the development of the fort rather than what happened there.”

The group then traveled to the Seventh Fort, where the original buildings still stand. Dee pointed out that the site where people were once imprisoned is now home to a school.

On the outskirts of Vilnius, the students visited the Memorial Museum of Paneriai, nestled deep within a forest in Lithuania, which had a profound emotional impact on the group.

“It was a mass killing site, so it was emotionally powerful in that way,” Onega said. “But it also stood out from others I’ve seen. You could see the mass killing pits — they weren’t properly filled, so the craters remain in the ground. That was emotionally heavy and struck me the most.”

Brinkmann said 70,000 Jews perished in Paneriai, most from the nearby ghetto on Vilnius. Germans and Lithuanian collaborators also killed 8,000 Soviet prisoners of war, hundreds of Poles, and an unknown number of Sinti and Roma between 1941 and 1944. He added that when the Soviets advanced to reclaim the territory, the Germans used Jewish slave workers to open the mass graves and cremate the remains to destroy the evidence.

Dovilė Troskovaitė, a historian who teaches at the University of Vilnius, served as the tour guide and provided the group with a poignant story. She handed them a paper about a Jewish man who had been forced to work at the site burying bodies — including those of his own family.

“The university faculty were very respectful, and they made it very human,” Reiff said. “They discussed individuals and stories of survivors and that was just very touching and very hard for everyone.”

The students’ journey also took them to a museum dedicated to the history and culture of Jewish people in Lithuania.

“It was interesting because there’s very little Jewish people left there, so you don’t get to see that firsthand,” Dee said.

To conclude the final day of their trip, the students visited a historic synagogue where they saw remnants of Jewish life before the Holocaust, witnessing the lasting legacy of the community that once thrived there.

Their next stop was the Jewish ghetto in Vilnius, where Dee noted that while there are no longer any Jewish residents, signs in Hebrew and Yiddish remain, offering a glimpse into the past.

The group then visited a house where a Jewish person had been hidden by a local Lithuanian family during the Holocaust. They were able to see the small attic space where this person had sought refuge.

“It was really emotional because it made you realize how tough these conditions were for these people, and obviously to most people, to be hidden was like a luxury,” Dee said.

The final stop on their journey was the National Library of Lithuania, where they explored a collection of books written by Jewish authors in Hebrew and Yiddish. Many of these were diaries, offering firsthand accounts of life during the Holocaust.

“Really, most of what we know is because of people who left behind these kinds of things,” Dee said. “I think the best way to learn about stuff is those primary source type of things.”

A key takeaway from the trip was the students’ realization of how the Holocaust is remembered in certain places.

“We got to see different interpretations of remembrance,” Butler said. “Whether it was a Soviet-era monument or one created by the local or remaining Jewish community, each reflected how people chose to remember and record what had happened.”

Reiff, whose family hails from the region, shared how deeply connected he felt to the places they visited.

“Lithuania was really an incredible place to be in, and I’m Jewish myself and my family comes from that part of the world. I just felt so connected with it immediately because they had that history,” Reiff said.

Onega’s takeaway emphasized the impact of physically being at these sites.

“You can read and watch movies and documentaries about all of this stuff until you’re blue in the face, but when you’re physically there and feeling the presence of everything that occurred, it’s a completely different experience.”

Liberal Arts Career Enrichment Network

The Career Enrichment Network empowers Liberal Arts students to explore, engage and define their career journey through diverse career development opportunities. Students can meet with a career coach to explore careers, internships, education abroad, research, the Liberal Arts Alumni Mentor Program and more. Through donor support, the Career Enrichment Network provides Liberal Arts students the opportunity to apply for funding to help support participation in many of these experiences.