JCG pupil Rebecca Curtis (16) and 17-year-old James Payne from De La Salle College both won the chance to go on the trip through The Lessons from Auschwitz educational trust.
Although the organisation has been running for a number of years, it has never included Jersey in its south-west region. However, this year an anonymous local benefactor arranged it so that Jersey was counted as a south-west school, allowing two students from the Island to participate. This benefactor also paid for all of the pair’s travel costs.
A competition was then launched last year to find two students to go on the trip. Open to all Jersey sixth formers, it asked young people to write a letter explaining why they should be given the opportunity to go on the visit.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of Nazi Germany’s concentration and extermination camps. It is believed that 1.5 million people died there, 90 per cent of whom were Jews.
Rebecca Curtis described the trip as a ‘momentous journey’.
‘It’s said that no birds sing at Auschwitz, yet on our journey there was bird song – surreal evidence of life surrounding the strong sensation of those who’d trod the ground we walked, their history and in the end their suffering,’ she said.
‘At Birkenau the ground is covered with the ashes of those who were murdered there, grass making the land green again through shards of bone, a timeless graveyard. And you reflect on the fact their lives were considered worthless and what that makes your existence if value is so fallible, how you are free to walk back up the railway tracks and out into your time – for now.’
The two girls made the visit on 23 April, which was the 120th anniversary of Hitler’s birth.
‘Oswiecim Poland is an entirely normal, small and inconspicuous town,’ James added. ‘It has people, buses, cars, shops and houses, making it even harder to believe that upwards of one and a half million people lost their lives here.
It’s hard to put this figure into perspective, it is impossible to comprehend one and a half million corpses, let alone trying to make sense of one and a half million individuals, each with a life, a future and a story to tell, conveyed by the mountains of shoes, spectacles and human hair which act as evidence for one of humanity’s most treacherous crimes.’
