Lessons from Auschwitz 2013
On Tuesday the 24th of September two of Monifieth High School’s Advanced Higher History pupils,
Jade Kettles and Hannah Matthew, embarked upon a trip to the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz
in Poland. Before leaving for Poland, the girls had attended a seminar in Edinburgh where they
heard an Auschwitz survivor’s testimony. Kitty Hart Moxon survived a two year ordeal in Auschwitz
at the hands of the Nazis and now actively testifies against the perpetrators and shares her
experiences in the death camp with young ambassadors for the Lessons from Auschwitz project.
This project aims to teach young people about the horrors of the Holocaust and ensure that its
victims are never forgotten, while also attempting to re-humanise those who perished and
reminding people that everyone had their own individual story and experience.
Mr Hugh Hood, Principal Teacher of Social Subjects and RME with Jade Kettles and Hannah Matthew
The girls flew from Edinburgh airport, along with 220 other young ambassadors from all over
Scotland, to Krakow Airport in Poland. They then journeyed to Oświęcim, the Polish name for the
town of Auschwitz. Here they visited the site of the Great Synagogue which was destroyed by the
non-Jewish townspeople before the outbreak of the Second World War. After this, they travelled
further into the town and visited a smaller synagogue that had not been destroyed as it was used for
storage by the Nazis during the war. Here they were spoken to by Rabbi Barry Marcus of the Central
Synagogue in London’s Great Portland Street who pioneered the idea of starting the Lessons from
Auschwitz project 12 years ago. Rabbi Marcus spoke to two groups about pre-war Jewish lives and
religious traditions that were lost during the war. The synagogue has also been partly turned into a
museum, where they have some of the hidden treasures from the Great Synagogue which were
recently found buried in its ruins. There are also personal stories on display of Jewish people that
originated from Oświęcim before the war.
Exhibition of personal stories and photos
The Jewish population in this town was 7,000 out of 12,000 inhabitants and this was one of the
reasons that the Nazis chose Oświęcim to be the site of the largest death camp ever built. After the
war only one Jewish person returned to the town and he lived there until his death in 2000, when he
was buried there in the Jewish cemetery in one of the only known graves. Due to the ruthlessness of
the Nazi regime, the other gravestones had been removed and used as paving stones during the war.
After this time, the gravestones were returned but not put back into their original places.
Next the girls visited Auschwitz I, which was the camp used to house political prisoners,
homosexuals, Soviet prisoners of war and some Jews. This has now been turned into a Holocaust
Memorial Museum and houses the pictures of the prisoners and all of their recovered personal
belongings that they brought with them to the death camp. Some of the items on display include 2
tonnes of human hair, 40,000 pairs of shoes, suitcases, children’s clothes and shoes and hairbrushes.
The aim of these items being on display is to re-humanise the victims and allow the visitors to
remember that they were real people who thought that they were being relocated and not sent to
their deaths. At Auschwitz I is the only intact gas chamber in Auschwitz. Next to this is the
crematorium room which was used by the Nazis to burn the bodies of their victims who had
perished in the gas chamber. The young ambassadors got the chance to enter these rooms and
were especially horrified by the thought of being somewhere where so many people were
murdered.
Display of prisoners’ shoes
The final place to visit on the day trip to Poland was Auschwitz-Birkenau, which is 25 times the size
of Auschwitz I. This was the camp purposely built for the extermination of the Jews and Gypsies in
the Nazis Final Solution plan to rid Europe of them. The infamous watchtower and railway that runs
through the camp was a daunting sight and is the last thing that many people who entered there
ever saw. The railway was purposely built for a quicker route to the gas chambers, the selection
process for which took place on the railway platform. The groups were shown a toilet and shower
barrack and also a living quarter’s barrack, and were informed of the terrible conditions that so
many people had to endure in these wooden huts. The barracks were built to hold no more than
400 people but would often hold up to 700 at one time. The ruins of the gas chambers and
crematoriums could be seen although the Nazis had destroyed them before the camp’s liberation, in
an attempt to cover up the atrocities that they had committed. Beside gas chamber number 3, there
is a pit where the ashes of the dead were discarded that can still be seen today. A memorial stone
has also been erected next to this gas chamber. Here the young ambassadors listened to a reading
from a prisoner’s secret diary that they kept while in the camp, which was an extremely dangerous
feat of bravery and courage. The groups then walked to the registration office at the camp, which
was where prisoners were registered, medically examined, washed and had their heads shaved.
Near to the registration office was an area separated from the rest of the camp which was
nicknamed ‘Kanada’. This block of warehouses was called this as the country of Canada was seen as
being a bountiful and plentiful place, which the Nazis viewed the belongings of the prisoners at the
camp as being also. The personal belongings that people had brought with them to start their new
lives were taken from them on their arrival and then put into these warehouses. They were then
sorted and whatever was able to be reused was sent back to Germany for the German citizens to
use. The people who sorted these belongings were fellow prisoners and many of them did this job
to survive in the camp; the work was in the camp and was also indoors. Extra food rations were also
often found in the cases as people had packed food for the journey. The prisoners in these death
camps would do anything necessary to survive, many helping to remove bodies from the gas
chambers and also being part of the ‘Shizerkommando’ which emptied the prisoner toilets. Life in
one of these death camps was awful and many people decided to kill themselves by walking into the
electric fences which surrounded the camps, rather than be brutally murdered by the Nazis.
Auschwitz-Birkenau
Following the visit, the girls will be travelling to Edinburgh to attend a follow up seminar on the 6th
of October. Here they will meet their group again and speak about what the experience was
personally like for them, while also talking about the next steps and how they will be bringing their
new knowledge back to their school and wider community. The trip was memorable and emotional
for both of the pupils but both have commended the project and what it does in keeping the
memory of the victims alive for the next generation.