Regent Students Study Holocaust Sites and Roots of Hamas Terror

Zoe Abbott stood before piles of shoes and hair collected from those killed at the camps. She had read books and watched films about the Holocaust, yet the physical remnants made the scale of loss impossible to grasp from a distance. The group from Regent University spent time in Poland under the guidance of Dr. A.J. Nolte, who leads the Institute for Israel Studies at the school. They walked through death camps and spent days in Warsaw and Lublin to see both the destruction and the everyday life of the Jewish communities that had lived there for seven hundred years. Nolte arranged the itinerary so students would grasp what had been lost before they confronted the mechanics of the killing. He wanted them to picture the neighborhoods, the families, and the daily routines that once filled those cities rather than only the empty sites that remained. Jason Bauer examined the rail lines at Birkenau that delivered people directly to the selection points. He described the process as an assembly line where decisions about life and death were made with the same efficiency used to sort livestock, and he left determined to guard against any similar pattern in his own community. Rose Van Sanders studied records of the Warsaw Ghetto before the trip. On site she noticed the blankets woven from human hair taken from victims, a detail that had not appeared in her earlier reading and that underscored how thoroughly the system had stripped people of dignity. Sophia Webster had been taught to focus on what is good and beautiful, yet the faces and personal belongings at the camps showed her the reach of deliberate hatred. She returned home more alert to propaganda that targets any group and more ready to speak against it among her peers. Nolte pointed the students toward the contrast with events after October 7, 2023. In Poland the Jewish communities were erased, but in Israel the same forces met a living state that rebuilt itself and pushed back. The students heard that difference described as the practical answer to the pledge of never again. After the journey several students said they now saw any tolerance for antisemitic remarks as unacceptable. They carried home a clearer sense of their own responsibility to respond when such language surfaces in conversations or on campus.