“If there was one thing I would take away from this experience, it is that everyone involved was human.”

Tuesday 27 January is Holocaust Memorial Day, which marks over 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Today, we remember the 6 million Jewish men, women and children who died at the hands of Nazis and their collaborators.

Each year, two of our sixth form students take part in the Holocaust Education Trust‘s Lessons From Auschwitz project.

The project involves attending a series of seminars led by experts in the history of the Holocaust, hearing directly from Holocaust survivors who share their personal experiences, and also visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum for a one-day visit to Poland.

In November 2025, Fred and Solomon from Haslingden Sixth Form took part in the project. They met Harry Kessler and Janine Webber, who both lost family members during the Holocaust. Their stories are incredibly powerful, and reminded Fred and Solomon of the quote by Margaret Atwood:

“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub, you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”

Reflecting on their experience in the project, the pair said:

“As soon as you get off the bus, there was a certain eeriness that filled the air, like nobody dared speak. Inside Auschwitz I, this continued as we were entering one of the largest mass murder sites in history, and it was overall a harrowing experience.

We experienced many shocking sights such as the Book of Names, walking through one of the gas chambers and seeing the piles of shoes that were once the victims’. This was echoed at Auschwitz II (Birkenau), where the pure scale of the camp was jarring.

However, despite all of the horrible sights we experienced, there still felt to be a sense of hope and life. We entered what was known as the ‘Room of Life’ that detailed pre-war Jewish life across cultures, next to the Book of Names, were pictures of those who survived the Holocaust and even something as simple as trees and nature growing inside the campsites. There were constant reminders of hope and life.

If there was one thing I would take away from this experience, it is that everyone involved was human. We shouldn’t reduce victims to statistics, as this gets in the way of reading the true horror,s and it is simplistic to reduce the perpetrators as ‘mad’ or ‘pure evil’. Everyone involved was a human being who made their own choices for themselves.”

– Fred

“As soon as we walked through the tunnel to Auschwitz I, there was an uncomfortable feeling of knowing you are about to be in and visit a horrific and incredibly infamous historical event. Once we started to see the buildings and the gate, our group was completely silent throughout until we got back on the bus to go to Birkenau, which just added a sense of tension and uneasiness to the experience in itself.

The confusion sets in once you are in and seeing all of the artefacts and reading the information inside the museum. The shoes, the hair, the suitcases, and the Book of Names of all of those innocent people and their lives taken prematurely.

All these harrowing events and actions were on the walls and in the glass cases. It had happened right where we were standing. How could something like this happen in the world that we live in today?

When we got to Birkenau, it made you question again. How could something of this scale and size be allowed to happen?

It allowed me to think about my own life and family. If this happened to me, I don’t know what I would do. It makes you humble and thankful for the life you have now, and grateful for the people around you. I think everyone should go and see to educate themselves on the awful side of history, which is sometimes avoided and neglected, to make sure history does not repeat itself.

Something our guide constantly repeated was that the Nazis were normal, everyday people. Not monsters or derranged psychopaths. They had been taught and manipulated in a way which they thought was right.

This can still happen today – it is happening in parts of the world – and can happen in the future, but should never happen again.”

– Solomon