Holocaust Memorial Day 2023

Friday 27^th January marked Holocaust Memorial Day, which falls on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi Death camp established during the Holocaust.  The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day was ‘Ordinary People’; the ordinary people who let genocide happen, the ordinary people who actively perpetrated genocide, and the ordinary people who were persecuted.

Pupils and staff gathered on the Sunken Lawn at morning break on Holocaust Memorial Day for a remembrance tealight ceremony. This provided an opportunity to learn, reflect and remember. The light reminds us to ‘Be the Light in the Darkness’; encouraging us to reflect on the depths humanity can sink to, but also the ways individuals and communities resisted that darkness to ‘be the light’ before, during and after genocide. During the ceremony pupils and staff were invited to light a tealight and take the opportunity to read passages from the resource booklet. Some photographs from the ceremony can be viewed below:  

To encourage pupils to learn more about the Holocaust and other genocides the library put together a Sharepoint with a variety of resources to enhance understanding of this subject.

Rachel Lines, Head of History said:

This is a day where we are all encouraged to remember in a world scarred by genocide; six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, alongside millions of other people killed by Nazi persecution and in genocides that followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. Commemorating and remembering this day is important, as it reminds us that prejudice and the language of hatred must continue to be challenged by us all."

#LightTheDarkness