Starting school this week?

Across Great Britain, children and young people are beginning or returning to school this week. After six weeks of a hot, sunny summer and holidaying, including activities such as camping, travelling, or relaxing, a new academic year begins.

 

The night before they return this week, children will be preparing their bags, laying out their uniforms, and ensuring they have remembered everything for the first day back. It is probably a nervous final night of the holidays for those who are starting school for the first time. On the other hand, it may be an anticipated evening with the promise of meeting friends again, receiving a new timetable and diary, and getting back into routine the next day. Starting school is a recurring event throughout childhoods but it never ceases to bring surprises. Each year as they return, they return a year older with a greater amount of work each time (which unfortunately means that when you get to my age and university there is a great deal of work indeed!). Starting school is not unique only to our society today though. 75 years ago life was very similar and starting school was very much part of it.

These photographs show classes of Jewish children. It looks as if there was a different way to schooling then: the hats, crossed arms, smart clothing, and regimented lines suggest this. However, they actually show us very similar school days to us. As you observe them, think back to your first day of school, or first days returning to school, or when you sent your children to school for the first time. What was it like? What did you get? Who did you meet? How was the day structured? What were the teachers like? What did you have to wear? Think about these Jewish children: what did they wear, eat, take with them, and feel like? As our young people start or return to school this week, remember the young people of the 1930s and 1940s starting or returning to school as well.

Schools of the 1940s were dramatically changed and altered however. The Second World War and specifically, the Holocaust wiped out a complete lifestyle. The people seen in these photos (courtesy of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem) saw a school life utterly destroyed. The ‘cheder’, or religious, classes of the Jews, particularly those in Poland, were completely destroyed. The children of Jewish schools were forced to experience a new lifestyle if they were put on the Kindertransport across Europe or taken to one of the many labour or concentration camps. The teachers were forced to emigrate, hide or face the atrocities of Nazi persecution. Jewish schools were similar to ours until the Nazis came to power.

This photograph tells us a lot about Jewish schoolchildren’s pre-war lives. This little girl, named Liselote Ermann, is holding a cone of sweets. She went to school in Germany, where it was customary that schoolchildren received a cone of sweets on their first day of school. Maybe you can remember something that your school gave you on your first day. I know that I can think of many things, including timetables, which I received and looked forward to receiving.

Below are more photographs for you to look at. Many of the children and what happened to them during the Holocaust are unknown. However, thanks to the work of Yad Vashem and survivors who are in these pictures, some of the children have been named. For example, three of the teachers in the third row in the first photo currently reside in Israel.

As the new academic year begins across this nation, please view and share these photographs. Be inspired to take every opportunity that arises at school or in the workplace, depending on where you are at. Be inspired to make the futures of 2013’s young people bright. Be inspired to fight hatred and injustice so that the lifestyles the Jews and us experience today are not destroyed. This is just one way that the Holocaust remains relevant for our society today.  

To finish, although we are only half way through 2013 and despite beginning a new academic year, in the Jewish calendar, September 5^th is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. I wish everyone, therefore, a happy and successful new academic year.

(This is a New Years card sent from the town of Plunge in Lithuania in 1935. The Jewish population in 1940 was about 1,700. Only 221 Jews from Plunge survived the war.)