For the past 9 years, Mrs Annick Berthod, history and geography teacher, and Mr Igor Bonnet, English teacher, have been involved in a deep-rooted remembrance of the Holocaust, by bringing each class of Terminale to Poland to trace the traces of Jewish life there.
The journey to Poland fits in with the history and history-geography, political science and geopolitics syllabuses of the Terminale, as well as with the school project of our lycée.
The aim is to prepare our students to become citizens conscious of the challenges of the past, present and future of participatory democracy, by studying and visiting the places where the extermination of a people took place and thus the annihilation of humanism, the very cornerstone of democracy.
Our journey takes us to Auschwitz and then back through history, following in the footsteps of Jewish life in Krakow, the Polish countryside and Warsaw.
The aim is to prepare our students to become citizens conscious of the challenges of the past, present and future of participatory democracy, by studying and visiting the places where the extermination of a people took place and thus the annihilation of humanism, the very cornerstone of democracy.
Classes, discussion and reflection sessions, workshops and visits to the Mahn-und-Gedenkstätte in Düsseldorf prepare students for the trip.


Restitution of the trip to Poland
This educational trip, which took us from Saturday 28 January to Friday 3 February, included a visit to the Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II Birkenau concentration and extermination camps, followed by a trip to Krakow, where we visited the city, the old ghetto and the Schindler museum, then to Chmielnik, where we visited a synagogue that had been desecrated and turned into a museum, before going on to Lodz, where the traces of a Jewish population representing half the city were still clearly visible.
After going to Chelmno to see the first Nazi extermination camp, the trip ended in Warsaw with a visit to the Warsaw Jewish Institute, where a permanent exhibition is devoted to the Ringelblum archives: texts, photos, drawings and other traces of life in the Warsaw ghetto.
This trip gave us final-year students a better sense and understanding of the history we are taught. The historical photos took on real dimensions. Despite our thick coats, the cold that seeped down to our skin was a humbling reminder of the harshness of the cold experienced by the deportees at the time. It was a modest experience compared to their terrible reality, but it gave us a better understanding of their suffering.
In the end, this genocide has become something personal. It is no longer numbers that are hard to pin down that come to mind, but distinct faces, families of innocents. The places are no longer vague in a faraway land. They are buildings that we have touched, cold stones, piled-up objects and hundred-year-old trees that, having been there at the time, have allowed us to grasp a little of the past and to appropriate the suffering of these people, just as a letter written by one’s ancestor would do, telling the story by talking about what happened.
During the presentation of the journey, the Terminales tried to convey, through a film, images and discussions, their experience, their understanding and the responsibility they now bear to the students in Première who are preparing for the journey and to their parents.
We would particularly like to thank Mrs Berthod, who organised and accompanied the trip, as well as Mr Bonnet and Mr Besançon, who accompanied them, and Mr Dillenschneider, for having made this trip possible, which is and always will be an immense privilege for the Terminales.
The Master of Ceremonies,
Terminale 2023