On Tuesday afternoon, me and my form were selected to do a virtual reality holocaust memorial experience. It was how realistic it looked. It was like we were really in a concentration camp. We were shown how the living conditions in the camps were like and how it was a huge change from their normal lives. We were given the chance to actually talk to a programmed version of Susan, who told us all about her life experiences and facts about herself, and it reminded me that she was only a kid my age when she had to deal with all the antisemitism, watching her mother walk away for the last time, seeing her own people die and witnessing her brother be beaten for being himself.

This session taught me so much about the holocaust and the people from the foundation gave me a new view on what it really was like to be a Jew back then. I’m glad we got the opportunity to actually learn about Susan’s story and the suffering she went through and how one person telling her to lie about her age actually saved her life. Although it was sad to hear about all the kids and families who never got to grow up or see each other again, it was an overall amazing experience that I will remember for years to come.

Hephzibah 9R

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Tuesday 13^th January, me and my form got the chance to meet with a couple of people from an organisation to talk about the holocaust and one of the survivors. It was a 2-hour session which started with the people from the organisation giving us information on Susan’s (the woman who survived the holocaust) childhood and her life before she got sent to the concentration camp. We got to use VR headsets to actually see the locations where she grew up in Hungary. After we did VR, we got to chat with Susan on a site that talks all about the holocaust and ask her questions about her life and what she would do in her spare time that she mentioned in an interview. When we finished talking to her, we learnt about her life during the concentration camps and what they would do. Using this information, we used the VR again and saw what the inside of the concentration camps looked like and what was in them.

We also listened to her speak about what happened to her and her family through our headsets while using the VR. There was one place in the VR where she said she slept and that if you were to make too much noise you would’ve got beaten or murdered. She also said that she was 13 when she got sent to the camps, but someone told her to say that she was 15 since that was the passing age to get into a camp and everyone thought it would be a good thing to go to one, so she wanted to participate in one too. Overall, I was really lucky that I got the chance to be picked to learn about the holocaust in this way and chat to Susan and learn things about her life I wouldn’t learn in a normal lesson.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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