History remembered and victims of the Holocaust honoured by Mansfield college students

Throughout November and December, students visited ‘Beth Shalom’, the National Holocaust Centre and Museum in Laxton, as a part of their tutorial programme.

Groups of students were given an introduction to the centre where staff educators outlined what the how the Holocaust came about, the rise of the Nazi regime and how many people suffered.

Tours of the museum enabled students to get a visual and audio experience of what life was like throughout the Holocaust through photographs, first-person accounts, videos and artefacts that have been donated to the centre by survivors and families of the survivors.

Students furthered their knowledge and understanding relating to the holocaust as they toured the centre’s memorial gardens which feature a rose garden where families pay tribute to loved ones, as well as a very poignant children’s memorial that evokes the stark reminder of how many children suffered as a result of the Nazi regime.

The children’s memorial honours the many young people murdered in the Holocaust and visitors are invited to select a stone from the trough and place it on the memorial, in tribute to one of the 1.5 million individual children who died.

Students took the opportunity to choose a stone and reflect on the lives of these many children and placed their contribution on the growing pile of memory stones.

Ryan Polglase, 18, Level 3 TV and film student, said: “To discover just how many people were killed in this was astonishing. I’ve seen a documentary before about concentration camps, but seeing this at the museum really hits you hard.”

Oliver Hunt, a student on the Advanced Extended Diploma in Civil Engineering, said: "There were many minorities who were wrongly killed due to their beliefs and life choices, which shows the cruel, idealistic views of the Nazi regime.”

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