Ms. Kang and other teachers have been planning the trip to Germany and Austria, from April 25 to May 2, for more than a year. A group of 32 students, chaperoned by 14 teachers and administrators, will stop at the Olympic stadium and the BMW museum in Munich, Neuschwanstein Castle, and Mozart’s birthplace in Salzburg, among other places. They will visit the Steiner school and eat lunch with their pen pals. And they will tour Dachau, about 10 miles from Munich.  Sheldon Benardo, the principal of P.S. 86 since 1991, said his students were not too young to see the world, although such overseas trips and cultural exchanges are more common in high school. Last year, P.S. 86 took 30 fifth-grade students to England for a week after teachers struck up a pen-pal exchange with a British school. In 2001, 24 students in the school chorus accompanied their teacher to her homeland in the Aland Islands of Finland.  Mr. Benardo, who will join the trip, said that he originally had reservations about taking students to Dachau, but that teachers had persuaded him that it was an important part of German history. He visited Dachau himself in the late 1990s, and said he found the barbed wire and the ovens a bit frightening. “I’m concerned about the kids’ reactions,” he said, “but I’m confident they have been prepared.”  Mr. Benardo said that he had not received any complaints from parents about the school’s focus on the Holocaust this year or the visit to Dachau.  Rosalba Herrera, whose daughter, Maria, 10, is making the trip, said she saw Dachau as part of the students’ education and worried more about an airplane accident.  Another parent, Lucitania Romero, said that she has taken her daughter, Ericka Tavera, 10, to orphanages in Santo Domingo to show her that she has a better life than many who came before her. “Sometimes she wants something I can’t afford and I say, ‘Remember the kids who have nothing?’ ” she said. “When she goes to the concentration camp, she’s going to know that people suffered for freedom.”  Mr. Benardo said students were selected for the trip based on their behavior and effort in class; the group includes four special-education students. Some students dropped out because they did not have legal immigration status, or could not obtain both parents’ signatures for a passport application. A couple of families thought their children were too young for an overseas trip.  Each family will pay $300 for the trip, and the school will subsidize the rest with $25,000 from its budget, which includes money raised through a book fair and a Snapple vending machine in the building, Mr. Benardo said.  Teachers have helped hold down costs. Evan Stone, a sixth-grade teacher, gave $80 to a boy who could not afford the fee for a passport application and asked a family that owns a BMW dealership in his hometown, Pasadena, Calif., to donate $500 for tickets to the BMW museum. Ms. Kang and Steve Cunning, another fifth-grade teacher, arranged for volunteer tour guides through the Goethe-Institut in Manhattan.  At P.S. 86 on Monday afternoon, about three dozen fifth-grade students gathered in the cafeteria to listen to Milton Fein, a retired Bronx principal, talk about the Holocaust. Mr. Fein, whose family includes German Jews, said his one trip to Germany in 1957 did not include a visit to a concentration camp because “I didn’t have the heart to go.”  Still, Mr. Fein said he was pleased to hear that P.S. 86 students were learning about the Holocaust because it was important, even though “it’s much easier to teach about things that are familiar and pleasant than about the things man does to man in a cruel and inhumane way.”  Afterward, Ericka Tavera said that she felt sad about the Holocaust, but still wanted to see what a concentration camp looked like. She said she felt more grown-up after learning about Germany and was excited to visit the country.  “Every single day I see American people — mostly Hispanic — around my block,” she said. “But I never see German people.”  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Bronx Elementary Students to Take a Trans-Cultural Trip, to Germany and Dachau. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Thirty-two fifth and sixth graders from Public School 86 will go on a trip to Germany to study the Holocaust and broaden their world experience.