Remembering the Holocaust

 

This week in Positive Education and in our Assemblies we remembered the Holocaust and spoke to our students about letting the light shine and to be an upstander in life, standing up for those less fortunate and the vulnerable in our society. The United Nations set Jan. 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day and urged countries to honour the victims. This date was chosen as it was the day the Russian Army liberated Auschwitz and brought to the World’s attention the horrors of the concentration camps.

The history of the Holocaust (also known as the Shoah) covers the deprivation of rights, persecution and annihilation of the Jewish population in Europe. This development started in the early 1930s with the systematic marginalisation of Jews in Germany through stigmatisation, calls for boycotts and legal regulations, such as occupational bans and the exclusion of Jewish children from state schools. It continued with expropriation and expulsion. The Pogrom Night of 9 November 1938 marked the start of the genocide: arrests and deportations culminated in forced labour and industrially implemented mass murder in the labour and extermination camps of the Nazi dictatorship. By the time the Allies liberated Germany, hunger, exhaustion, disease as well as mass shootings and gassings had claimed the lives of about six million people, including Anne Frank and all the other inhabitants of the secret annex, with the exception of Otto Frank.*

In Secondary School we speak to the children about remembering the victims of the Holocaust and we use resources from the Diary of Anne Frank and the United Nations World Days of Observance. 

On this annual day of commemoration, the UN urges every member state to honour the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism and to develop educational programmes to help prevent future genocides.

We teach the Holocaust Historiography at A2 in our Cambridge History lessons and it is important that we remember and we do not allow people to forget or deny this terrible moment in human civilization.

We use the school values and try to look at the upstanders in History and how we can as individuals make a difference and be the light that shines in darkness.

*Where is Anne Frank?

Holocaust Survivors Podcast

 

Robert Cooke
Head of Pastoral and Safeguarding