MP Andrew Pelling and Croydon students visit Auschwitz (From Your Local Guardian)

MP Andrew Pelling and Croydon students visit Auschwitz

3:10pm Friday 30th October 2009

Comments (2)   Have your say »

MP Andrew Pelling visited Auschwitz with students from Croydon with the Holocaust Education trust last week.

The one-day trip was designed to encourage the students to think about the 1.1million people put to death in the camp and consider what they experienced.

Mr Pelling said: “Auschwitz-Birkenau stands as a monument to the human capacity to both hate and endure.

"The instruments of torture and extermination in part remain, but sixty-four years of silent vigil testify that however perfunctory the act of murder was rendered by a well drilled process, the fact is that human beings were responsible for the murder of other human beings.

"There is no such thing as a faceless victim or an identikit guard.

“It gave the students the opportunity to contextualise the historical consequences of far-right political thought with the policies of hate espoused by the BNP.

“It is of great encouragement that so many of the students were motivated to engage with politics by the horror of such attitudes.”

• What do you think? Let us know by email here, phone the newsdesk on 020 8330 9555 or leave a comment below.