The Holocaust Educational Trust, established in 1988, aims to educate young people from every background about the Holocaust and the important lessons to be learned for today. The Trust works in schools, universities and in the community to raise awareness and understanding of the Holocaust.
Now in its ninth year, the Government-funded Lessons from Auschwitz project (LFA) is based on the premise that ‘hearing is not like seeing’, the  focus being a one day visit to the former extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Alice Taylor and Kitty Langton reflected on their shared response to the visit in a whole school assembly earlier this term.

Holocaust Assembly

Alice Taylor and Kitty Langton spoke to the whole school during Holocaust Memorial Week……

The theme for this year is Stand up to Hatred. The Holocaust was the genocide of millions of European Jews and others by the Nazis, shortly before and during World War 2. It was an undisputed act of evil. You may ask why we do so much to remember such a horrific and catastrophic event. But the point of remembering the Holocaust is to bring and keep, evil and hatred in the light so that it may not be forgotten but pushed back against and stood up to.

Adolf Hitler, the Nazi dictator, came into power in 1933. He was a fanatical believer in the Aryan race, the master race and held strong anti-Semitic views. From his first day in power he did all he could to promote these views through persuasive propaganda. He won the support of millions in Germany. As he gained more support, the persecution of Jews increased. They were made into a public disgrace. People began to treat them as a sub-race and they were gradually dehumanised. Jews were forced to wear a yellow Star of David which immediately drew attention to them and segregated them. Jews were given restrictions. They were only allowed to shop in Jewish shops, they couldn’t sit on park benches, they couldn’t attend concerts or go to the cinema. Jewish shops and businesses were boycotted as well as their places of worship. On Kristal Nacht which means ‘Night of broken glass’, 400 synagogues were burned across Berlin. Jews were then made to pay for and clear up the damage. They were publicly humiliated in the streets, being forced to clean the streets with a toothbrush, being shaved by SS guards in the streets. Jews were also relegated to live in ghettos. There were terrible conditions in the ghettos. They had to live seven to a room and had to survive on only two slices of bread a day. 100,000 Jews perished in the ghettos mainly due to starvation and disease. However, while the Jews were brutally persecuted, we have to remember that it was not only them. The Nazis persecuted anybody who wasn’t considered to be of the master race. They also targeted gypsies, the mentally ill, Soviet prisoners of war, Jehovah’s witnesses and eventually even Catholics.

During this time Jews were being deported en masse to concentration camps and death camps across Poland. Once they arrived at a camp, victims were selected for either harsh labour or immediate death. During the Holocaust 6,000,000 Jews died because of starvation, harsh labour, terror, inhumane living conditions, disease, punishment, torture, criminal medical experiments and executions, most effectively by gas, in the gas chambers. At Auschwitz concentration camp alone, where Kitty and I visited, 2,000,000 Jews were killed.

Throughout the early years of his dictatorship Hitler began to think of ways to wipe out the whole of the Jewish race. He wanted to kill every Jew, starting in Europe. He called this the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’. This was obviously a euphemism for the mass murder of European Jews. By creating the gas chambers, Hitler essentially industrialised murder. His only concern was to find the quickest way to kill the largest number of people possible. The gas chambers at Auschwitz Birkenau could hold 2000 people at one time. They took between seconds and 20 minutes to die.

One of the most striking things about the regime was the mass organisation. There were so many people behind the running of it. At Auschwitz for example, and many other camps, there were SS guards, doctors, executors, cooks. But there were also the people who built the gas chambers, who provided the poison, the company who provided the gas-tight doors and furnaces. Were all these contributors really evil? It is hard to believe. It’s a scary an uncomfortable thought. As human beings it is hard for us to imagine such evil from people who are not much different from us.

At first glance you would not think that these women were SS guards, perpetrators of the Holocaust. They look like ordinary women, like you and me, enjoying a break from work. Not only were the victims of the Holocaust people like you and me, so were the perpetrators.

However, you can see in the presentation we have put up, that there were those who stood up to hatred. Many Jews in the ghettos and camps carried on worshipping God despite everything. There were also instances when Jews managed to stand up to the Nazis and hold them off. For example, in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. There were also non-Jews, Gentiles, who were so appalled by the actions of the Nazis that they did whatever they could to save innocent lives.

The piece played as you were coming into assembly was by a man called Steve Reich who originally composed a piece to describe the frequent journeys he made by train across America when he was a young boy. He then decided to compose “Different Trains 2 – Europe During the War”, from the viewpoint of a Jewish boy living in Europe during World War Two travelling by train to, what the Nazi’s intended to be, his eventual death.

Another step in the dehumanisation of these innocent people was to pour them into cattle trucks; up to 120 men, women and children per carriage. These were to transport them to one of the many concentration or death camps built by the Nazis as part of the ‘final solution’.   

