Thursday 13-12-2018 - 14:09

Students’ union Vice-President (Welfare & Community) Emily Delaney recently travelled to the Auschwitz concentration camp as part of a project created to ensure the lessons of the Holocaust are never forgotten.

Organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust and the Union of Jewish Students, the project was created to educate Full-Time Officers from universities all over the country on how to recognise and challenge modern antisemitism.

During the summer Emily signed up to take part in two days of workshops and discussions and travel to Poland to visit Auschwitz – the most notorious of the death camps set up by the Nazi regime during the Second World War. An estimated 1.1 million people – 90 per cent of whom were Jews – were killed at the camp.

Emily writes: I visited Auschwitz for the first time when I was 15. I wanted to go because I’d studied the Holocaust but had never been able to really conceptualise it – going to the camps makes you realise that it happened.

So I went into this project feeling I knew quite a bit about the Holocaust, but I was completely wrong.

Before the trip Auschwitz we had the chance to meet Holocaust survivor Susan Pollack MBE. Born in Hungary in 1930, Susan became aware of growing antisemitism in her home town from a young age. She had experienced discrimination as a child, but as the years passed several liberties were stripped from Jewish people – from being segregated in her classes from non-Jewish children to not being allowed to use public transport. The situation became much more serious following the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944. Jews were forced to identify themselves by wearing a yellow Star of David, and eventually a letter was issued calling all Jewish fathers to a meeting to discuss the welfare of their families. All who attended, including Susan’s father, were herded on to cattle wagons and taken to a concentration camp. To this day, Susan does not know how, when or where her father was killed.

By May 1944 almost all Hungarian Jews had been deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Susan was selected to work and spent 10 weeks at the camp before being moved to Germany as a slave labourer in an armaments factory.

Liberated by the British Army in April 1945, she was sent to Sweden to recover from the tuberculosis, typhoid and malnutrition she suffered in the camps. She and her brother Laci where to only two members of the family to survive.

Hearing Susan’s story made me realise that one of the big lessons from this project is that when we talk about the Holocaust we talk about six million people, but we hardly fully think about individual people and their lives.

Six million Jewish people were killed, 10 million people were killed overall, but then there are the families and friends who go on knowing they have lost people to ignorance and hatred. What happened then continues to burden countless people today.

Later, when we visited Auschwitz we saw some of the possessions that had been left behind by people who were killed – toys, books, kitchenware and jewellery, anything they had brought. There were lots of house keys, that had belonged to people thought they’d eventually get to go home. There was a huge room full of human hair, and some of it was still in pigtails and plaits from when it was cut off. That was something that really impacted me – I was in tears at that point.

The bit that really got me was seeing the children’s clothes. I saw a little pair of dungarees that would fit my little godson and knowing him so well and thinking of him in the position that the child who they belonged to forced me to visualise the reality of the situation.

The most important thing about the programme is that we continue passing these stories on, because it won’t be long before there are no Holocaust survivors left.

The Holocaust started with hate speech and petty acts of discrimination and in just nine years people were taken from their homes, robbed of their belongings and taken to camps – simply due to their race, religion and/or other characteristics. Our duty now is to challenge antisemitism, discrimination and hatred - whenever we hear or see it we need to stand up and stop it in its tracks, otherwise we’re just normalising it and allowing these attitudes to continue to grow.

One of the reasons I did this is that antisemitism is unfortunately still a large problem and there are antisemitic incidents at universities in Britain each year. I feel a lot more confident about being able to recognise modern antisemitism after being part of this project.

• Emily is making a documentary film about the project, which she aims to publish early in 2019.

Emily is pictured with Holocaust survivor Susan Pollack and Lancaster University Chief of Staff and Director of Strategic Projects Dr Giles Carden.