AIA Basketball Team Moved by Visit to Auschwitz

[Sexton Hardcastle]

Here's an article about Dwight Thorne's experience while playing with the Athletes In Action men's BB team in Europe.

AIA Basketball Team Moved by Visit to Auschwitz


An already rigorous trip took some unexpected and emotional turns as the AIA men’s basketball team, touring through Poland, visited the Auschwitz concentration camp.

“I bring the players to Auschwitz so they can understand a little bit of the history and the suffering of the people. Often times it expands their world,” says team director Mike* who has organized this tour for the last three years.

The visit was overwhelming for many of the players, as most of them have never had such an opportunity while some had never even heard of Auschwitz. The Auschwitz concentration camp is the largest of Nazi Germany’s concentration and extermination camps where about 1.5 million innocent lives were lost according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“Some of the players were shocked and couldn’t even go inside some of the buildings because it was too powerful to see,” Mike says.
The camp, now having a museum feel to it with videos and photographs, has a series of block buildings that housed the prisoners. Inside each building are rooms with various themes showing the horror that took place there including items of torture, medical experiments, human hair, glasses, cookware and baby shoes.

“Walking along the roads and standing in the block houses is something I will never forget,” says player Abe Lodwick of Washington State University.

Another player, Dwight Thorne of the University of Colorado at Boulder, was asked by his coach before the tour to find information on his father-in-law who had been a prisoner of war at Auschwitz. As a result, the coach’s 83-year-old father-in-law has begun to share his experiences as a Holocaust survivor with his family for the very first time, Mike says.

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