This week, as part of our Focus Week topic of Holocaust Memorial Day, Year 9 had the opportunity to take part in a live webcast with Holocaust survivor Mala Tribich MBE. Tribich was born in Poland to a Jewish family in 1930, and upon the Nazi invasion her family were forced to move into a ghetto. She was later interned at Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps.
Our students were able to hear testimony from Tribich about her experience, and were able to part-take in a question-and-answer session. It was a powerful experience for our students to hear from a survivor about the journey she has had, her experience in the camps, and her reflections about the world eighty years on the end of World War Two. It was particularly moving when Tribich spoke to our students about it being their duty to call out forms of discrimination in the world today, in order to ensure that humanity is able to ensure events like the Holocaust never happen again.
The talk explored themes that we will examine in lessons over the coming months. The Friary School works in partnership with University College London in holding Holocaust Beacon School Status and this reflects our nationally-recognised commitment to on-going high-quality provision of and innovation in teaching and learning about the Holocaust. We take pride in this award, and we look forward to using the excellent resources provided by the Holocaust Education Trust in our lessons on topic of the Holocaust over the coming months.
Liam Rivers-Boyce, Head of History, said: “We encourage our students to be outward-looking in life and this can be achieved by learning the lessons from the past. The students were deeply moved by the talk and wanted to talk more about what they had heard after the session.”
