Holocaust Memorial Day

On Thursday 25 January the whole of Upper 4 gathered in the school hall to hear a presentation and talk from Jeanette Marx, representing the charity 'Generation to Generation'.

This talk formed part of the Holocaust Memorial Day activities which this year focused on the theme: ‘ The Fragility of Freedom’. For the last four weeks Upper 4 have been learning about the Holocaust and the way in which slowly but surely the freedoms of ordinary Jewish people were chipped away by the Nazi regime culminating in the Final Solution and the extermination of six million Jews from across Europe.

Jeanette represents the charity 'Generation to Generation' who give speakers an opportunity to tell their family Holocaust stories using eye witness survivor testimony. Jeanette spoke about her mother Mascha Nachmansson nee Stern who was born in 1920, Lodz, Poland. Jeanette detailed what her mother’s early life was like in Lodz before the Nazi invasion in 1939. She talked about how the antisemitism experienced by Jewish people grew into them being placed in Lodz ghetto where conditions were terrible. To compliment Jeanette’s talk she included videos of her mother talking about her experiences before her death in 2012. These short videos spoken by Mascha allowed the Upper 4 to understand her experiences of the Lodz ghetto, her deportation to Auschwitz Birkenau, a Berlin armaments factory as a slave labourer and then lastly to Ravensbruck concentration camp where she was liberated before settling in Sweden. Jeanette’s mother lost seven immediate members of her family in the Holocaust and there are no photographs left of them. Questions at the end of the talk from the U4 focused on when Jeanette had found out about her mother’s story and how that had shaped her own life.

The event provided a very personal and real account of the impact of the Holocaust on one person and Jeanette perfectly encapsulated the theme of this year’s remembrance by reflecting on how lucky her mother had been to survive and how sad it was that so many members of her extended family did not