Details of young people's Auschwitz programme.

‘Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it’    George Santayana

Southwell House Youth Project is a charitable organisation, established in 1988, which works with young people from a variety of social, cultural and economic backgrounds in providing educational programmes responding to their personal and social needs. We work with between 5,000 and 7,000 young people every year. Our programmes are based on the methodology of non-formal education.

We work with young people who have to face the consequences of living in a diverse, multicultural society, very often without even realising it, and who may not have the tools to analyse what they are experiencing every day, despite its affects upon them. Observing the lives of young people, seeing how their understanding of the world and their attitudes towards each other can be changed, influenced or even manipulated, and witnessing the social processes that are happening, we recognise the need of organising educational programmes focused on issues of social justice, social diversity and social development.

Inspired by the sentence by George Santayana ‘Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it’, we are organising a programme covering issues of tolerance, acceptance, indifference, discrimination, prejudices, ‘banality of evil’ and meaning of individuals’ freedom and responsibilities that would be held in Oswiecim (Auschwitz), Poland.

The Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp is not only a monument to horror, not only the world’s biggest cemetery, but it is also an educational place that can be used to build a new understanding of civil societies and the role of individuals in them. From our experience we know that the place itself offers great opportunities for young people to reflect on the current social and political events; that it challenges and questions them; that it offers a space to evaluate their values and understanding of world. It is the place that can, like no other place, empower young people and stimulate a very positive change.

We would like to invite fifteen  Sixth Form students to participate in our programme. The programme begins on Sunday, July 6th 2008 at  at Southwell House, and the party will travel to Poland on Tuesday 8th.  The programme ends on Saturday July 12th at a time to be determined.. A more detailed description of the programme is below.

The cost of the participation in the programme will be about £320 per person.  A deposit of £160 has to be paid when booking.

Because of the nature of the programme and the fact that the flight tickets have to be booked in advance to ensure the best price we would like to finish the process of recruiting the participants by May 29th 2008. We will accept the participants on a first come first served basis so if you are interested in the programme, please contact me as soon as possible to reserve a place for your students. The Southwell House team can also visit your school or parish before the programme to talk to young people who would be willing to take part in the event.

If you have any questions or queries, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Yours sincerely

Paulina Sekrecka
Southwell House Youth Project
39 Fitzjohn’s Avenue
LONDON
NW3 5JT
020 7435 8534
Fax: 020 7435 9133
paulina.sekrecka@southwellhouse.com

The programme will consist of the following

The aims of the first part of the programme will take place at Southwell House in London, and will include getting to know each other; establishing a contract; sharing expectations and fears and creating a support structure for what will be an intense experience for them. We will also organise a meeting with an Auschwitz survivor to make a first step into the programme but also to provide young people with a very personal story to follow while visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau. From our experience we know that the scale of the crime can make individual victims of it almost invisible moving the focus from a human perspective of it into a scientific, numerical one.

Then the young people, accompanied by 3 of our staff, will fly to Krakow and then travel to the Centre for Dialogue in Oswiecim. There they will have the chance to settle in, and get to know the people working at the House as well as continue the group building process.

The programme in Auschwitz begins by preparing the young people for the experience of facing Auschwitz and Birkenau. We will try to establish an understanding of what happened right before and during the Second World War in terms of social processes, rather then political or military ones, with particular reference to Auschwitz and Birkenau, reflecting on how and why these events took place.

Most of a day will be dedicated to visiting the Auschwitz Museum with a professional guide so that the young people gain a more rounded picture. Once the young people have had the opportunity of seeing this historic place, we feel that they would then need to do something completely different in order to give them some space to consider what they had seen, and to physically remove them from Oswiecim, therefore we propose to take them to Krakow. We recognise that as Krakow is one of the cultural capitals of Europe and seeped in history it will give them the opportunity to experience Polish culture and deepen their understanding of the country they will be visiting.

There will also be a morning visit to Birkenau Museum. And then some time will then be given over to allowing the young people some private space to reflect upon the experiences of the previous few days. The theme of the evening will come from the poem by Pastor Niemoeller; ‘First they came for the Jews and I didn’t stand up for them because I was not a Jew...’ We will be trying to explore the question of how could such atrocities have occurred. The aim of this session would be to begin to bridge the gap between the historical aspects of Auschwitz and Birkenau and how they can be translated into the current world climate. We will focus on the social aspects but we will also discuss the political, religious and economic situations.

We will encourage discussion and run the sessions around personal as well as social responsibilities, freedoms, moral and ethical choices. We will also look at Human Rights issues, their development, current changes, improvements, practice and violations in local and global context.   Finally we spend some time summarising the programme. We will try to focus on issues closest to young people’s every day reality and try to empower them and provide them with skills and resources to make informed choices based on wider knowledge and understanding of the social situation. The afternoon will be handed over to the young people for them to consider where they should go from here, we will explore the ways how young people can get involved, undertake some actions and make a positive difference in their environment.

This programme will be co-ordinated and led by Paulina Sekrecka, a youth worker who has five years experience of taking international groups to the museum of Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps.  Pauline has worked at Southwell House Youth Project since 2005.

Southwell House Youth Project
39 Fitzjohn's Avenue
LONDON
NW3 5JT
020 7435 8534
kasia.lichon@southwellhouse.com

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