Auschwitz trips for students
Every school in England is set to send two students to the Nazi death camp, Auschwitz, as reported in yesterday’s Daily Mail. The partially government-funded trips have been carried out on a pilot scheme since 2006 and are now going to be expanded to include every senior school in the country.
With few Holocaust survivors still alive, these trips must surely be a good idea; it will be all too easy to forget the atrocities carried out by the Nazis in the last century as memories become faint.
When I taught at an international school, the Holocaust was not commemorated in any way. This despite a small concentration camp being just over the border in the north of Italy. Perhaps because of my deep personal interest in the genocide, I found this hard to stomach - we should be doing everything in our power to educate the next generation so that nothing on the scale of the Holocaust can ever happen again.
The government are apparently putting up £200 of the £300 for each student to go on these trips with the schools having to find the remainder. I wonder whether any private sponsorship could be found to enable schools to spend the other money on furthering Holocaust education for every student?
In my view, the first stage in Holocaust education must involve Richard Dimbleby’s report from Belsen. His clipped voice and quasi old-fashioned language do nothing to detract from the poignancy of the last words he utters: “this day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life”.
Whenever I think of the attempted extermination of the Jewish population, these words return to me. Music always accompanies them.
I bought a book of songs written in the lead-up to, during, and directly after the terrible events of 1939-45. One that particularly stands out is called And Must It Be This Way? The music has the same haunting quality as John Williams’ music for Schindler’s List. With the Yiddish lyrics, though, this song somehow touches me more than Williams’ soundtrack. The minor modality and, more particularly, the striking dissonances in the music (especially a 9th played about the sub-dominant chord, for musicians) reek of anguish and suffering.
As a preface to the song, Jerry Silverman, the complier of the songbook recounts a story of one less-well-documented atrocity: as the Red Army appraoched from the East in early 1945, the fleeing SS guards from one concentration camp marched some 20,000 Jews westwards towards Germany in freezing conditions. Having reached a frozen lake, the guards forced prisoners to jump in through a hole in the ice. Anyone trying to get out was either pushed back or shot.
The sadistic nature of executions such as this are more personal and in some ways more shocking than the more commonly talked of gas chambers. To my mind, they highlight even more starkly the need for Holocaust education so that the mass indoctrination such as that of the German population can be stopped in its tracks, before monsters emerge to carry out the will of deranged leaders.