Held annually on 27th January, Holocaust Memorial Day falls on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp where more than a million people died during the Second World War.
The Holocaust is central to Holocaust Memorial Day when we remember the six million Jewish men, women and children who were murdered.
Today, Sam Neumann (Northern Holocaust Education Group) attended Cowley to share the story passed down from his mother, Bobby, who as a Jewish teenager in Nazi Germany allied Hungary, was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944 – a terror she endured and survived. Sam presented to our Y9 students.
To mark Holocaust Memorial Day on 27th January, we reflect on the recent MFL trip taken by a group of Year 11 pupils to Munich and Salzburg. As part of this visit, pupils took part in an educational guided tour of Dachau concentration camp, located just north of Munich.
The visit was deeply sombre, yet incredibly informative, helping pupils to understand how and why the Holocaust began and how it expanded throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Dachau, established in 1933, was the first concentration camp created in Nazi Germany, several years before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. During the tour, pupils heard powerful testimonies about prisoners of all backgrounds, nationalities and ages.
The Year 11 pupils conducted themselves with maturity, respect and attentiveness throughout the visit and were a real credit to the school.
A sign displayed in one of the Auschwitz exhibitions reads, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (George Santayana). As time passes and the number of living witnesses continues to diminish, this message feels more poignant than ever. On Holocaust Memorial Day, we encourage our school community to pause and remember the six and a half million innocent people who lost their lives in the Holocaust across Europe, including a small number from the UK armed forces and the Channel Islands.
Learn more about Holocaust Memorial Day.
