GCSE year trip to auschwitz - any experience?

[cymruoddicatref]

My daughter (first year GCSE) is being encouraged to take part in this trip next year. She and her friends are reluctant to go. I have not offered a view yet. I am a bit cross that it is put forward as supporting the history curriculum, so that I am going to worry as a parent that her studies will be compromised if she does not go, although it is not necessarily a place I would want her to visit as a young teenager - at least not in a school party. Has anyone else had experience of one of these trips - or turned one down? Has it made a difference to GCSE study either way? Are there any teachers with first hand experience?

Workwork thank you for that. My generation has no reason to feel they were touched by the War but growing up we watched the pain of the Polish non-Jewish generation which were, even if we didn't recognise that that's what it was. That pain wasn't, in our family at last, segregated into racial groups. My father's family was hidden by a Jewish family when the Soviets came in from the East. My grandfather then sheltered the same Jewish family when the Germans came in. There was a mutual risking of life, not a sense of them and us. I'm sure that the old man's pain wouldn't have been intended to belittle the pain of anyone else.

Thank you for your explanation, it was full and gracious.

Thanks, and I'm sorry to have waded into sensitivities about which I know so little. That is a beautiful tale of reciprocal aid, despite the awful sadness.

My father-in-law's family, too, suffered at the hands of the Soviets. They were taken to Siberia, I think, remained there some time in great fear until pressure from the British once the USSR had entered the war, and then subjected to years of painful travelling in Iran and India before eventually ending up in Britain.

When I went to Auschwitz in 1993 one of the most upsetting things was the attitude of the visiting groups of Polish teenagers - laughing, playing around, in one case they were posing in front of the wall where prisoners had been executed, and staging mock executions. Massively bad taste, and I assume it was because they hadn't chosen to go on these trips but had to go as part of a compulsory curriculum.

I'm not suggesting your daughter's group would do anything like that, but it does indicate to me that when groups go to concentration camps they need to be a bit older, 16 or 17, and it should be entirely voluntary with no pressure to take part.

My kids are growing up in Germany - there is a concentration camp (Sachsenhausen) about 30 miles away which I went to many years ago. I don't think DD1 at 12 would be ready for it yet, and Auschwitz, as a location for industrialised mass-murder, is much more traumatic than that one. I don't know at which age they 'cover' Nazism and the Holocaust in school, but it certainly hasn't been mentioned yet.

I also think it's a shame that they would be going only to Auschwitz without seeing the other side of Jewish culture in Germany and Eastern Europe - it's much more instructive and worthwhile to combine it with a visit to the Jewish Museum in Berlin, for instance, which emphasises Jewish life and religion over hundreds of years in Europe; that for me somehow makes the devastating loss all the more real and tragic, but it's also important that the Jewish people in Germany are not solely seen as 'victims'.

OP I organised the trip for Y13; I personally would have reservations about my own going at your DD's age with the school. I was OK with my son going because I was there.

The students spent the evening before the visit going to Schindler's factory, looking around the old Jewish quarter in Krakow and having supper in a Jewish restaurant. So a mini version of the sort of thing MotherMountainGoat is suggesting (we had time constraints). Immediately after the trip they were actively encouraged to go shopping, to break the mood, it seemed healthy to me.

not participating in the trip is unlikely to have any negative effect on your dd's history studies. She needs obviously to know about these crimes but she does not need to personally visit a concentration camp IMO

i went to Sachsenhausen which was not a "death camp" or murder factory as such. Nevertheless of course many died there due to poor nutrition (i.e. starvation), disease, torture and experimentation. I went with my Polish friend whose grandmother had been sent there for handing a piece of bread to a Jewish man who came to her door asking for food. She starved to death there. Ther is not much left standing, markings on the ground to show where barracks were etc. Nevertheless quite harrowing enough

Fascinating thread. Yesterday a friend put a graphic novel through my door. It's called A Family Secret and is about a Dutch girl and her German Jewish friend before and during the war. It is seen through the eyes of the Dutch girl's grandson in the present day who is looking through her attic and comes across his grandmother belongings. She takes him on a journey back in time. It is beautifully drawn and written. Feels totally authentic and was moving and informative without being horrific. I would recommend this to a teenager and totally agree with mothermountaingoat about looking into understanding and celebrating Jewish life and religion as well.

It's written by Eric Heuvel and published by the Anne Frank Museum. ISBN number: 90-72972-00-7