Lighting Candles in the Darkness: An Exploration of Commemorative Acts with British Teenagers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum

Alasdair Richardson

doi:10.3390/rel12010029

Abstract

Every year around 3000 British school pupils and teachers visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum as participants on a Lessons from Auschwitz Project organized by the Holocaust Educational Trust. Each visit ends with a memorial ceremony held at the end of the railway tracks at Birkenau. This article analyses interview and survey data from participating students and educators to explore their experiences of these ceremonies. The research findings indicate that the context and content of the ceremony are significant for both groups, with a general consensus that the ceremony is an important and appropriate way to end the day visit to Poland and the museum. The students’ responses also particularly raise issues around their emotional engagement with the ceremony and the impact it had on them in this way. In conclusion, this article suggests how similar reflective spaces might be created in other educational contexts at similar sites of memory.

Highlights

In comparison with its European neighbors, the United Kingdom (UK) has a very different geographical and historical relationship with the events of the Holocaust
In 2000 the UK was an original signatory of the Stockholm Declaration and subsequently became a founding member of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research (ITF)—
The content of the memorial ceremony had resonated with participants in a number of ways. Their emotional engagement with the memorial ceremony was a significant aspect of participants’ recollections. These themes are explored in detail below, followed by a discussion of the implications they raise within a wider critical consideration of the context of the Lessons from Auschwitz (LfA) project structure

Summary

Introduction

In comparison with its European neighbors, the United Kingdom (UK) has a very different geographical and historical relationship with the events of the Holocaust. In 2019 over 200,000 visitors at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum came from the UK, constituting the second largest group nationally (Bartyzel and Sawicki 2020). Many of these will have been young people on organized educational visits with their schools, colleges or community groups (Nesfield 2015). This paper explores the particular experiences of some of these young people on such an organized educational visit to the museum. The topic of the Holocaust has been a unit within the National Curriculum in the UK since its introduction in state funded schools in 1991. In 2000 the UK was an original signatory of the Stockholm Declaration and subsequently became a founding member of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research (ITF)—

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