Two sixth-formers from every school in England are to visit Auschwitz to learn about the Holocaust, under a government-funded initiative to help to ensure that the lessons of the Nazi genocide live on with a new generation.
Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, wants the teenagers who take part to educate their classmates and communities in turn by giving them their own accounts of the death camp in Poland where more than one million Jews, Roma, Sinti, gay, disabled and black people were put to death.
The Government will fund the greater majority of the cost of each student’s trip. While their school must find £100, the Education Department will find the remaining £200 per trip over the next three years.
Teenagers selected for the visit will meet an Auschwitz survivor, be shown around the camp’s barracks and crematoria and see the registration documents of inmates, piles of hair, shoes, clothes and other items seized by the Nazis. They will also hear first-hand accounts of life and death in the camp and end the visit at a memorial service.
“The Holocaust was one of the most significant events in world history,” Mr Knight said. “Six million people died, not for what they had done, but simply for who they were.
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“What strikes me is the sheer scale of it and how industrialised and mechanised the process of killing people became at Auschwitz. It was not hot-blooded brutality, it happened in a very planned way, with some people designing the process of death and others carrying it out. Every young person should have an understanding of this.”
Students taking part will fly to Poland and back in a day, leaving at 5am and returning at 10pm.
The visit takes students first to Oswiecim, the small town next to Auschwitz death and concentration camp, where the local Jewish community lived prior to the start of the Second World War.
They will then see the remnants of the gas chambers at Birkenau, where the vast majority of victims were murdered.
The visits will be preceded by a seminar in the UK, where students, aged 16 to 18, will hear testimony from a survivor of the camp. Following their return, they will attend a second seminar to reflect on the experience.
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Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Education Trust, which runs the visits, said that the project aimed to turn the educated into educators.
“We are very aware that there’s going to be a time where there aren’t any survivors left to go into schools,” she said. “The young people on these visits themselves become eye-witnesses.
“For a lot of them, it’s life changing. They suddenly realise what they value and they see it is important to challenge prejudice today. We don’t want young people wandering around the camp and sobbing. It’s not about making them cry, it’s about helping them to reflect on what it means.”
Ms Pollock said that some students who visited were inspired to distribute leaflets protesting against the British National Party candidates standing in their local council elections. More usually, students gave talks about their visit to their schools and other groups.
Critics have suggested that the visits might act as a smokescreen to disguise present-day atrocities. But Mr Knight is determined that this will not happen. “We want them to see it, not as an isolated period of history, but as something real and something that can happen again and again if we let it, like it has happened since then in the Balkans, in Cambodia and in Rwanda,” he said.
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This is why today he will confirm that the scheme, which has been piloted since 2006, will now be on a permanent footing receiving £1.5 million of government funding a year until 2011, with a promise of further funding in the future.
In preparation for the time when there are no survivors left alive, the Holocaust Education Trust has produced a DVD containing the testimonies of survivors. The DVD, which took four years to develop and which schools can order, contains testimonies from 18 witnesses to the Holocaust and survivors of the eugenics programme, including Jewish, Roma and Sinti people, Jehovah’s Witness survivors and political prisoners.
Aristides Bernard-Grau, 19, from Graveney School in Wandsworth, South London, visited Auschwitz on an educational trip in November:
“ It felt a bit like going to Price’s candle factory. I felt very ordinary. It was when I saw the collection of human hair, literally tonnes of it, that I realised where I was standing and what I was witnessing.
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It started to rain and we were freezing, even though we had our thermals on. And we thought how cold the inmates must have been as they hardly had anything to wear.
It isn’t like being in a history lesson where you are told that six million people were slaughtered. You witness it and you feel it. It was like getting into a cold bath and being incredibly shocked. I had expected to cry. But it only really caught up with me when I got home at 11pm and was talking to my mother. Then it hit me like a slap in the face.
At school you get caught up with exams and your friendship groups and you can forget about what is really important. In Auschwitz I learnt about humanity. The trip made me more respectful of others and understanding. It was life-changing. If I had my way, every single child would go.”
Grim toll
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— Auschwitz started as a prison camp in June 1940.
— Mass murder began in 1941-42.
— About 1.1 million people died at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp
— In total, the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps covered 40 sq km
— Rudolf H?ss, the commander of the camp, was hanged in front of the Birkenau crematorium
Sources: Times database www.auschwitz.org.pl