This week two of our sixth form students, Eden Button and Alice Lawson, have been commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day with assembly presentations for students in the lower school.
Every year Teesdale Sixth Form sends two Year 12 students on the Lessons from Auschwitz project, ran by the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET). Eden and Alice met a Holocaust survivor, attended a series of seminars and visited Auschwitz for the day during October of last year. As part of this experience, they became ambassadors for HET and developed the assembly as part of their project to share their understanding with others.
During their visit to Auschwitz, both Eden and Alice were struck by the experiences of individual victims and this brought the horror of the genocide home to them in a way that reading about statistics could not.
Edmund Burke wrote: "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." In other words, evil prospers when good people do nothing to stand against it. Eden and Alice's assembly was a timely reminder that it is the responsibility of all of us to ensure that tragedies like the Holocaust cannot happen again.