This is a study of the thoughts of ten students who were part of the Vassar College 1998 Study Trip to Berlin on the subject of their March 15 visit to Buchenwald concentration camp.

Before the trip to Berlin this spring break, I had made three visits with three different groups of people to concentration camps; I had been to Buchenwald two times and Auschwitz once. With all of these groups, I got the sense that people had many strong feelings about what they were experiencing. However, I felt that I never heard much more than a few snippets of people's thoughts - never the whole story. Those stories were something I was very interested in hearing, since I myself had begun to form some distinct impressions of concentration camp visits.

When Assistant Professor of German Silke von der Emde came to our class in February to give a lecture on Holocaust memorials, including concentration camps, I could see clearly from our discussion that there were diverse, and even fiercely contested opinions in the class regarding the camps. Thus I decided that I would embark on a class project that would take an in-depth look at a cross-section of students' feelings towards our impending visit to Buchenwald.

I made the project anonymous - the participants' identities are known only to myself - since it sometimes seems that because this is such a sensitive issue, people cannot always say openly what they feel. I sent out questionnaires by e-mail to all the students in the class and asked for volunteers to write a personal response, making or not making use of the questions I offered, to the topic of the upcoming visit. With a few participants, I did not receive written responses, but rather conducted interviews before our visit. After we returned to Vassar, I requested a similar response over e-mail from those who had chosen to participate.

I wanted to create a primary resource documenting these expectations and reactions of a group of my peers to this experience. In my research, I had never come across anything quite like this. I found the web to be a perfect medium for my project because of the ease with which one can jump back and forth between expectation and reaction and between participant and participant. The order in which it is viewed is completely determined by the user.

What I try to evoke in the expectations and reactions main pages is the feeling of a group all trying to talk at once, but not really able to get much of anything out. This is the usual sense one gets with a group, while visiting a camp. With my project, however, you can, by clicking on the beginning of the person's thought, look deeper into what each person thinks and follow his or her progress.