Holocaust Memorial Day at Currie High

As the sun went down at the end of the train tracks of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a powerful silence fell over our group of 200 secondary school students. It was the first time that day that we had been able to stop and think, to reflect on the fact that everything we knew about the Holocaust, everything we had been told but did not want to believe, was true. 

Last year Paul Macbeth and I took part in the Lessons from Auschwitz Project. We attended two afternoon seminars and a one-day visit to the former Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, in order to gain a fuller understanding of the Holocaust, and to pass on the lessons that must be learnt from history to our school and community in order to ensure that they are never repeated. 

The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day was ‘Communities Together: Build a Bridge’. In the week leading up to the 27^th of January we led assemblies, speaking to every year group at Currie about our experience of visiting the camps, and what we had learnt from it. During the assemblies the school choir performed relevant songs, and pupils read out testimonies from survivors of other more recent genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. 

Every pupil and member of staff at Currie, and members of the wider community, were encouraged to write their hopes and dreams for our community on a paper brick that would then go towards ‘building a bridge’ along the Guidance corridor. We took the colours of the Nazi classification system - which had been used to separate and isolate particular groups of society - and used them instead as the colours of our bricks, combining them to create a powerful reminder that every individual in society has a right to be living in a tolerant and respectful community, but also has a responsibility in maintaining it. 

Louisa Burden S6