Organized school trips from the United Kingdom to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp will continue despite education cuts, The Mirror reports.
Minister Michael Gove, the head of the Ministry of Education, told the newspaper that the Ministry of Education would “honour Labour’s £1.5 million annual pledge to the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET).”
“The commitment to support the HET which the last Government gave is one we are proud to be able to continue with,” said Gove.
Gove had reportedly agreed to continue funding former prime minister Gordon Brown’s plan to send two students from every high school and college to visit Auschwitz annually to learn about what Gove calls “the greatest crime in human history.”
In 1991 the Holocaust formally became part of the United Kingdom’s history syllabus. From the age of nine, all British students study the Holocaust. As part of the program, the government funds the majority of the cost of the trip with the school paying £100 and the Education Department paying £200 per trip. The trip accompanies ninety pairs of students per trip.
Students selected for the trip fly to Oswiecim, a small town beside Auschwitz whose pre-World War II population was over fifty percent of the city’s residents. In the camp, they meet an Auschwitz survivor, take a tour of the camp’s crematoria and barracks and view the registration documents of inmates and their belongings.
Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Education Trust, which organizes the visits, told the Sunday Times, “We are very aware that there’s going to be a time where there aren’t any survivors left to go into schools…The young people on these visits themselves become eye-witnesses.”
“For a lot of them, it’s life changing. They suddenly realize what they value and they see it is important to challenge prejudice today. We don’t want young people wandering around the camp and sobbing. It’s not about making them cry, it’s about helping them to reflect on what it means.”
