Local children commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day
7:20am Monday 6th February 2012 in Where I Live
More than 150 school pupils took part in interactive assemblies to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.
Youngsters from four schools gathered to take part in poem and story-telling sessions and dance performances.
All of their poems were inspired by the day of remembrance, which took place last Friday and promoted the theme Speak Up, Speak Out - exploring the rights, responsibility and duty people have to speak up when confronted by injustice.
Pupils from St Mary's, in Battersea, joined in with an assembly at nearby Chesterton School while The Alton School, in Roehampton, welcomed youngsters from Sacred Heart, in Putney.
Following a screening of a short Speak Up, Speak Out film made by the Holocaust Memorial Trust, dancers Dinal Bloomfield and her daughters Sinoun and Chantria performed two classical Khmer dance routines.
Dinal was only seven years old when the Khmer Rouge took control of her home town in the 1970s. Her father was murdered and the rest of her family were forced to walk from one side of Cambodia to the other to escape the Khmer Rouge regime.
Ruth Hudson, headteacher at the Alton , said: "We hadn't realised there would be a focus on Cambodia, so it was the starting point to discuss what a holocaust is and can we think of any others.
"As a school we discuss how to stand up to and stop bullying and other unkind or unsafe behaviour using positive assertion techniques."
To learn more about Holocaust Memorial Day 2012, visit hmd.org.uk
