Holocaust Memorial Day - Jan. 27th

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I marked Holocaust Memorial Week at the end of Jan. by circulating two video links to our form teachers in school. It had already been chosen as the the theme for the week in assemblies and form periods. The first is a “Making Of’’ documentary for the film “Freedom Writers” (which some of my more recent former pupils out there - both Film Studies + RE should remember). The film deals with themes relating to tolerance, racially motivated violence, etc… The teacher in the film uses the Holocaust as a way of getting her students to take stock of their own situations and understand their own behaviour, seeing it in the wider context of historical cases of racially-motivated violence.


The second clip (which I uploaded to YouTube myself for use in school) is from the “Freedom Writers” film itself and shows the teacher taking her students to visit to the Museum of Tolerance (Simon Wiesenthal Center), Los Angeles and then having a meal with 3 Holocaust survivors. The real Holocaust survivors appear in the film (which is based on a true story - see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Writers.

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