Maria Chamberlain was our speaker and her parents were both Holocaust survivors. Maria shared their/her testimony to our S3 students. Our S3 students have recently finished the Holocaust unit so this was an excellent opportunity for them to hear live testimony. This was arranged through generation2generation.

Maria’s story:

My family comes from Krakow in Southern Poland. When the Nazis invaded in 1939, my family was torn apart. My parents survived, but many of my family members did not.  My father was interned in several concentration camps. My mother escaped from a train destined for an extermination camp and spent the rest of the war years in hiding. Both owed their lives to chance, resilience, guile and the selfless support of random ‘good people’.

Initially my parents bid me to ‘never tell anyone I was Jewish’. Later they relented, realising that collectively testimonies make history. I tell their story because we need to understand what happened, but also how easily it can happen, so that together we can hope for a more just, humane and peaceful world.