Melbourne Holocaust Museum
The importance of Holocaust and genocide awareness and education has been highlighted in recent months now more than ever before. Here at Mac.Rob, our humanities team is proud to deliver a comprehensive and compulsory educational unit for our Year 9s, as we phase it out of Year 10 this year. During Term 4, nearly 200 of our students spent the day in Elsternwick visiting the Melbourne Holocaust Museum, and watching a film at the Classic Cinema titled “Simone Veil, A Woman of the Century”. Hear from two of our Year 10 students, Siena L and Hannah J about their experience below.
James Desmond, Head of Humanities and Stephanie Ruth, Year 12 Coordinator
Paul Grinwald speaking to our students.
On October 19th, History classes from both Year 9 and 10 went on an excursion to the Melbourne Holocaust Museum and Classic Cinema. For Year 10s, this experience linked to our learning in class about the causes and events of WWII, with the excursion beginning our new Holocaust topic; whilst for Year 9s, this experience came at the commencement of our dedicated Holocaust education unit.
At the Holocaust museum, we got an introduction to the Holocaust and the context of Judaism and Jewish people and culture in Europe at the time. We also attended a session where we explored different artefacts from the Holocaust in groups where we were able to interact with many artefacts such as passports, newspapers and documents that gave us an incredible and unique insight into the experience of Jewish people before and during the war and especially their treatment by the Nazis. Finally, we attended a Q&A session with Holocaust survivor Paul Grinwald, where we learnt about his incredible story of survival, and afterwards, at the Classic Cinema we watched the movie “Simone Veil, A Woman of the Century”.
The movie and our session with Paul gave us a raw insight into the Holocaust which made us truly empathise and gain a perspective outside the numbers we were often confronted with in class. Overall during this experience, we learnt the importance of different values such as judgement, perspective, kindness, hope, fairness and bravery as they related to the Holocaust and also how they can relate to the world today.
We really appreciate the dedication and comprehensiveness of the MHM and Classic Cinema staff, and really look forward to deepening our relationship next year when we visit again.
Siena L (10H) and Hannah J (10C)