By Matthew Roberson
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There are moments when my camera is more than a documentation tool – it becomes a bridge between memory and responsibility. As a public health and toxicology university student, I never imagined my journey would lead me to the grounds where the darkest chapters of human history unfolded. While on Nazareth’s Holocaust history trip to Germany and Poland, called “The March: Bearing Witness to Hope,” I found myself not just documenting moments on the trip, but bearing witness to the legacy of the Holocaust and the resilience and hope that continues to rise from its ashes. It was an act of remembrance. As we walked through spaces that once bore unimaginable violence, our physical presence was the hope that we wished to see. Our physical presence was a testimony to the lives lost and a commitment to remembering.
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| Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe | I visited this memorial twice, once with the main group and once in the early morning. |
It is in these spaces that the line between past and present blurs. The green landscapes surprised me. We found bright trees and blooming wildflowers sitting atop places of horrendous suffering. I was unsettled. How could nature thrive here? The solace that I found was the fact that nature grows back. I find hope in that fact. The trees, rising again from the same soil that bore witness to death.
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| Auschwitz-Birkenau | I spotted this tree and wildflowers behind the barbed wire where the barracks once stood. |
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| Treblinka | The horizontal concrete stones resemble the original track line there, which leads to a ramp to Treblinka. |
As a photographer on this journey, I thought of French philosopher Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida while looking at the physical spaces and the pictures exhibited and taken. He writes of the concept of punctum, which is the emotional wound or detail within a photograph that pierces the viewer, that lingers after the image fades. I saw this in the hundreds of thousands of empty shoes in the Majdanek concentration camp. In the worn bricks of the Warsaw Ghetto Wall. In the hair clippings of many in Auschwitz. In the comforting gestures between students acknowledging each other in silence. These were the moments where the past gripped the present unwaveringly. The moments and images don't just document, they testify. They become part of the living memory of what-has-been.
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| Warsaw Ghetto Wall | We were able to see the wall from our hotel. |
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| Auschwitz - Gas Chamber |
To witness is not just to see. It is to feel, to question, and to carry forward. It is to resist apathy. The Holocaust teaches us the capacity for hatred, but also the resilience of hope. And as students, as global citizens, as humans, we must let this understanding shape how we move through the world.
We remember so we do not repeat. We bear witness so that we can build a future rooted in values of justice and compassion. And we find, in the quiet growth of trees and the persistence of memory, that there is still hope.
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| Łopuchowo Forest | Beyond the frame of this photo lie the mass graves of Jews from Tycocin. |
Matthew Roberson ’26 is a senior, double majoring in toxicology and public health with an honors minor, who’s conducting his summer research at Duke University (through a Nazareth partnership) on the health and environmental impacts of microplastics — his second summer there. Passionate about research, policy, photography, and ethical travel, his upcoming trip to Singapore reflects his ongoing mission to learn, document, and engage thoughtfully with the world.
