When college students talk about what they did during their summer breaks, few of them say they embarked on a “life changing” journey, but that is exactly how 10 New Mexico State University students collectively describe their May 2006 trip to Poland.

“It will take a lifetime to process this experience,” says NMSU student Christine Benitez of San Bernardino, Calif.

“This was about more than history, I just cannot explain the magnitude of what this has done to me emotionally,” says Jonathan Buttrey of Carlsbad, N.M.

Benitez, Buttrey and eight other NMSU students joined a diverse group of students from throughout the world for the March of Remembrance and Hope (MRH), a dynamic educational leadership program that teaches the dangers of intolerance through the study of the Holocaust.

“We volunteered to participate in this living history lesson,” says NMSU participant Amanda Rogers of Moriarity, N.M. “Using lessons from the past, we can become better educational leaders working for social justice for all.”

Making social justice concepts tangible for students – that’s why Todd Savage, an assistant professor in the counseling and educational psychology department in NMSU’s College of Education, wanted to bring the MRH program to New Mexico State.

“Meeting and learning from Holocaust survivors, visiting actual places and sites associated with the Holocaust and interacting with rescuers in Poland brought the Holocaust to life to me in ways reading about it or watching films just could not,” Savage says. “I started to relate what I was learning in Poland about the Holocaust to issues of social injustice in my own backyard in the here and now.”

Savage participated in the inaugural MRH in 2001 as a graduate student at the University of Kentucky and again for the second event in 2003 as a faculty supervisor. He brought the program to the Southwest for the third trip in 2006 and enlisted the help of his colleague, Eve Adams, also an assistant professor in counseling and educational psychology, to work with him as a faculty sponsor.

“The MRH benefits students in the Southwest in many ways,” Savage says. “In the Southwest, we see high levels of poverty; ongoing stereotyped beliefs about and discriminatory behaviors toward persons of color; negative attitudes toward persons who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, biased perceptions about persons crossing the border from Mexico; and issues in schools related to language. The list goes on and on. The NMSU students participating in this journey have the opportunity to explore issues of social injustice in their lives, how they may contribute to such injustice and what they can do to prevent injustice or intervene when injustice does occur.”

It seems many of the NMSU students took those lessons to heart.

“I am already taking steps to make changes in my life. I am not as tolerant of quiet discrimination such as tacky jokes and I am more careful of what I say and do,” Buttrey says.

“The underlying agenda for the trip was not for us to sit and say ‘never to forget’ but rather to become proactive and say ‘never again,’” Rogers says.

But Rogers points out that this type of atrocity has happened again.

“The eight participating Holocaust survivors each mentioned various other genocides that have taken or are taking place in the world right now. The activities going on in Rwanda and Sudan were touched upon frequently,” Rogers says.

The eight-day trip started with a two-day seminar in New York, but Savage had already begun preparing his students for what they might experience in Poland. The 10 participants met monthly with Savage during NMSU’s spring 2006 semester as part of an independent study course and each worked on a culminating project as part of their participation in the MRH.

“I believe students must establish and participate in a community network of learners who can support each other through the MRH preparation process, the trip to Poland, but more importantly in the months and years to come, as they take what they learned from the overall experience and apply it in their personal and professional lives. The Holocaust and social injustice are huge, complex topics that cannot adequately be addressed in one or two sessions. This type of learning is a process and a journey,” Savage says.

During the trip, the participants visited monuments and memorials that commemorate the once-thriving Jewish cultural centers in Warsaw, Krakow and Lublin that were ravaged during the Holocaust. They walked through the death camps of Auschwitz-

Birkenau, Majdanek and Treblinka and spoke with Holocaust survivors and rescuers.

“I don’t know if you can ever imagine such places or moments in time without actually experiencing them,” Rogers says. “Walking through concentration camps, seeing barracks filled with shoes and suitcases, feeling the dirt underneath your feet and smelling the straw that lay on the floor where people slept.”

NMSU participant Phillip Luna of El Paso, Texas, says no matter how much you study the Holocaust, nothing can prepare you for the experience of having a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau show you her bunk in person.

“It was an eye-opening experience,” Luna says.

The March of Remembrance and Hope is a program of the March of the Living, Tel Aviv, Israel, an international leader in educating today’s youth about the Holocaust. The inaugural MRH program in 2001 included 400 participants from 20 countries. In 2006, more than 700 students from around the world participated.

Other NMSU students participating in the MRH were Kelsie Foster of Tinton Falls, N.J.; Janette Mialkowski of Peoria, Ill.; Marcia Osborn of Deming, N.M.; Becky Rodriguez of Carlsbad, N.M.; Elizabeth Schall of St. Louis, Mo.; and Cammaron Trujillo of Los Lunas, N.M.