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Written by: Wollaston School

Jan 2025

Letters from the Headteacher

Dear parents and carers

General Notices

A reminder that Edulink is now unavailable to parents and all information about your child such as timetable, homework, attendance and behaviour can be found on Arbor.

Next week we are hosting an evening for parents and carers of Year 10 to signpost how students can maximise their success at key stage 4. This is a ticketed event so that we can anticipate numbers and these are available on Eventbrite here.

Holocaust Memorial Day

We are very fortunate to have staff who are heavily invested in Holocaust Education and our annual trip to Krakow in Poland is always a significant trip for the students who are able to attend. A key follow up activity is the work that the staff and students who went on the trip do in school to reflect on their experiences and particularly around Holocaust Memorial Day which is on January 27^th. In advance of this, assemblies will be held next week to recognise the day and for our students and staff to share their experience of visiting Poland.

Mr Foster, trip lead, has reflected on the trip below. Our thanks go to Mr Foster, Mr Hopkins, Mrs Hillman and Miss Woodward for organising and leading this trip.

Year 11 Holocaust Memorial Tour 2024

Mr Foster writes: ‘In the final week of term, a group of over forty year eleven students visited Krakow, in Poland, as part of Wollaston school’s annual programme the ‘Holocaust Memorial Tour’. During this trip, the group follows events around the Holocaust and the impact this had on the Jewish inhabitants of Krakow and other persecuted groups of people. They also consider this persecution across other European countries too.

On the first day, the group visited the historic Remuh synagogue and cemetery, toured the old Jewish district of Krakow to look for signs of pre-war Jewish life. It was particularly striking that the wall contains fragments of Jewish tombstones that were destroyed during world war two, sometimes having been used for doorsteps, paving or windowsills.

The following day, students visited the Galicia Museum and learned how sites associated with the Holocaust have tried to move on and commemorate events. They also got a chance to hear an emotional testimony from Lidia Maksymowicz. She is the daughter of resistance fighters from Belarus and as an infant she survived the Auschwitz camps and the experiments performed on her. Students also took part in workshops focused on different groups of people from this time, discussing the choices they made and the consequences that followed. In the evening, the group toured around the ghetto area of Krakow, visiting two fragments of the ghetto wall and a memorial at the ‘Ghetto Hero’s square’.

On day three, the group were guided around the site of Płaszów concentration camp, learning about conditions within the camp and visiting various memorials and an old Jewish cemetery which had been destroyed to make space for the camp. This is the camp that was reconstructed for the film ‘Schnilder’s List’. Two striking sights were the ‘Grey House’, used by the SS guards and a very striking Soviet memorial to the mass execution of prisoners in the camp. The group also visited the old Oskar Schindler enamelware factory. In the evening, students went to a Jewish restaurant to sample some traditional food and were entertained by a folk group. By the end of the meal, everyone was clapping along and some brave students got up to dance as well.

Day four involved a guided tour of Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau. The group toured many of the exhibitions in the barrack blocks, a gas chamber and crematorium. In the afternoon, the group walked past the infamous gatehouse, around the female’s camp, the unloading ramp and to an area known as ‘Kanada’. This is the area where the sorting of personal possessions took place that had been taken from the prisoners. Over the years many items have been washed to the surface and the group found this a real point of connection with the past, seeing spoons, forks, medals, plates and more preserved under glass in the place they had been found. The group also spent some time at the Holocaust memorial wall, following the Jewish tradition of placing rocks at the memorial that had been brought from home. Mr Hopkins concluded the day by running a reflections workshop.

The final day was a chance to ‘decompress’ a little before returning home. Students visited a local shopping centre to buy some souvenirs or gifts for their families.

Our students excelled themselves on this trip, with staff at the hotel and museums praising them for their excellent behaviour and maturity and will have left the trip with much to think over.’

Key Dates