As part of our commitment to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, a member of the SEJ team accompanied a school group on a trip to Auschwitz in 2011. Featured below is a first-hand account of his experience and the history of the Holocaust.
To help prepare pupils for what they will experience, the Holocaust Educational Trust runs an extensive preparation programme ahead of each visit.
So it was that a very well prepared group – of Holocaust Educational Trust staff and volunteer educators, pupils, teachers and invited guests – mostly journalists – gathered at Edinburgh Airport in the very early hours of a late autumn morning.
Auschwitz I was the first camp to open in 1940, and was primarily a concentration camp.
We visit the hospital block, where the now infamous camp Doctor, Joseph Mengele, carried out horrific medical experiments on camp inmates.
Workload is unsustainable – teachers are working on average 11.5 hours each week over and above their contracted 35 hours per week contract. With 1688 teachers fewer than in 2007, today’s teachers are providing unpaid labour to subsidise an understaffed and underfunded education…
