National Holocaust Memorial Day 2006
January 27th 2006 is National Holocaust Memorial Day. The theme this year
is "One person can make a difference ". This year's theme celebrates the courage of the rescuers who helped the persecuted survive and gave them hope. Many rescuers are still alive and living in the UK and they should be honoured, before it is too late. Their courage enabled many victims of the Nazis to survive the Holocaust.
Celebrating the rescuers follows on naturally from last year’s theme. Its relevance to life today is that we all have to make moral choices in our everyday life and the lessons of the Holocaust show that we cannot avoid making these choices if we are to live comfortably with ourselves.
For more information on Holocaust Memorial Day please visit the website . A wide range of educational resources on this year's theme are available to download.
Additional resources about the Holocaust available on iRespect include:
Leon Greenman was born in London in 1910, but was living in Holland at the time of the Nazi occupation. He survived Auschwitz - but on arrival there lost his beloved wife, Else, and three year old son, Barney, to the gas chambers. He did not later remarry, but, instead, devoted his long life, post-Holocaust, to keeping alive the memory of those 6 million who died, endeavouring to inform the young and prevent such a dreadful thing ever happening again. This relentless reliving of his experiences must be at great personal cost to him, and we should play our part by listening, responding, and contributing to keeping alive memories for the young.
Roma, or Gypsies, are an ethnic group who have experienced some of the worst and most long standing discrimination, prejudice, and racism in our history.
Additional resources about the Holocaust are available for loan from CIRCLE:
For more information, contact Dee Russell-Thomas at CIRCLE, Tel: 01452-427261
- Auschwitz: MSPowerpoint presentation, display and resources available for loan to Secondary schools in Gloucestershire.
Terrezin : Resources are also available for loan on Terrezin, a concentration camp in the Czech Republic where a large collection of children's drawings and poetry has survived - though the children themselves perished.
Holocaust Memorial Day provides a unique opportunity for teachers to encourage young people to reflect upon the past, and make a personal commitment to active citizenship, and to combat racism in all its forms, wherever they may meet it.
Individual action, however small, makes a difference. This is a day to make a personal commitment.