26th April 2009

Katharine and Will being interviewed by Tim Daykin from BBC Radio Solent.

Two Canford sixth-form students, Katharine Clements and Will O’Rourke, recently visited the former Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland. They were chosen to take part in the Lessons From Auschwitz project, organised by the Holocaust Education Trust.

With over 200 students from schools all over the South-West, Katharine, Will and Canford’s Head of History, Mark Rathbone, flew from Exeter Airport to Kracow, and then travelled by coach to Oswiecim, the town where the two camps making up the Auschwitz complex were built.

After visiting a pre-war Jewish cemetery, evidence of the large Jewish community in the town before 1939, they were taken on a tour of Auschwitz 1, the original camp which took over a former Polish Army barracks. Here they saw the famous gate, with its slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei” and huge glass-fronted cabinets full of the possessions of the victims, stolen by the Nazis before their execution: shoes, suitcases and human hair. At the larger camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, they saw the selection area by the railway, where Nazi doctors decided which of the new arrivals would be sent straight to their deaths and which were fit to work as slave labourers, as well as the remains of the gas chambers.

Four days before flying to Poland they had taken part in an orientation seminar in Exeter, where they heard the testimony of Zigi Shipper, a 79-year-old Holocaust survivor.

Katharine and Will were interviewed by BBC Radio Solent presenter Tim Daykin and appeared on his show on the Sunday after their visit to Poland. “I think it is important that the messages of the consequences of the Holocaust are passed on to the younger generation who weren’t around during World War 2,” said Will, “and that we do not forget the terrible things that happened.” Katharine agreed, saying, “Racism and hatred should not be allowed to prevail in such a way that something like this could happen again.”

An important aim of the whole project is to enable the participants to pass on their feelings about what they have seen to others in their school and community.

The gateway at Auschwitz 1. The slogan means ‘Work makes you free’.	Katharine and Will at the Jewish cemetery.
The interior of prisoners’ accommodation at Auschwitz-Birkenau	The selection area by the railway.