Entrance to the main camp at Auschwitz is through the infamous portico where it says: “Arbeit macht frei”. MIDI LIBRE – VM
On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the "discovery" of the camps and as part of the Regional Plan to Combat Racism and Anti-Semitism, the Region organized two trips to Poland for 300 students from the Toulouse and Montpellier academies, twice as many as in previous years.
The terror comes less from the terrifying setting than from the discovery of the implacable mechanics of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where time seems to have stopped. This Thursday, January 16, 150 students from the Aubrac high schools in Sommières, Albert Camus in Nîmes, Joffre in Montpellier, Paul Valéry in Sète, Jean-Moulin in Béziers, Christian Bourquin in Argelès-sur-Mer and the Aubin vocational high school, traveled to the most diabolical killing complex of the Third Reich.
The objective: “to make our young people memory transmitters”
This study trip, initiated by the Region, has taken place every year since 2019:“The goal is to make our young people memory transmitters, to pass on to them this immense responsibility to tell, explain and report the horror of the Shoah,” recalled the president, Carole Delga, on the sidelines of the trip.
In the 170 or so fenced-in hectares, enclosed in the arms of the Vistula where tons of ashes have been dumped and the birch forests that deprive the mind of any escape, progress requires several deep breaths. “I am both fascinated and horrified,” Jules explains, crushed by the weight of memory. Many things are in ruins or have disappeared. It seems so improbable to me.“
Feeling Auschwitz
Hands in pockets, faces buried in scarves reveal looks frozen in unspeakable stupor, some of which will soon become clouded with despair or anger. We don’t explain ourselves, we don’t visit Auschwitz, we feel it: “I’m in shock”, testifies Lili, a young woman from Nîmes who very quickly went from abstraction to concreteness. “I’m 16, I think in particular of those who were my age.” “It's terrifying,” adds Maël, 17, who feels “thrown back” to the news, overwhelmed by the immensity of the genocide. “It's not a concentration camp, but a killing center. We tell ourselves that we have absolutely not evolved, this kind of atrocities continues in other forms.”
On either side of the rails, the selection ramp by the Nazi doctors.
The cohort of high school students advances cautiously into Birkenau on the black ice of the “judenrampe” and the “bahnrampe”, these platforms where the sorting procedure is carried out by the SS “doctors” who with a wave of the hand send them to death or to work. “The elderly, the sick, the infirm, mothers with children, pregnant women, young children and people deemed unnecessary to the German war economy are destined for gassing”, lists bluntly Rémy Sebbah, coordinator of study trips at the Shoah Memorial.
“I note everything down while it is still fresh”
All you can hear is the hard snow crunching under your sneakers. “Tomorrow morning, I will have gained some perspective”, confides Lili. “So I write down what I feel so I don't forget, so that maybe, when I have children, I can talk to them about it, come here with them.”
Wooden shacks, lined with barbed wire, watchtowers and hundreds of curved concrete posts that have left their mark on the imagination, punctuate the walk on the slippery ramp, until the rails suddenly disappear, close to the commemorative plaques in several languages.
Students pay tribute in front of the French stele at Auschwitz.
A minute of silence is observed under a metallic sky, joined on the horizon by hectares of fallow land frozen in the snow. The last vestiges of the massacre emerge, the Germans having failed to erase all traces of their crimes as the Red Army approached. “I feel tiny in this immensity, summarizes Louise. We are told poignant stories, I am very moved”.
The Book of Names brings together those of the 6 million victims of the Holocaust.
“To forget the dead is to kill them twice.” The voice of Rémy Sebbah, coordinator of study trips to the Holocaust Memorial, unaffected by emotion, resonates like a warning, bringing us back to reality. Auschwitz-Birkenau must “resolve the Jewish question” on a large scale. “In five years, more than 1,100,000 men, women and children died at Auschwitz, including 900,000 on the day of their arrival, in the gas chambers”.
At the end of the quay, the ruins of one of the four Krematorium combining gas chambers, a dressing room and several ovens. The ashes are then buried or spread in the fields.
The rest of the visit leads to the main camp of Auschwitz I, through the infamous gate overlooked by the inscription “Arbeit macht frei” (work sets you free). Many brick blocks stretch along the Lagerstraße (“camp streets”), including “block 11” which served as a place of torture and execution, house the medical experiment rooms, the cells, the display cases with 7 tons of hair, suitcases, shoes and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.
“I will not forget”
“This journey is about putting images on what we learn, it is about understanding, learning and realizing the importance of the duty of remembrance, especially in 2025 with everything that is happening in the world”, testifies Chloe.
It is 5 p.m., back at the airport. Fatigue is visible on their faces. The light of the spotlights illuminates the path back, within the deserted camp. “I will need time to digest what I have seen. I will not forget”, she concludes.
Marie-Ange Rivière, academic advisor for memory and citizenship
How is the Holocaust taught today??
The Holocaust has been part of the curriculum for 30 years. It has entered the history and geography teaching programs of history. It is taught at three times during schooling.
How is this history, which is so difficult to hear and understand, addressed in primary or secondary school?
It begins in primary school, in CM2 where we approach the issue with students, obviously, without insisting on the dramatic aspects, insisting more on the persecutions and the rescues, going through the story of children too, hidden children.
The Shoah Memorial offers many resources, including Sarah's Attic, which gives teachers tools that allow them to approach this very difficult phase with young children. Then, all students follow this teaching in 3rd grade.
How is it approached for older children, in high school ?
The Second World War and the genocide of the Jews, hence the Holocaust, and of the Gypsies is approached by teachers in the context of the Second World War. Which is normal, since the genocide occurs in the context of the war, but at the same time, it is prepared by an ideology that emerged well before the Second World War. One of the problems is that the genocide occurs in a short time, but it is part of a much longer temporality, which is that of the history of anti-Semitism.
A first difficulty for teachers is this manipulation of two temporalities, that of the event and that of the genesis of the event, because a genocide is a process. One of the advantages of doing educational projects to work on this management is precisely to have more time and to also be able to have time that allows working with witnesses, either witnesses who physically come to the classes, but there are fewer and fewer of them, or recordings, since now we still have very abundant material, from different foundations, which offer testimonies that are very numerous, varied, with diverse experiences. And then the third type of project that is developing is local history projects, micro-history projects, that is to say, researching in the local environment of the establishment, stories of people who actually lived through the Shoah, either who disappeared or who survived because they managed to escape persecution, because they were hidden children. And so, by working with archives, embodying a history that is not just a quantitative history, because for students, when we say 6 million dead, it is very abstract. But in fact, behind it, there are lives lived.
The idea is therefore to transmit an experience, beyond the facts.
There you have it, that's what's important to make students understand, that when we do history, we talk about past events, but these past events were experienced by people who were actors, who were victims, who could also have been executioners. Students are much more sensitive when history is embodied, when it doesn't ultimately remain theoretical. Meeting witnesses is always very powerful. We are surprised to see the density of the silence of listening when there are even a large number of them facing a witness. Something is happening. If we only did history with witnesses, we would only teach a very recent history. We have many digital tools, recordings, captures, documentaries. We see that students are very sensitive to real, raw material, and not just what we find in textbooks.
How can we disseminate the benefit that these groups of students were able to derive?
We know that communication between peers is important and sometimes more effective than the words of adults. So, it is important that there is in the project this dimension of restitution in the form of reports, photos, videos, testimonies, debates, exhibitions, at least, at the level of the establishment. Let there be a repercussion.
I subscribe to read the rest