27 January 2018
International Holocaust Remembrance Day in Croatia
“More than 75 years after the young Czech poet Pavel Friedmann famously penned a farewell poem to "the very last" butterfly at the Terezin Concentration Camp, the children of the world have answered Friedmann with the largest migration of butterflies ever seen.” The students of II. osnovna škola Čakovec with teachers Dunja Mikulaj and Monika Vrtarić Vuk marked The Holocaust Remembrance Day by creating an art installation of butterflies. Later, at a special presentation, they also recited the poem The Butterfly.
Our 8th graders learnt about the Holocaust within history lessons: with their teacher Snježana Odak Hrkač they had a workshop where they were split into four groups. They had an assignment to do research about four young people, victims of the Holocaust: Anne Frank, Petr Ginz, Lea Deutsch and Avraham Koplowitz.
They thought about how they might have felt and wrote monologues – what would have they said if they had been able to talk to us? After the workshop, four pupils of grade 8 presented themselves as Anne, Lea, Petr and Avraham and shared their thoughts at a special presentation with other students, their teachers and the headmaster, who all gathered to pay tribute to all innocent victims of war.
They also listened to the song Dona, Dona by Rachel Hyman, and watched the film The Last Flight of Petr Ginz. Everything we heard was deeply emotional. We wanted our students not only to learn about the facts but also to emphatize and try to see through those people’s eyes.
The Holocaust Remembrance Day: our 8th graders watching the film The Last Flight of Petr Ginz with their history teacher Snjezana Odak Hrkac.
Remembrance Day
The Last Flight of Petr Ginz - film reviews by Croatian students
International Holocaust Remembrance Day in Italy
Crocus Project
The Irish Holocaust Education Foundation (HETI) has provided us with crocus yellow bulbs to plant in memory of the one and a half million children who died in the Holocaust and thousands of other children who were victims of Nazi atrocities. The yellow flower recalls the yellow of the Star of David that the Jews were forced to sew on their clothes during the Nazi rule. The crocuses have flowered around the date of the Day of Memory. These beautiful flowers also remind us that after the most terrible events, a new life begins and we can hope that everything is better than it was before. The flowers remind us that in the world there is still beauty and hope for our future.
The class actively participated in the project, doing a search among hundreds of thousands of children who were killed by the Nazis, each student dedicated a flower to one of those children. On Memorial Day they remembered and prayed because the most effective weapon against every kind of madness and evil is memory.
The pupils of the kindergarten and primary school inspired by the poem "the last butterfly" of Pavel have colored the courtyard of many butterflies, they have recited the poem, read some passages on the holocaust, they danced Jewish dances.
Italy
International Holocaust Remembrance Day in Cyprus
International Holocaust Remembrance Day in Poland
Gross-Rosen Museum in Rogoźnica
“…The magnitude of the Holocaust, planned and carried out by the Nazis, must be forever seared in our collective memory (…).
The depths of that horror, and the heights of their heroism, can be touchstones in our understanding of the human capacity for evil and for good …”
(from Stockholm Declaration signed in January 2000 by representatives of 45 states)
As part of the celebration of the Holocaust Day, students from our school visited the Gross Rosen Museum in Rogoźnica.
Prisoners of the main camp in Rogoźnica were evacuated in February 1945. The last transport left on 13th of February and abandoned camp was taken by the Russian Army. In March 1947 it was officially handed to polish authorities, which got down setting the post- camp grounds in order and guarding the camp remains. On 11.09.1947 arose Gross- Rosen Protection Committee. There was announced a competition for a mausoleum project to commemorate the victims of Gross-Rosen and gathering of funds for it started. On 2.11.1947 there was a ceremony of building a foundation stone into mausoleum by Adam Procki’s project. Its unveiling was in Autumn 1953. Ashes of prisoners were put in it. In 1963 the bronze statue was removed from the stone pedestal. In 1985 there were built two additional wings, which keep ground from former subcamps of Gross-Rosen.
We watched the exhibition "At risk of living - Poles saving Jews during the Holocaust". The exhibition was devoted to those who helped the Jews during the Second World War.
In addition, we learned about the specificity of German occupation in Polish territories, the division of the city space into ghettos and the "Aryan side", sanctions that threaten to help Jews. The main role in the narrative is played by the individual fates of the Poles who survived - above all those awarded by the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem with the title Righteous Among the Nations. It is through their biographies that everything that during the war and the Holocaust is a testimony to both the greatness of man, his sacrifice and great goodness, as well as meanness and the dormant evil inside him.
Ror preparing the exposition there was used priceless collection of more than 400 interviews with the last Righteous Among the Nations in Poland, which was collected in the years 2007-2013 in the framework of the museum project "Polish Righteous - Recalling For Memory".
International Holocaust Remembrance Day in the UK
International Holocaust Remembrance Day in Portugal
9th year Students in our Schools, studied this theme in their History class and developed some works to be in an exhibition at school.
Here are the photos - real photos that expose the World War II and concentration camps models, as a fictional diary.