Young police cadets from Tower Hamlets schools have returned to east London from visiting Auschwitz Nazi death camp where they took evidence of the Holocaust in the Second world War..
They toured Auschwitz-Birkenau near Krakow where almost a-million Jews and 250,000 others were murdered in a systematic genocide in German Occupation of Poland.
“Visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau was humbling,” cadet Regan Healy from Stepney’s Bishop Challoner Secondary said.
“I will never forget the experience, seeing the sheer scale and the conditions in which people were kept, in such a horrendous place.
“But at least I have some understanding of what happened. It is an important lesson, so that the horrors will never happen again.”
The Trip was organised by Chuni Kahan, whose paternal grandparents were among the 960,000 Jewish men, women and children murdered at Auschwitz. He explained to the cadets what a lack of intolerance can lead to, as the Holocaust “didn’t happen overnight”.
The 25 cadets also toured Krakow and the old Jewish Quarter. Cadets’ coordinator Sgt Steve Austin told the East London Advertiser: “I had concerns they wouldn’t understand the enormity of the crimes that took place at Auschwitz.
“I needn’t have worried—the asked profound questions and were visibly moved by the experience.
“Children the same age as the cadets were put to death when they arrived at the camp.
“The experience of visiting Auschwitz will stay with us all our lives.”
One of the cattle trucks used to transport Jewish families from all over Occupied Europe has been preserved on the rail track leading directly into the death camp, used 75 years ago to deposit its human cargo.
Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet forces on January 27, 1945, a date kept as International Holocaust Memorial Day in memory of the six million Jews and one million others exterminated in the Nazi death camps in Occupied Europe.
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