ABSTRACT
After discovering that a number of girls had been making antisemitic comments in her school, a distressed teacher remarked to me recently, ‘I wish I could take them on a school trip to Auschwitz so that they could see where antisemitism leads.’ Clearly, there are countless reasons why educators choose to take their students on school trips to Holocaust sites. Some opt to do so in an attempt to combat prejudice and intolerance, others to press upon their learners the true extent and nature of the Nazis’ crimes, while many practitioners see such excursions as a valuable way of increasing their class’s knowledge and understanding of such a complex topic. Experience suggests that the majority of students will be simultaneously affected in a number of ways. As they learn more about the horrors of the Holocaust and visit the actual place where such atrocities occurred, they are likely to recognise the danger of antisemitism and feel the emotional impact.
