Wirral school pupils visit Auschwitz concentration camp

Oct 21 2009 Birkenhead News

WORK sets you free.

There’s a cruel irony to that statement, infamously wrought in iron above the gates of Auschwitz passed through by hundreds of thousands of Poles, Jews, Roma Gypsies, trade unionists, homosexuals and anybody else who didn’t fit the Nazi vision of the future.

Those who saw the words Arbeit Macht Frei were the lucky ones.

The rest, mainly women and children, were sent straight to a painful and inhuman death in a factory of gas chambers; their names never recorded, their presence never documented.

The snow was falling in Krakow, Poland when the plane carrying more than 250 students from across the North West arrived, as part of the Holocaust Educational Trust’s (HET) mission to ensure the events that occurred in the previously anonymous town of Oswiecim, between 1940 and 1945, are never forgotten.

Among the passengers was a strong contingent from Wirral schools, including Pensby High School for Girls, Birkenhead Sixth Form College, South Wirral High, St Mary’s RC College, Upton Hall School and Neston High.

The first stop was a Jewish cemetery, to give students an idea of life, and death, before Nazi occupation.