Holocaust Memorial Day, Wednesday 26th January

Holocaust education features significantly in the history curriculum at PGHS. Students in Year 9 are currently studying in depth at how and why the holocaust happened, and as part of their unit on Germany 1919-1991, Year 11 students study the topic as part of their GCSE studies. Each year, the Holocaust Educational Trust host a live webcast with a survivor on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

This year, Eva Clarke gave a fascinating and articulate testimony of her experiences of the holocaust and how her family had been brutally persecuted by the Nazi regime. Eva was born at Mauthausen concentration camp at the end of the war and only survived due to the liberation of the camp by the US army in April 1945. If you would like to hear Eva Clarke speak about her experiences during the Holocaust, follow the link to her full Oxford Union address in 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3HmeidS8Z4

Assemblies this week have been on the theme of Holocaust education and remembrance, with students learning the story of the evacuation of 300 Jewish children from Eastern Europe to Windermere in 1945. The children were survivors of many camps and had been tragically orphaned during the war. They were flown to Britain to start a new life after the war, and spent their first few months in the Lake District. If you would like to know more about this miraculous story, you can watch a fascinating BBC documentary here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000dt7g

Alternatively, there was a dramatisation of the experiences of the Windermere children released in 2020: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10370380/.

Mr Herbert, Curriculum Leader for History

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