Rowan Meredith

When Rowan Meredith came to UVic several years ago, she knew she had a unique opportunity to explore her passions. Her path to law school could follow any route that would allow her to excel. Now, looking back at her Slavic Studies degree at UVic from her scholarship-funded seat at UCLA Law School, she knows she made great choices: studying abroad, participating in the Holocaust I-Witness Field School, and undertaking a co-op placement as student curator at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.

Upon arriving at UVic in first year, “I wanted to learn Russian,” she explains. “It seemed a great language to learn. And then I fell in love with the department—they were so amazingly supportive.” The Germanic and Slavic Studies program fostered her interest in Russian language and culture, writing references to enable her to study the language in a two-month immersion summer program in St Petersburg.

That same summer, after leaving St Petersburg, she backpacked with her sister through Europe. A visit to the Czech Republic took them to Terezín, on a pilgrimage of sorts. At age nine, Rowan had played the part of a young girl Holocaust victim in the play I never Saw Another Butterfly. That young Jewish girl had died in Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, and Rowan found her name there “amongst a huge list of others.”

The moving experience spurred her decision in the next summer to travel with the I-Witness Field school to Holocaust memorial sites in Europe and, immediately following the course, to stay on for a co-op term at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

Paradoxically, the little things moved her the most, bringing the full weight of the Holocaust to bear: as Rowan explains, “we were in a room with shoes—some of them very small, just baby shoes. And while we were in the room, someone in another tour group had a baby, and it started crying…” Looking at those shoes with the voice of the baby in her ears moved Rowan profoundly, as did a ring she curated in Auschwitz, one in the form of a silver snake—a design as unique, perhaps, as its owner.

Rowan completed her degree with an outstanding GPA, her academic excellence and experiential learning propelling her to UCLA’s prestigious law school.