Holocaust

Celebrating and remembering the Holocaust is part of our activities  at school .We have been doing it ever since we started celebrating 27th January. Teams of teachers and school are involved in projects, readings and celebrations.

The #Holocaust began with words, but with education and knowledge we can counter hate speech and help prevent genocide.

27 January is International #HolocaustRemembrance Day

ℹ️ https://t.co/41dxzOZfJT pic.twitter.com/KUERXdcvRX

— UNESCO (@UNESCO) 27 gennaio 2019

I have taken my students to visit  some concentration camps : in Germany and also in Poland. We have a lesson  based on the places and the documents which we saw. I saw my students crying and I am aware that what they experiences there will always be part of them.

I have also met a man who was a child  at the time of the Holocaust and he lived in France. He talked to us and  we could learn more about the conditions of the people who lived in the regions occupied by  the Nazis.
Hopefully,people cared and he was saved.   His mother  and his family died as they were taken to  concentration camps but a good  soul  looked after him and the other  children. They  had lessons and tried to forget that their families  were not with them anymore.

These are school  projects which  I took part in, but every year we do work on texts, readings and  videos about the ones who survived and also to remember the ones who died because of the atrocies which took place in the concentration camps.

This year I worked on a text, Memento by S.Spender, it is  a poem that reminds  us that we should never forget. The power of images can help us see  what  the soldiers saw when they arrived in Auschwitz.

We have also watched the first part of the film  Shindler's list  and we have seen some videos where some people  remember what happened to them.

Here I have collected some interesting documents which I might use with my students. They tell us about the importance of listening, meeting  the last survivors and also  teaching about the importance of respect. We live in a society where  the young and also the old  forget or they do not seem to be interested in the past.

 Without the past and the lessons from the past human beings  risk making  the same mistakes.
This is the reason why everybody should remember what happened in Europe  in the dark age of Nazism.