Tudor Hall pupils to remember the lives lost in Holocaust

Pupils at Tudor Hall School near Banbury will be doing a memory wall to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27 and remember those who died during the Holocaust in the Second World War. NNL-160121-120545001

The date marks the liberation of the infamous concentration camp Auschwitz and pupils will take part in a Holocaust assembly on January 25 with those in Years 11-13 participating in Holocaust Remembrance Debates on January 26.

English lessons will focus on the poignancy of the day, and pupils will have the opportunity to express their thoughts and feelings on a memory wall to ensure they think beyond the victims’ names,

Sylwia Holmes, research associate at the UCL Holocaust Education Centre and music administrator at Tudor Hall, said: “We found, that marking the Holocaust purely on January 27 didn’t allow the girls sufficient time to really learn about and reflect on this time in history.

“And so, in the week leading up to this day of remembrance, we are immersing them with information on Jewish life and ensuring that common misconceptions, like the geographical spread, diverse socio-economic class and beliefs of the Jewish people, are corrected.”

The aim of the memory wall is to ensure pupils think beyond the victims’ names, researching who the victims were, where they lived, their language, beliefs, religious subset, clothes, profession, culture and traditions.

The Jewish population was predominant in the Eastern parts of Europe, in countries like Poland, Russia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Ukraine, while less than one per cent of Germany’s total population was Jewish.

To read Sylwia’s article on Holocaust Education on the Institute of Education/University College London blog, click here