Two S6 students went on a reflective visit to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp earlier this month, writes Sarah McCready.
Joined by 200 other visitors from Scotland, S6 RE Vice Captains Carla Foley and Kate Hughes had an emotional experience as they toured one of the most important sites of European history.
“I feel like dissociated would be the best way to describe how I felt, I just couldn’t comprehend this was where I was,” explained Kate.
She said she didn’t realise herself that this was where everything happened until she saw a “work makes you free” sign while walking around.
Kate also mentioned the tragic side of how the Holocaust had a big impact on religion for Polish Jews as many synagogues were destroyed but never rebuilt.
Oswiecim, the town near where Auschwitz is located, once had a 50 per cent Jewish population; now very few Jewish people live there.
Kate reflected on how the community near Auschwitz urges people to talk about the severity of the genocide that occurred and to find some stories from individual survivors as it is “easier to connect to one person than six million”.
Sixth year student Carla Foley was very moved by the visit and said: “At first I was overwhelmed by the experience.
“It was hard to take it all in and the size of Auschwitz made me realise that this was people being slaughtered on an industrial scale.
“We looked at a corridor of photographs of faces of the prisoners.
“This had information about the day that they arrived and the day that they died – some only survived a few weeks and others one or two years.
“This really put a faces to the issue, you could see humans and not just statistics.”
The sixth year students will now participate in presentations at year group assemblies in order to share their experience with the whole school.
