Ampersand Programs immediately immerse first-year students in the very best of WashU, blending classroom study with experiential learning while fostering tight-knit cohorts and close connections with faculty.
Conner Yamnitz, 19, stood amid the jagged stone markers of the Treblinka memorial and thought about the lives they represented.
Nestled deep in the woods of eastern Poland, the memorial marks the site of a former Nazi extermination camp where more than 800,000 people were killed. Its stones rise from a flattened circle of dirt like a makeshift cemetery, each one honoring a different Polish Jewish community whose inhabitants were erased from history.
Yamnitz visited Treblinka in summer 2023 with a small cohort of classmates as part of the Arts & Sciences Ampersand Program “History, Memory, and Representation of the Holocaust.” Standing side by side with his peers and guided by world-leading Holocaust scholars Erin McGlothlin and Anika Walke, he quietly traced the stones, reflecting on the history they had studied over the two-semester course. It was one of the final stops on a transformative journey through Berlin, Krakow, and Warsaw, with each site bringing to life lessons from the classroom.
Before this experience, Yamnitz had a limited understanding of Holocaust history.
“If you had asked me at the time, I probably would have said the Holocaust happened in Germany,” Yamnitz said. “That’s not entirely untrue, but it’s missing 80% of the picture. I learned that the vast majority of victims were Eastern European and that all the major killing centers, like Auschwitz and Treblinka, were in Eastern Europe. I was shocked by that.” Standing at one of those sites, Yamnitz wasn’t looking at a dot on a map; he was immersed in history. The silence, the stones, and the weight of what had been lost hit him harder than anything else he had seen on the trip.
“It helped me visualize the scale of the communities that were completely destroyed at this one, tiny place,” Yamnitz said. “It was overwhelming.”