For many people, the winter holiday represents a time of vacation, gift giving and joyous visits with family. However, for a group of SMU students and faculty, this holiday season will take on a whole new meaning.

“Why We Go to Auschwitz: Art, Trauma and Memory” is SMU’s latest addition to the art history department’s class roster.

On Dec. 18 the class will commence with an 11-day tour of Poland. Led by Dr. Rick Halperin, director of SMU’s Human Rights Center, the group will visit nine concentration camps and several other “memory sites” including Nathan Rapoport’s Warsaw Ghetto Memorial and Adam Haupt and Franciszck Duszenko’s installation at Treblinka.

Haperin has been making the trip to Poland since 1984 and has been bringing students on the trip since 1996. He describes the experience as “emotional, spiritual and sobering.”

Having experienced the trip under a wide variety of conditions, Halperin said that his most poignant experiences occurred during the winter.

He realized that in order for students to get the most out of their visit to the concentration camps they had to “be under the worst physical and climate conditions possible. They have to experience the brutality of the cold and must spend time in these places alone, with only their thoughts,” Halperin said.

After participating in what can be anticipated as a highly transformative experience, students will return to classes in mid January to participate in the seminar portion of the class.

Janis Bergman-Carton, associate professor and chair of SMU’s art history department, will teach this portion of the multi-faceted experience.

The first part of the class will examine the visual culture of the Holocaust and World War II. By examining a wide variety of multimedia artistic creations and monuments inspired by the Holocaust, the class will discuss the ways in which society reacts to extreme trauma, especially in its creation of visual arts and public memorial sites.

Claude Lanzmann’s film “Shoah,” Stephen Spielberg’s film “Schindler’s List,” and Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel “Maus,” as well as works created by contemporary artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Shimon Attie and Marina Vainshtein are among the many visual products of the Holocaust that will be examined throughout the semester.

Bergman-Carton specializes in studying and teaching modern European art. However, she has a special connection to the topics tied to this course because of her Jewish faith and Polish grandparents.

Bergman-Carton aims to guide the seminar by discussing the important topic of “how a visual artist conveys the passage of time and a memory.”

The phenomenon of the creation of memorials will also be examined in a more current context during the second portion of the semester. Students will study and analyze local memorial sites such as the Sixth Floor Museum, the Freedmen’s Cemetery Memorial and Dallas’ Holocaust Museum in order to gain a better understanding of how society interprets memory and deals with trauma.

While the class itself seems to deal heavily with the issues surrounding the Holocaust and World War II, Halperin felt that it was important to emphasize the art historical themes that inevitably emerge while examining the Holocaust.

“The Holocaust goes on in a very artistic sense,” Halperin said. “What most people don’t realize is that the Holocaust wasn’t just the biggest mass murder of all time, but it was also the biggest theft of all time and at the centerpiece of that is art. This topic is alive.”

Emily Ewbank is an SMU student who will go on the Poland trip and take part in the class during the spring semester. Through this class she feels that she will be able to combine her multiple academic interests.

Her initial interest in the class stemmed from her desire to go to Poland and her passion for studying the devastation caused by the Holocaust and World War II. Ewbank’s expectations for the trip reflect those passions.

“I expect the trip to be harrowing,” Ewbank said in an e-mail response. “I will not return the same.”