Think you're brave? Not compared to this guy.

Blogging is more fun than writing mini-research papers.

Today was an incredibly cool day. We went to the museum about the French Resistance this morning - which was cool in itself, as it used to be the headquarters of the Gestapo during the war. But after we went through the museum, we had an "interview" (it was more like a speech with follow-up questions) with a man who had been part of the Resistance movement during World War II. At age 16, in 1939, he joined the worker groups that were starting to move to resist the Nazis and the Vichy regime - the wartime French government that collaborated with the Nazis. He got deeper and deeper into the Resistance as the years went on - he even became close friends with Charles de Gaulle's nephew - until he was helping to blow up electrical lines and railroads that the Nazis were using. In 1944 he was arrested and tortured after being taken to the headquarters of the Gestapo (where we were today - literally the building in which he was giving the speech was the same in which he had been tortured more than 60 years before). He was tortured by Klaus Barbie, the head of the Gestapo, and he refused to speak, despite the fact that they used a technique similar to waterboarding and the tendons in his wrists were severed by the handcuffs he was hanging from as they beat him.  He was eventually deported to Buchenwald because he wouldn't talk and give the names of fellow Resistance members. The only reason he survived the trip in the cattle car to Buchenwald - during which many died of asphyxiation because it was so crowded and many others went mad - was because he pressed his face to crack in the car wall and managed to breathe enough air through it. He was later liberated from Buchenwald by American troops, and when he made it home to his family, his mother did not recognize him because he was so thin.

And through all this, when we asked him where his courage came from, he simply said, "I had to fight for my homeland. There wasn't a choice. Everyone was in danger and the Nazis and Vichy were wrong, so I had to resist." None of this was said in a boasting way. He was humble. It was simply a question of protecting everyone he could, because there was no other option.

Unbelievable.

Tomorrow we leave for Annecy, in the Alps. Should be a good trip - the whole program is going, so basically we're invading. There's nothing more conspicuous in France than a group of 40 American college students flooding off a bus.