BUDA

Hello from Budapest!

The HiA summer program is over now…. It doesn’t feel real! Parts of the Berlin conference were wonderful – some of the speakers, meeting fellows from the other four programs, hearing more about HiA from the people who founded it and are those who are involved now. There was also an itch to just be hanging out together and seeing Berlin but luckily we were able to have plenty of both worlds.

I guess it officially ended on July 3rd with the end of the conference but about a dozen of us stayed around in Berlin for a few days after so it felt like a continuation of HiA on our own. None of us really cared what sight seeing we were up to as long as we were spending time together. Plenty of neighborhoods to explore, a couple of museums, and that one important wall.

Six of us took a day trip to Sachsenhausen concentration camp just an hour north of Berlin. Hard to really put that into words. I wasn’t unequivocally shattered and sad per se – mostly just very detached and deflated. Looking at the cremation chambers gave me a literal gag reflex. This particular camp is unique in that most people there were political prisoners rather than Jews. When Germany was split in East and West Sachsenhausen was in the DDR and it was under that government that the camp became a museum/site. It churned up a lot of controversy because the commemorations were solely to the communist who were persecuted by the Nazis and not at all to the Jewish people who were there. It also heavily thanked the Soviets for freeing the camp. In reality the Soviets kept it running as a quasi-work camp for a couple years after the war. History is never subjective.

Leaving my HiA friends was unbelievably difficult. I don’t know how it happened but I love these people, I realy do. I feel insanely close to many of them after just five whirlwind weeks. I have learned so much from them and changed the way I think about myself and the world. It’s hard to say exactly how yet but like I struggled to convey in my last post – I can tell that there are many changes yet to unfold form this experience. I feel like talking a little bit about some of my friends and what I learned from them:

Sofia is able to be critical of almost any idea without shutting down a conversation. She doesn’t just “play devil’s advocate” – her brain is that actively engaged in conversations and her mind is that flexible to see outside of the mainstream. She’s a law student in Stockholm now interested in immigration and migration there. It seems that every conversation we have somehow involves her telling me the story of a social movement in Sweden or political figure in India or feminist author I simply must read – her thirst for and grasp of world knowledge is amazing. It intimidated me at first, but she is so warm and affectionate as well.

Thomas was my Danish partner for our final article for the program. He is an incredible idealist through and through but such an intelligent, confident, and creative one. Hearing him speak about the social welfare state was so revealing about Danish culture and my assumptions about political systems. To him, it simply makes sense that the strong should help the weak and that society should reflect that logical truth. Thomas is SUCH a nice guy - he felt terribly for expensive everything was in CPH so he insisted on treating me to so many drinks and kebabs and paper-writing snacks. He’s also a complete weirdo/dork – organized us playing Danish children’s games, had a literal “yes hat” that he wore when we went to clubs, and has the best quirks – some typically Danish and some entirely Danish like the nose tap, the tongue click/head bob… to be imitated at a later date ☺.

Marija is from Bosnia and seems so wise to me. The social and political climate there fascinates me… I mean, there was genocide just 16 years ago, but you’ve got to go on, as she says. Her views on holocaust remembrance and education were always extremely strong and sure – she gets frustrated when too much emphasis is placed on the past because she sees people in her country focusing on retribution rather than the future. She is extremely nonjudgmental – her focus is on doing what is in her power.

Theis, like Sofia, helped me to challenge my definitions of “normal” and “possible”. We "got" each other from the beginning and so became really, really close. He seemed to know things about me that I hadn't verbalized - he's several years older than me,

Love,
Alice