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Davidson basketball team visits holocaust concentration camps

By Elsa Gillis
By Elsa Gillis

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The Davidson College basketball team was invited to spend four days in Poland and recently toured concentration camps Auschwitz-Birkenau and Auschwitz I.

They were guided by Holocaust survivor Eva Mozes Kor.

"First you feel a lot of grief and sorrow for what happened to the victims but then for me, pretty quickly afterward, it becomes a lot of anger,” basketball player Pat Casey said. “I think that's what makes Eva's story so amazing is that she's gotten to the point emotionally, where she can forgive."

It was a trip with great intention for coach Bob McKillop.

"Our players learned about this process of dehumanizing people for whatever reason,” McKillop said. “Now, they need to live that experience in the way they treat others."

The team has been back from the trip for about two weeks, but Casey said he's still processing the magnitude of what they experienced.

"To think that 90 percent of the people that were taken there were taken directly to the gas chambers. It was pretty sobering," Casey said. "We have a duty as humans to preserve human dignity and to make sure something like the Holocaust never happens again."

The four-day trip, with no basketball on the itinerary, came from an invitation from a Davidson alumni connected to the Maimonides Institute for Medicine, Ethics and the Holocaust. That is a nonprofit focused on Holocaust education and remembrance.

MIMEH, which organized the trip, is planning a documentary about the team's experience.

MIMEH partnered with CANDLES, a nonprofit organization founded by Mozes Kor, a survivor of medical experimentation in Auschwitz.

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