No more suffocated laughter by evoking the latest gossip of the school, more debates on the responses of the examination of math, more jokes on the memories of the New Year’s Eve. Faced with the ruins of the gas chambers of the Auschwitz camp II, in southern Poland, nearly 200 high school students were automatically tus. And remains only the silence, broken by the freezing breath of the wind against the heaps of red bricks. In a soft voice, Rémy Sebbah recalls the facts that took place between these walls, more than eighty years ago. “The key word for the Nazis was the yield. Here, thousands of people could be gassed at the same time,” he traces. The professor of history-geography, coordinator of study travel for the Shoah memorial, spares nothing from the history of places to students. He tells the ambulances placed with perversity by the Waffen SS at the entrance to the gas chamber to reassure future victims, the bodies found in each other after trying everything, mothers, mothers Killed with their children to avoid any “loss of control” at the exit of the trains.
Hands sunk into the pockets of her down jacket, a high school student fixes the red roses deposited in the snow by visitors, in tribute to a member of their lost family, to a friend never returned. “I am upset. I really don’t understand how we could get there, and let it do this,” she breathes, while the students of five high schools, gathered on the initiative of the Provence-Alpes region- Côte d’Azur and the Shoah Memorial, walk silently to the monument erected a few meters away. Two adolescent girls raise a wreath of blue white red flowers and drop it off at the foot of a commemorative plaque, whose inscription seems more relevant than ever, while on January 27, the 80th anniversary of the camp release. “That this place where the Nazis murdered a million and a half of men, women and children, mostly Jews from various European countries, forever for humanity a cry of despair and a warning. “”
“Before, it was blurry”
It is precisely to honor this duty of memory that Muriel Blanc, professor of history-geography at Lycée Niçois Mélinée and Missak Manouchian, decided to invest in an educational project around the history of genocides. For several years, in partnership with the Shoah Memorial, the teacher brings together witnesses returned from the camps, has taken them to the places of genocides, pushes them to seek local stories of deportees or resistant to the departmental archives … Then realizes, with his class, podcasts, articles or conferences on the subject. “Fundamental” projects to maintain the memory of the Shoah, but also to make students aware of the magnitude of the genocide. “We can do all the lessons of the world, they never project themselves as much as when they hear the voice of a witness or that they see their own eyes some of the unimaginable,” she explains .
Thus the young girls of her class particularly reacted when Ginette Kolinka, survivor of the camps, said to them during a meeting she had “made Auschwitz without panties”. “Coming on site, students realize the cold, dirt, the inhumanity of such a life on the spot. And these small details remain,” analyzes Muriel Blanc. On this January 23, it was the drawings of deported children, reproduced on the walls of the museum, which particularly move Elise. From the top of her 17 years, the high school student struggles to find the right words to express her emotion: “When we were small, we all drawn houses or flowers. There are hanged. And SS, “she describes.
A few minutes later, it is the turn of one of his comrades to hold back his tears in the face of the frightened, difficult sustainable looks, of dozens of children photographed upon their arrival at the camp, before being sent to the crematorial oven. Stella, she remains silent when leaving the Auschwitz I gas chamber – the only one who was not destroyed by the Nazis before the release of the camp. “It is very strong in emotion. I entered it saying that they took the same path as us, but did not go out,” she whispers. This part of the camp, and the image of the two tons of human hair or thousands of clothes and shoes kept behind large windows, deeply marked the high school student. “It makes me realize the number of deaths. Before, it was blurred,” says the teenager.
“Want to react”
But beyond the “shock” images generated by such a visit, the guides of the day try above all to make their students think about the “political and social soil” which allowed such anti-Semitic hatred to settle everywhere in Europe in 1930s. In a dark room in one of the blocks, Rémy Sebbah invites students to watch and listen to the speeches of Hitler or Goebbels broadcast in black and white on the big screen. Together, teachers and high school students analyze the vocabulary used at the time to talk about the Jewish community, study theorized ideas in Mein Kampf and covered over the meetings. “The first stone of a genocide is the dehumanization of a people,” insists Rémy Sebbah. A reminder that makes Elise think after leaving her visit, when she has just leafed through the impressive “Book of Names” where the identities of 4.8 of the 6 million victims of the Shoah are listed. “Given the current context, I can’t help but see similarities with certain anti -Semitic or racist speeches. We must always remain vigilant,” said the teenager.
During the visit, several young people evoke the dazzling rise of anti -Semitic acts in France since October 7, 2023, the election of Donald Trump and his assumed will, during his campaign, to “define” millions of illegal refugees, the gesture d’Elon Musk during the inauguration of the American president, recalling a Nazi salute, the thunder of applause that this behavior has generated, or even the hateful comments and remarks read all over posts on social networks. “In class, it is common for students to learn the shoah lightly, making jokes on it. It makes me want to react even more, and tell them what I observed today “Stella argues.
Muriel Blanc can only rejoice in such awareness – after several decades of career, she assures that work is far from over. If the negative reactions of parents or students in the study trip to Auschwitz remain largely in the minority, the teacher claims to have, several times, faced the questioning of students or their loved ones – one believing that C ‘was “Jewish propaganda”, the other questioning why young people “were not taken to Palestine”. “I also had that have brought me the theories of the conspiracy they see on social networks, arguing for example that the Jews would have spent a pact with Hitler to sacrifice 6 million people in exchange for obtaining The state of Israel, “said the professor, who is fighting, despite everything, to” sow small seeds “in the heads of these high school students. Like the nearly 3,000 people who were visited in Auschwitz by the Shoah Memorial in 2023, his students will not be really unscathed. “We were told that we certainly stayed in the camp longer than 90 % of the people who were deported to it. We are responsible for carrying this message,” breathes a teenager at the end of the visit.
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