VICTIMS OF HUMAN DEPRAVITY GIVEN A HUMAN FACE AS COLLEGE STUDENTS MEET HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR
A group of A level Religious Studies from Portadown College recently confronted the remnants of mass genocide and the worst of human depravity on a trip to Eastern Europe. The students were visiting Krakow and Auschwitz in order to examine, in tangible form, philosophical questions about the co-existence of evil and an all-loving God.
On their return, some of the students spoke to a captivated audience in Assembly when they described their experiences and the profound impact which visiting a Nazi death camp had on their collective and individual consciousnesses.
The trip to Poland allowed the sixth-formers to experience a new culture and they were very grateful to have Weronika Janson from Year 11 as their guide and interpreter. They enjoyed the architecture and varied culture of Krakow, their main base, and the reality of the Jewish experience became clear when they toured the Jewish Quarter from where the first Jews were taken to Auschwitz. In the evening, the students enjoyed traditional entertainment at a Jewish restaurant which had been visited by Stephen Spielberg when he was making Schindler’s List which was filmed nearby.
The students spent a day at Auschwitz and were very privileged to meet a Holocaust survivor, Mr Shmolin, who had designed the museum. They benefited from hearing about his experiences first-hand and they were able to experience vicariously how he was arrested at eighteen because he was part of the resistance movement against the Nazis and how he did not see his mother for another four years. On his first day at Auschwitz, he was made to stand absolutely still in the baking sun for the entire day as a precaution against potential escape. Mr Schmolin believed that his job registering new prisoners saved his life.
For young people to hear first-hand accounts of such a significant aspect of world history was an amazing experience and one which will be impossible in years to come. Mr Schmolin described his most vivid memory of the screams as families, children and friends were separated and people’s sense of the ultimate betrayal as they realised that they were not there for the better life which they had been promised by their captors.
Mr Schmolin studied to be a lawyer and was later involved in the trials which led to the conviction of many of the Nazi soldiers who had previously tortured him and others.
The College students visited the museum and they found it profoundly moving. History was brought to life in the most macabre way as they saw rooms filled from wall to wall with people’s shoes, glasses, kitchen utensils and suitcases with names on them. They struggled with the horrific sight of a room full of human hair, cut from the heads of about 140 000 victims, which the Nazis used to make rough fabric. A visit inside one of the gas chambers was also part of the experience. At the second camp, Birkenau, the scale of the “final solution” became all too obvious as there were workhouses as far as the eyes could see in all directions. One of the students commented that when you step into Birkenau “you step out into a very strange atmosphere with no birds singing, no flowers and it is as if all the colour has been drained out of the world. The sensation of being somewhere where the sadness is almost suffocating will stay with me forever”.
The staff who organised and led the trip, Mrs D Speers and Mr D Wright, must be commended for giving these teenagers such a valuable experience. Through listening to a survivor of the Holocaust, history was brought to life in the most dramatic way: facts and figures became real people and faces. In addition to experiencing the diverse culture of the city, they witnessed what is left of the depths of human depravity and the ease with which a society was led into the darkness of human morality by a dictatorship. As a reminder of this, it was a sobering thought that the Principal, Mr Harper, briefly related his own experiences of visiting a museum dedicated to the genocide in Rwanda in more recent times.
The students found the experience very rewarding and they certainly inspired their audience. Their understanding of heinous human behaviour was reinforced and they expressed not only a renewed appreciation of their own experiences, but a sense of collective responsibility for the decisions of society and the direction which it takes.