140 FRENCH HIGH-SCHOOL STUDENTS IN AUSCHWITZ

« “I just couldn’t imagine what it meant. It really impressed me and I’m going to tell everybody about it,” confided Quentin, a student at the Agricultural High School in Arras.

The Committee for Informing High School Students about the Shoah was created in 1989, on the initiative of the French Section of Jewish World Congress (JWC) and the Representative Council for Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF). In 1994, the French Centre for Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDJC) joined the initiative.

The Committee’s action consists of taking students in their last and second-to-last year of high-school, whether public or private, to the extermination camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Poland, for a one day visit. They pursue a double objective: on the one hand, deepen the teaching that the students receive about the Second World War and more particularly about the Shoah, and on the other hand, help them build up – based on the terrible observation of the effects of Nazi barbarity and totalitarianism – a reflection on exclusion, on the problems of racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism that are rife in today’s society, and also on their own understanding of citizenship.

One of the strong points of such days lies in the presence of the camp survivors who accompany these young people throughout their visit, willingly giving straight answers to all the questions they are asked and who are generally invited by the students to come back to their schools for lectures. This gives the survivors an opportunity to not only address the youngsters who made the trip to Poland but also the very many students who, in the meantime, will have had their awareness raised by their classmates.

Marc Knobel, historian and researcher, and Charles Sulman, CRIF delegate in the Nord Pas-de-Calais Region, represented CRIF for this informative day.