Students win trip to Auschwitz

The horrors of the Holocaust could happen again according to two King’s Year 12 historians who won a trip to the Nazis death camp Auschwitz.

Rosie and Max won a school essay writing competition to win places on the government funded Lessons from Auschwitz Project which included a day trip to the Polish mausoleum.

Rosie, who gained 10 A stars in her GCSEs and wants to read History at Cambridge, said: “We visited both Auschwitz One, which was a former Polish military barracks, brick built and the site’s work camp and Auschwitz Two, which was purpose built by the Nazis and was the death camp.”

Rosie continued: “I was shocked by the sheer size and industrial scale of the purpose-built death camp. The horrors of the extermination were brought home when you saw the black stains on the ceiling above the incinerators, which were left by the remains of the burning bodies.”

Max, who is applying to Oxford to read History and gained four A stars and five As in his GCSEs, said: “Not only could genocide happen again but it already has happened again. Look at Cambodia , Rwanda and Darfur , and I am sure with men like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Nick Griffin about, another genocide of the Jews could quite easily happen again, even in this country.”

Max added: “There have been strong anti-Semitic feelings across Europe since the time of Jesus Christ, and the first pogroms can be traced back to the 19th Century, but it was only really the Nazis who extrapolated the death camps from a perverted take on social Darwinism. It is an experience I will never forget and left all the students quite dumbstruck by the evil that mankind is quite capable of committing.”

King’s School Head of History Graeme Wright said: “Rosie and Max, who are both Oxbridge History candidates, were excellent ambassadors of the King's School.  They will now deliver assemblies throughout the school on the subject of the Holocaust and genocide in the modern world.”

 

CAPTION: Pictured are King’s Historians Max and Rosie with some of the images from their trip to Auschwitz.