Since 2014, the Normandy Region has organized, in partnership with the Shoah Memorial, a study trip to Auschwitz (Poland) for high school students. Every year since then, the operation has been repeated as part of the duty of remembrance. Until 2021, this trip was carried out in one day. Since then, it has lasted two days. With a first day of preparation for the visit to the Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau extermination camps.
This was necessary, this November 20, 2024, in addition to the work undertaken in the various establishments of these hundred young people since the start of the school year, to partly absorb the shock of the discovery of these places of horror, of the unspeakable, where almost More than a million Jews were murdered by the Nazis.
Read also: Ginette Kolinka, conveyor of painful memory
Arriving in Krakow at the very end of the morning, they separated into five groups, like so many classes and high schools from all the Normandy departments, each led by a tour guide through the streets of this large city where 250,000 inhabitants lived at entry of the German army on September 6, 1939. Among them, 68,000 Jews. A quarter of the population. Almost entirely decimated by barbarism. Only 3,000 survivors.
History of a civilization
Old synagogue (built in the 15th century, making it the oldest in Poland, now transformed into a museum) in the Kazimierz district, where the future cosmetics industrialist Helena Rubinstein lived, ghetto from which little Roman Polanski managed to be exfiltrated , the young Normans were able to measure the extent of the earthquake that the Nazi occupation represented for this martyred community.
“We start here to fully understand what the Jewish world was like before the Second World War, and the Nazis' objective of eradicating Jews from the face of the earth with the Shoah, summarizes Olivier Lalieu, historian at the Shoah Memorial. Their presence is very old, in Poland, in the heart of the European continent, Jews numbered nearly 3.5 million, it is the country in Europe where they were the most numerous. »
The specialist speaks to high school students about the importance of this culture, this civilization, this philosophy of the oldest monotheistic religion “which irrigated everything else and from which Catholicism and Islam derive in many aspects”, of its diversity, too: “The Jews did not represent a uniform group. » Young people drink in his words, open their eyes wide, walk these streets where terror has been unleashed.
“They will be upset”
“I found them curious, despite the not-so-simple approach to Judaism,” appreciates Valérie Maray. She teaches history at the horticultural campus of Coutances (Manche), says that she carried out this project with her students to “the duty to remember is so important to show them what it is. Before coming, we organized a video with Ginette Kolinka (one of the last survivors of Birkenau), it was extraordinary. She touched them greatly with her words, the strength of her testimony. »
This first special day ended with a visit to the city's historical museum, located in what was the factory of Oskar Schindler, the man from the film Schindler's List by Steven Spielberg, who saved 1,200 Jews from death. “I haven’t seen this film, admits Justine Leroux, from the Coutances horticultural high school, but I saw A Bag of Marbles and The Striped Pajamas. I'll watch it as soon as I get home. » The high school girl, who thought “know well the subject before this trip”, said to himself “shocked” of what she saw. Learned.
The young girl has “watched a documentary on the liberation of the camps on Tuesday”, expects the worst this Thursday: “There, I'm going to be there, find myself where these horrors happened and I can't get it into my head, I don't believe it yet. » Her history teacher is a little afraid. “I have already taken a class to Dachau. I know they will be upset. »
The classes concerned this year: 1st professional Agora baccalaureate at the Mézeray-Gabriel d'Argentan high school, Terminal management of horticultural production and food sales consulting technicians at the Métiers nature high school in Coutances, 2nd – 1re – Final year at the Léopold Sédar Senghor high school in Évreux, final year in history-geography, geopolitics and political science at the Jeanne-d'Arc high school in Rouen, 1st professional baccalaureate in cooking at the Jean-Jooris high school in Dives-sur-Mer.