Nazi soldiers gathered thousands of families and individuals from the ghettos for a roll call. This would last hours as they would have to call the names of every person who inhabited that ghetto whilst they stood silently as they were threatened with death if they attempted to even sit down, let alone escape. 

To many, the journey was one of their most traumatic experiences throughout the period of the Holocaust. Being trapped in a claustrophobic, overcrowded wooden carriage for days with no food, water or hope of escape, Elie Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor, described it as though “with every groan of the wheels on the rail, we felt that an abyss was about to open beneath our bodies”.

Often, in isolated towns, many would be oblivious to the horrors that would ensue if taken to these camps, and so would be tricked by the Nazis when they were forced to buy tickets for the train journey. The tragic naivety of these people led them to believe that their destination would be a brighter future for them and their families, or even just a more developed ghetto. In reality, for those unfit to work at the concentration camps, it was merely buying themselves a slower death.

Once the train had arrived, soldiers forced those being deported with the threat of gunshots and beatings. Children were separated from their mothers, most held onto the hope of being reunited, and some did eventually find the family members they thought they had lost. But because of the way the prisoners were perceived by the perpetrators, and by most living under Hitler’s regime, any sense of unity or even companionship was prohibited throughout this atrocious, unforgivable moment in history.

Whilst the Holocaust is probably the most remembered genocide, it is most definitely not the most recent. Since the Nazi regime fell, there have been genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and most recently Darfur.

The Cambodian ruler Pol Pot saw the death of 1.7 million Cambodians through the result of political executions, starvation and forced labour during the 1970s. It was thought by the governing party that it was necessary to kill Buddhist monks, Muslims, Western-educated intellectuals, educated people in general, people who had contact with Western countries or with Vietnam, the crippled and lame, and the ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese. An ‘intellectual’ could be anyone from those who knew a second language to anyone who wore glasses.

In Darfur African farmers are being systematically murdered at the hands of the Janjaweed, a government-supported militia recruited from local Arab tribes. Since February 2003, the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed have used rape, displacement, organised starvation, threats against aid workers and mass murder. The genocide in Darfur has claimed 400,000 lives and displaced over 2,500,000 people. More than one hundred people continue to die each day; five thousand die every month.

Holocaust survivor and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Elie Wiesel, was outraged at how some would go so far as to deny the Holocaust, and spoke about how it was vital that we were never to forget what had happened in Europe under Hitler’s rule.  "For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time. The witness has forced himself to testify. For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future.”

There is no justification for genocide; to kill someone because they are wearing glasses is just as cruel, senseless and deplorable as it is to kill someone because they are of a different race. The testimonies that Holocaust survivors have left behind leave to question: Where were the other countries that opposed Hitler during the Holocaust? There was knowledge in Britain of the mass persecution of Jews as many British Jews left for America in fear of Hitler invading Britain, but the train tracks leading to Auschwitz weren’t bombed, the amount of Jewish immigrants from Europe was very much limited and those who came to Britain were often met with anti-Semitism. The apathy of other countries during this genocide has been recognised as something inexcusable, but, as the massacring of innocent lives continues today throughout Darfur and other areas of the world I haven’t mentioned, who are we to condemn past generations for their indifference towards such violence?

I’d now like to put into perspective some of the statistics of the Holocaust.

It is estimated that during World War 2, the Germans killed 14 million people. That is almost twice the population of Greater London.

During the Holocaust 6,000,000 Jews alone were killed. That is one million less than the approximate population of Greater London.

287,000 Romanian Jews were killed in the Holocaust. That was 84% of the Jewish population in Romania. It would also be every single person that lives in the London borough of Southwark, that we are in now.

At the concentration camp Auschwitz 1, towards the end of the war, there were as many as 20,000 deaths a day. That would be the death of every pupil of 25 schools this size, every day.

762 Norwegian Jews were killed during the Holocaust. That would be every pupil in this school.

90% of Polish Jews were killed. That would mean three survivors out of an average size class at Jags. It would also mean only 75 survivors in the whole school. That would mean every pupil in years 7-12 dead.

Antonia is now going to play Jewish Prayer by Bloch. Use the music to reflect on the atrocity that was the Holocaust and to remember the lives lost but also to think of ways that you yourself can stand up to hatred.

Lastly we encourage you all to go onto the Holocaust Memorial Trust website www.hmd.org.uk where it invites you to light a virtual candle in memory of the Holocaust. Thousands of people have already lit it and it would be great if you could make a contribution and see which number you are. I was the 8,881st person to light the candle.

We hope we’ve managed to put across some of the horrors of the Holocaust and that we’ve given you questions to think about during this week. Keep on your minds the theme for this year, Stand up to Hatred, and try, if you can to pursue that theme.

Alice Taylor and Kitty Langton, Year 12