Kathi Diamant

I'm learning a thing or two about blogs. After getting advice from the best and brightest at KPBS, the fact is I can't keep up. Life happens faster than I can write about it. Especially when you are living it in Krakow. The

One chapter has closed and another begun. The

I learned about the Holocaust, concentration camps, and death camps in eighth grade last year, but what they taught us did not bring the emotions felt when I was at that camp. & I knew they had small beds, little food, and horrible conditions, but to see the beds stacked three high and very close together was even worse than I imagined. & When we went into the "bathroom" you saw a long row of "toilets" that were just holes one next to another on a cement slab about one and half feet off of the ground. & To see this was appalling and to try to imagine what it was like to be there with them was dreadful. Schools can try to teach you this but unless you see it, unless you are there, you cannot get a feeling of how they lived. &

Yesterday in Prague we saw the buildings where Kafka lived, went to school and worked. One high point for me was visiting the New Jewish Cemetery in the suburb of Strasnice. In this damp, green, wooded place Kathi stood with one arm around Kafka's tombstone and told us how Dora collapsed on his grave the day of his funeral, & June 11, 1924. In a solemn procession, my friend Martin and I followed our other travel companions in laying stones on the grave for remembrance, as is the custom there.

Byron LaDue (pictured) is the IT volunteer on this research mission. He spent four months in Berlin with me in 1998, mentoring my 10-year old niece,…

Ten years ago I foundedthe Kafka Project at SDSU, andspent four months in Berlin researching Nazi, Gestapo and SED (East German Communist) files. I discovered many treasures andunknown facts about Franz Kafka and Dora Diamant. That first Kafka Project effort in 1998, led to amazing