This morning Mr Barnett and Mr Ellis held a whole school assembly on the theme of International Holocaust Remembrance. As we know, but perhaps forget in the hustle and bustle of life, The Holocaust was the attempt by the Nazis and their collaborators to murder all the Jews in Europe. Six million Jewish men, women and children were killed in ghettos, mass-shootings, concentration camps and extermination camps. However what we perhaps don’t know is that since 1945 there have been other periods of genocide across the world and in Darfur it is still happening today.
Students were moved as Mr Barnett explained how hatred forced many people to ‘ turn a blind eye’ to the horrors of the Nazi persecution. Indeed, statistics tell us that nearly 1 in 20 people living in our society today, still deny the Holocaust ever happened. Hatred is a powerful emotion and through fear, manipulation and propaganda, human beings become blind to what they prefer not to know.
Over the period of the Nazi regime more than 12 million people were murdered. Numbers like this are very difficult to conceptualise, so Mr Ashcroft did the maths and calculated that it would take 90 years to ‘remove’ 12 million people from the world, if the number of people sitting in our school today, were ‘removed’ everyday. 90 years !
Mr Ellis talked about a Holocaust survivor he had met whilst on teacher training. This man was a survivor of Auschwitz, but had lost his mother, father, sister, grandparents and cousins through this terrible period of history. When asked if he hated the people responsible, he replied that he did not hate because hatred was where it all started.
A very moving assembly that certainly made us think.
