Key Stage Three and above Assembly:
Holocaust Memorial Day 2017
(Age 11 and older)
How can life go on?
The Holocaust
Teachers please note this assembly is aimed at Key Stage 3 upwards (11 years old
upwards). We have not separated out for different age groups at secondary level to give
you the flexibility to deliver the message to various types of assembly groups on and
around 27 January 2017, as suits your school and needs.
We have provided a script and
PowerPoint to support teachers in
the delivery of key information and
messages as required. Please feel free
to adapt and vary the language and
content as you see fit for your particular
students.
Assembly script:
• (Slide 1) Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. Holocaust Memorial Day is the day each
year when we remember the six million Jewish people systematically persecuted
and murdered by the Nazis and those who collaborated with the Nazis during the
Holocaust. Holocaust Memorial Day is when we remember Roma and Sinti people,
disabled people, gay people, political opponents and many others who faced
persecution and death at the hands of the Nazis. Holocaust Memorial Day is when we
remember the millions of men, women and children, who have been murdered since in
genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.
• (Slide 2) Genocide is when a group of people are targeted for destruction just
because of who they are, such as their race or their religion. Genocide does not
happen out of the blue, it is the result of prejudice and persecution which sees a
group progressively treated differently to the rest of society. On Holocaust Memorial
Day, we are reminded of what can happen when prejudice and persecution are left
unchallenged, and of our responsibilities to stand against these processes when we
see them in our own communities.
• (Slide 3) The theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2017 is How can life go on?
This theme asks us all think about how people who have experienced the horror of
genocide can start to rebuild their lives. How communities and countries can heal
after genocide and what role we in the UK have towards individuals, communities
and nations who have survived genocide. Holocaust Memorial Day is not only about
commemorating past genocides and honoring those who died, but about standing with
those who survive.
Page 1 of 2
• (Slide 4) In July 2016 a well-known survivor of the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel, died at the
age of 87. I want to tell you his story.
Option:
You can read either the full life story of Elie Wiesel or the simplified easy to read
life story, depending on which is most appropriate for your audience. Both are
provided below. You may wish to give the story to a group of students to read
aloud.
• (Slide 5) Speaking about re-building life as a genocide survivor, Elie Wiesel once said
‘For the survivor death is not the problem. Death was an everyday occurrence. We
learned to live with Death. The problem is to adjust to life, to living. You must teach us
about living.’
• I call on all of you here to do just that. Whilst today we remember what happened
during the Holocaust, and during the genocides since the Holocaust. Whilst we think
about all those who were murdered simply because of who they were. Let us all also
consider how we can support those who have survived genocide to learn about living
– to rebuild their lives.
• (Slide 6) At this very moment genocide is taking place in a part of Sudan called
Darfur – and in places all around the world people are being forced to flee their homes
because they are being persecuted. Many of these people are the refugees we hear
about in the newspapers and on our televisions. Many of these people have been
through unimaginable suffering, they have lost loved ones and have learned to live
with death.
• (Slide 7) Let us all today commit to do something, no matter how small, to support
people who have fled such violence to re-build their lives. Let’s be welcoming and
supportive to refugees in this country and be patient if they don’t speak English well
or don’t know or understand cultural things that many of us take for granted. Let’s find
out about where genocide is taking place, and tell others what we learn. Let’s stand up
against prejudice and the processes of persecution. Let’s learn about and celebrate
the lives and cultures of those who are the victims of genocide. And, like Elie Wiesel
asked of us – let’s teach those who have survived genocide about living.
Find out more..
hmd.org.uk
[email protected]
020 7785 7029
HMDT’s resources for educators: hmd.org.uk/educators
The Holocaust: hmd.org.uk/holocaust
@hmd_uk
hmd.uk
@holocaustmemorialdaytrust
Learning lessons from the past to create a safer better future
Page 2 of 3
ELIE WIESEL
As a boy, Elie Wiesel survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald camps. As
an adult, he dedicated himself to commemorating the Holocaust and to
ensuring its lessons were learnt. He was an acclaimed author and recipient
of the Nobel Peace Prize. He died on 2 July 2016, aged 87.
