Fr. Frank Majka, SJ – The Bridge

Some Places

A high school newspaper I ran across recently had a story about a student trip to Germany. One sentence in it brought me up short: “Other places visited include Berlin, Stuttgart, Munich and Dachau, where they saw a concentration camp.”

I guess I was looking for something more about that last place. Were the students surprised, bored, saddened, confused or made thoughtful? The article didn’t say. Maybe for them Dachau was just another stop between museums.

I started thinking. Most of the places we’ve been to probably don’t “address” us (to use the phrase of the 20th century Jewish philosopher Martin Buber) in any significant way. But some of them do, especially if we understand what we are really seeing and what happened there. They not only speak to us, they demand something from us.

Perhaps that was missing in the experience of those students. Perhaps no one had really explained to them what they were seeing, and why, for instance, Dachau or Auschwitz will always be remembered as places of cruelty, suffering and sadness and will always make a claim on us to insure that such will never exist again.

Or maybe they actually did know and feel the site addressing them but the writer of the story simply wasn’t on the trip. I’d like to think that was the case.

But leaving the students’ experience aside, can we recall any places that have addressed us? What responses do they ask from us and how have we, individually or with others, answered them?