In Germany, learning while seeing
FREIBERG, Germany — The sky soared blue and flowers dotted the ground at Auschwitz when Ayanna Dunmore visited. “When I was looking at the ruins of the gas chamber, a butterfly was flying … next to me,” Dunmore said. It was mid-summer, and nature’s exuberance provided a startling counterpoint to the horror associated with the camp where the Nazis systematically gassed more than a million people, most of them Jews. Beauty and memory created a dissonance for Dunmore, a Harvard sophomore, and her Harvard Summer School classmates. “It was very hard to be in that space, but it was also very eye-opening. There’s only one gas chamber left, which we did walk through. That was actually one of the most disturbing parts for me,” Dunmore said. “You could definitely imagine what it must have been like for the people who were actually there. “I just kept feeling like there is a very big difference...