‘The survivors had every reason to despair
of society; they did not. They opted to
work for humankind, not against it.’
Eliezer ‘Elie’ Wiesel was born in 1928 in the small
Romanian town of Sighet. He was the third of four
children and the only son. He was 15 when, in spring
1944, German troops occupied Sighet. Soon after, he
was moved with the rest of his family into one of the
two ghettos created in the town. When both ghettos
were liquidated the entire Jewish population of Sighet was deported to AuschwitzBirkenau.
Wiesel later wrote about the conditions in the transport: ‘Lying down was not an
option, nor could we all sit down. We decided to take turns sitting. …After two
days of travel, thirst became intolerable, as did the heat.’ He recalled his arrival
Auschwitz-Birkenau: ‘We stared at the flames in the darkness. A wretched stench
floated in the air. Abruptly, our doors opened. Strange-looking creatures, dressed
in striped jackets and black pants, jumped in to the wagon.’
At the selection ramp of Birkenau, Wiesel was separated from his mother and
sisters. This was the last time he ever saw his mother and his younger sister,
Tzipora: ‘Men to the left! Women to the right!’ Eight words spoken quietly,
indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words. Yet that was the moment
when I left my mother.’ On the advice of an existing inmate, Wiesel lied about his
age, claiming to be 18, to avoid being selected for extermination.
Decades later, Wiesel recorded his feelings during his first hours in Auschwitz:
‘Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, that turned my life into
one long night seven times sealed…Never shall I forget the small faces of the
children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.’
After being held for some time at Auschwitz I, Wiesel and his father were
transferred to Monowitz (Buna), a work camp that made up part of the extensive
Auschwitz camp complex. There he worked as a slave labourer. The loss of his
mother and sister and the daily brutality of the camp led Wiesel to question his
faith: ‘My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God,
without man. Without love or mercy. I was nothing but ashes now.’
As the Russian army advanced through Poland in early 1945, the Germans
evacuated Auschwitz-Birkenau. Wiesel and his father marched for miles on foot
before being transported to Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, where
his father died. Wiesel was liberated from Buchenwald on 11 April 1945.
After liberation, Wiesel was reunited with his older sisters, Beatrice and Hilda, in a
French orphanage. He went on to study in Paris and became a journalist.
For a decade after the Holocaust, he kept silent about his experiences, until a
French journalist, François Mauriac, persuaded him to write. The result was Night,
his acclaimed memoir, published for the first time in French in 1958. The book
has been translated into over 30 languages and Wiesel went on to write over 60
books, fiction and non-fiction.
He moved to the US in the 1950s and married in 1969. He had a
son, Shlomo, in 1972.
Appointed as the first Chair of the President’s Commission on the
Holocaust in 1976, Wiesel initiated Days of Remembrance, the
United States’ annual commemoration of the Holocaust. At the Day
of Remembrance ceremony in 2003, he spoke of the importance of
commemoration: ‘All the rivers run to the sea, days come and go,
generations vanish, others are born...What does one do with the
memory of agony and suffering?…To remember means to lend an
ethical dimension to all endeavors and aspirations.’
He returned to Auschwitz-Birkenau for the first time as part of his
work with the President’s Commission and wrote about the visit
in his memoir, And the Sea is Never Full: ‘Birkenau: I had not
realised that the camp was quite small… It has swallowed an entire
people…a people with hopes and memories.’
Elie Wiesel in 1987
Photo © Erling Mandelmann
Alongside his work on Holocaust commemoration, Wiesel spoke out on behalf
of Soviet Jews, victims of apartheid, victims of famine in Africa and victims of
genocide in Cambodia, Bosnia and Darfur, amongst others. He was a Professor
at Boston University and with his wife he established the Elie Wiesel Foundation
for Humanity.
Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. The citation for the award
said: ‘His message is one of peace and atonement and human dignity. The
message is in the form of a testimony, repeated and deepened through the works
of a great author.’
