Lessons From Auschwitz

On Thursday morning Bethany and Caitlin delivered a moving assembly to the Senior School on the trip they made to Poland as part of their involvement in the Lessons from Auschwitz. This is a national project open to Sixth Form students and we were very lucky to have been chosen to send two of our girls. Here is a brief description of their experience.

On Tuesday 2nd November we flew to Krakow airport in Poland and together, with our group travelled to Oswiecim. Here we visited a pre-war Jewish cemetery in which the grave stones had been vandalised by Germans. This was moving and gave us our first insight into the inhumane treatment the Jews had to endure.
From here we travelled to Auschwitz one, the labour camp, above the entrance we were greeted by the infamous sign which read ‘ARBEIT MACHT FREI', which translates ‘work will make you free'. This despicable irony was a chilling welcome into the prison. Whilst there we saw rooms full of the victims shoes, children's clothes, toys, suitcases and their personal belongings. Although in Auschwitz one what we saw was incredibly disturbing, we felt that the next camp, Birkenau, was the most haunting.
To conclude our day's trip we attended a memorial service led by a Rabbi singing a Hebrew peace prayer. Whilst standing in a five hundred acre grave yard, his voice and the whistling of the wind, around the empty land, we were reminded of how lucky we were to walk out of Birkenau with our freedom.