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Canons High School

Special Holocaust Memorial Day visit to Edgware & Hendon Reform Synagogue.

January 13th

Ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day at the end of this month, our Year 9 students made their way to visit our friends at the Edgware & Hendon Reform Synagogue for a very special event.

After a chilly walk we received the usual very warm welcome at the Synagogue. Seating ourselves in the wonderful main Prayer Room we met remarkable Holocaust survivor Eva Clarke. She told her incredible story to our silent and enthralled young students. But its telling was with the aim of reminding us about the Holocaust, the almost unbelievably horrific and inhumane effort by the Nazi regime to exterminate the Jewish people from Europe.

   

 

 Eva Clarke telling her emotional but incredible story.

 

An Incredible Story... 

Eva Clarke was one of only three babies born in Mauthausen concentration camp who survived the Holocaust. She was born on 29 April 1945, just a day after the Nazis had destroyed the camp's gas chambers and less than a week before its liberation.

Her Jewish mother and father, Anka and Bernd, had been imprisoned in a Czech ghetto before being sent to the notorious Auschwitz-Berkenau concentration camp in Poland. Eva's mother was then moved to a slave labour camp near Dresden, Germany, but without her husband. Next she then endured a horrific 17 day, 400 km (248 miles) rail journey from Dresden in Germany, across Czechoslovakia to Mauthausen in Austria. They travelled in filthy, open coal wagons with no food and little water as the Nazis moved their slave labour prisoners away from the advancing allied troops.

Very soon after arriving, Eva was born. She was worryingly tiny and her mother was terribly emaciated. Both would have surely died if the American forces hadn't liberated Mauthausen just a few days later.

 

A newborn baby photographed in a newly liberated camp

 

Very sadly, Eva's mother never saw her husband again. He didn't even know she had been pregnant. It was later discovered that he had been shot dead just a week before Auschwitz was liberated and a few months before Eva's birth.

Eva and her mother were the only survivors of her family. Three of her grandparents, her father, uncles, aunts and her 7 year old cousin Peter were all murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz!

 

Eva's story is horrific, almost unbelievable and uncomfortable to hear, but that is exactly why it is so important that we do hear it, to remind us of the past, think about how these things came to happen and ensure they can not happen again! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  


 

What was the Holocaust?

The Holocaust was the systematic murder of Europe's Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War. This programme of targeted mass murder was a central part of the Nazis’ broader plans to create a new world order based on their ideology.

As well as 6 million Jews, political opponents, homosexuals, Roma, Jehovah Witnesses, Poles, Soviet Prisoners of War and others were killed or died in camps as a result of neglect, starvation or disease.

The Nazis wanted to rid themselves of anyone they deemed 'undesirable', even their own German citizens who were disabled and seen as a burden!

 


Giving New Life...

Our students also took part in a thought provoking craft exercise involving empty glass jars. Taking old photographs of Jewish children who didn't survive the Holocaust and whose names are long forgotten, they placed them in a jar, giving them a name and adding a few imagined details about their personalities. In effect, giving new life to these poor lost souls of the Holocaust.

The idea evolved from the story of Irena Sendler, a young Catholic academic who bravely saved the lives of about 2,500 Jewish children during the second world war.

They were trapped in the notorious Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw, Poland during that countries Nazi occupation. She smuggled children out from the ghetto and gave them new Catholic names so the Nazis couldn't find and murder them; but she kept details of their real names hidden in glass jars, stored, hidden, right under the Nazi's noses, so that they could be re-united with their real families when the war was over.

 

Eva presented with an orchid by one of our Canons students.

 

 

Thank you very much to everyone at the Edgware & Hendon Reform Synagogue for their kind invitation, their generosity, hospitality and friendship. It is very much appreciated.