Find out more...
hmd.org.uk
[email protected]
020 7785 7029
The Holocaust: hmd.org.uk/holocaust
The Elie Wiesel Foundation: eliewieselfoundation.org
Visit hmd.org.uk for poems by Elie Wiesel and book reviews
@hmd_uk
hmd.uk
@holocaustmemorialdaytrust
Learning lessons from the past to create a safer, better future
ELIE WIESEL
- EASY TO READ LIFE STORY
Key terms:
Jewish: People who believe in a religion called Judaism. Jewish people are
also called Jews.
Nazi Party: The political party which ruled Germany at the time of World
War Two. They thought people who were ‘Aryan’ (white skin, blond hair,
blue eyes) were better than all others. They wanted to kill people from other
groups who were different from them, such as Jewish people and Sinti and
Roma people.
Ghetto: A small area in a town or city where Jews were forced to live
all together. They were not allowed to leave. The ghettos became very
crowded with lots of families forced to live in the same flat or the same
room.
Concentration camp: Places where the Nazis kept many people as prisoners, such as Jews and
Roma and Sinti people. They were put there because the Nazis did not like them. In the camps
people were forced to work as slaves or they were killed. There were many camps like this in Europe
in the 1930s and 1940s.
Genocide: Genocide is a word used to describe killing people just because they belong to a
particular group. This has happened in many countries around the world.
Elie Wiesel was born in a small town in Romania, a country in Eastern Europe. He had
three sisters. His family were Jewish.
Elie was a teenager during World War Two. The Nazi party, who were running the
country in Germany, were fighting against many other countries in Europe and other
parts of the world. The Nazis believed that the Jews were not as good as other people,
even though they had done nothing wrong.
When Elie was 15, the German army invaded Romania and took control of his town. He
had to leave his home and live in a ghetto. After this, he was put on a train and travelled
for two days in a hot, smelly, crowded carriage with no water. He was being sent to
Auschwitz-Birkenau, a Nazi concentration camp.
When Elie arrived, he was separated from his mother and sisters as men and women
were sent to different places. He never saw his mother and little sister, Tzipora, again.
Elie and his father were made to do hard work, like slaves. He found himself in a scary,
lonely and sad place and it made him feel there was no love and kindness in the world.
He only kept going because he knew his father was alive too.
Towards the end of the war, Elie and his father, with many other workers, were forced
out of the camp and made to walk for many miles. For these weak and sick people,
the journey was too hard. Many of them died along the way. They went to another
concentration camp, called Buchenwald. Elie’s father died there, so Elie was left alone.
Elie did survive. American soldiers, who were fighting the Nazis,
came to Buchenwald and freed all the prisoners who were
still alive. Six million Jewish people did not survive and were
murdered by the Nazis. Millions of other people were murdered
too.
Elie’s two older sisters, Beatrice and Hilda, also survived. After
the war they all found each other again. More than ten years later,
Elie wrote a book about what the Nazis did to him and his family.
His book, called Night, is now sold in many countries all over the
world.
Elie moved to live in the United States of America, got married
and had a son. He gave his son the name Shlomo, the same
name as his father.
He wrote many books and did a lot of work to tell people about
what the Nazis did to Jews.
Elie Wiesel in 1987
Photo © Erling Mandelmann
He wanted people to learn to live in peace and treat each other
with kindness, not with hatred and violence. He was given a very
important prize called the Nobel peace prize for his work in trying to make our world a
better place and stop these terrible things from happening again.
Elie said:
‘The survivors had every reason to despair of society; they did not.
They opted to work for humankind, not against it.’
Find out more... The Holocaust:
hmd.org.uk/holocaust
The Elie Wiesel Foundation: eliewieselfoundation.org
Visit hmd.org.uk for Elie Wiesel poems and book reviews
Other resources for educators: hmd.org.uk/educators
hmd.org.uk
[email protected]
020 7785 7029
@hmd_uk
hmd.uk
@holocaustmemorialdaytrust
Learning lessons from the past to create a safer, better future