Walking through Birkenau and standing in wooden stables that were made originally for horses but housed 100s of people in unimaginable conditions is hard to describe. As is spending the day visiting purpose built extermination camps made by humans for the sole purpose of destroying a group of people for their beliefs or ideology.
Since 1999, over 34,000 students and teachers have taken part in the scheme called ‘Lessons from Auschwitz’.
There are 4 key steps which are core to the programme. From them you will hear survivors of the Holocaust give their testimony, you'll learn about Jewish Life before the War, and then spend a day visiting Auschwitz Birkenau and the town of Oswiecim. The programme ends with a series of reflective sessions where you share what you've learnt with others in the next steps programme and you become an ambassador for LFA.
The premise of the LFA is “Hearing is not the same as seeing.” That is an understatement; as you'll discover, hearing about Auschwitz is nothing like visiting it. The educators are keen to show as much as they can and provide you with huge pools of knowledge, but crucially, they encourage the lessons that you learn to be individual to you, and not rigid ones that they just repeat. I can't say honestly what you will gain from this experience, but I do know it's something which will change your perspective; whether this is a minuscule or considerable change depends on you. But I would urge any students reading this to encourage their school to take part in the project if they do not already.
We were told by the Trust when writing our applications that it's a strange thing to want to visit the sites of genocide, but strange does not even begin to cover it. The enormity of the abhorrent act committed by the Nazis and their collaborators is not conceivable through statistics read in books. And the experience of walking around the camp on the trip is a far cry from watching documentaries or dramatisations.
A quote we were presented with said “ We learn from history, that we do not learn from history.”
I find the fact I agree with this statement quite saddening, but the LFA scheme is trying its best to change this. It has inspired us in the continuation of attempting to understand the Holocaust, and its message, that we must continue to learn from it, is an important one.
