Grammar Gazette- Issue 1, 2019

/ 26

HOLOCAUST AND THE HUMANITIES

Mrs Regina Lipshut with Year 10 students, Rabiya Abro (10G), Annabel Douglas (10R), Giselle Vellnagel (10R), and Victoria Chen (10O)

From here, the children were sent into hiding in the countryside where they were cared for by a Catholic couple who had young children of their own. This family placed themselves in great danger harbouring three Jewish children; the penalties for being caught would have been dire. To this day, Mrs Lipshut has maintained a close relationship with the now elderly children of this couple and calls them her second family. While the Holocaust forces us to confront the darkest aspects of humanity, stories of humanity’s best also shine through. Mrs Lipshut’s survival story, like so many others, serves to warn us of the depths to which bigotry and racism can take a society. It also reminds us of the power of ordinary people to make a profound difference when they take a stand against prejudice and reject the position of bystander. The students learned about World War Two as a key moment in the modern world. Their exploration of the causes of this led them to understand the emergence of fascism in Germany, a movement, the centrepiece of which was anti-Semitism. As part of their studies in this unit, the students applied their critical thinking skills to important questions related to the advent of the Holocaust. In Term 2 students will study a unit called ‘Rights and Freedoms’ which seeks to examine the nature of prejudice in more detail.

AUTHOR Ms Alison Dare Director of Humanities

The Holocaust—an unprecedented event in history— in many ways defies rational analysis and falls beyond the limits of our collective imagination. Perhaps where logic and reason fail us, the human story is all we have to fill the void and bring meaning and understanding to what seems otherwise inexplicable. On Wednesday 28 March 2019, Year 10 History students were moved by the story of Holocaust survivor, Mrs Regina Lipshut. Born in Paris in 1941, Mrs Lipshut was an infant when both her parents were taken to Auschwitz. The question of why she survived is one that Mrs Lipshut has had a lifetime to ponder. In her own words, ‘… it was pure luck. It wasn’t good management—all of it was luck …’. Mrs Lipshut’s story of survival began when her mother made the heartbreaking decision to relinquish her children into the care of a Jewish orphanage so that they might have a chance to live.

GRAMMAR GAZETTE