There’s an excellent article in today’s Guardian online which starts like this:
You’re 16 and just back from a visit to the second world war Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in Poland. Only you and another sixth-former from your school were picked to go. But there was a condition: you must now present what you saw to pupils in the younger years. Where the hell do you start?
It’s a good question and one I found quite difficult to resolve for myself (and I am rather older than 16) when I returned from my recent visit to Auschwitz. Where to begin? What to describe? How to express the emotional impact of the visit?
The young people quoted in the story find interesting and different solutions, depending on their own personalities and what they think it’s important to convey about what happened at Auschwitz. Some want to show their emotions, some don’t. Some want to focus on the individual stories of those murdered at Auschwitz, others on the broader issues, and yet others engage in campaigning as a result of what they have experienced.
Holocaust Educational Trust
The Holocaust is a compulsory part of the national curriculum for 11-14 year olds (Key Stage 3) in the UK – and rightly so – but I am sure is challenging to convey to young teenagers the extent and meaning of the suffering at Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps. So the work done by the Holocaust Educational Trust in organizing the visits (albeit for students aged 16 and up) is crucial in confronting young people with the horror of the Holocaust and of genocide in general.
Thanks to funding from the UK government’s Department for Children, Schools and Families, is able to keep the cost to the students to a minimum.
Long may the HET’s excellent work of “bearing witness to the Holocaust and empowering young people to deliver its universal messages” (as Karen Pollock, HET’s Chief Executive is quoted in the article) continue.
Visits to Auschwitz are far from being a “short term gimmick”, as at least one senior politician seems to think.
Technorati Tags: Holocaust, Holocaust Educational Trust, students, Auschwitz, Birkenau, death camps
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