These high school students from Meaux, in Seine-et-Marne, went to Auschwitz-Birkenau for a study trip

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As part of a partnership with the Shoah Memorial and the Île-de-France Region, students from the Baudelaire high school were able to travel to the Auschwitz camp, in Poland, in December 2024.

They were supervised by the head of establishmentFranck Yamajako, et al. two teachers: Sébastien Lucarelli, literature-history teacher and high school culture referent, and Marjorie Mennechez, Management-Administration teacher.

Find out more at the Shoah Memorial

In order to prepare this study trip the students were invited to go to the Shoah Memorial in Paris on Tuesday, November 5, 2024. They were welcomed by a cultural mediator : He clarified to them the role of the Memorial, the content, and the origin of its collections.

The mediator mentioned the 76,000 French Jewish deportees which brought together many members of the same family. The guide continued the visit to the Memorial by discussing the 6 extermination camps in Poland and the content of the Shoah which consisted of a genocide that the Nazis hoped to keep secret and which was deployed on an industrial scale.

A visit full of emotion

It is with this story in mind, the students arrived at the camp from Auschwitz-Birkenau, accompanied by two guides, a Frenchman and a Polish woman.

At the start of the visit, the students were taken to the convoy landing docks. The deportees who had left France in 1942 arrived there exhausted and disoriented. All prisoners' personal effects were confiscated upon their arrival at the camp.

The group of Meldois students walked the path – followed by the deportees – towards the gas chambers. “The students were moved to tears in front of the ruins of a crematorium designed to burn many corpses at once” testifies Sébastien Lucarelli.

The guide explained to the students the process of gassing the deportees: they were killed in 20 minutesthen piled into a freight elevator, before being introduced into the crematorium.

The students then visited the museum located inside the Auschwitz I camp, and the different blocks. They are overcome by emotion while observing the 80,000 shoes gathered behind glass.

The students and their three companions were very distressed when they also observed hair accumulated behind a window following the Zyclon B assassination of 44,000 women.

The guide reminded that a little more of a million peoplewere exterminated at Auschwitz.

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