British or just English students? oster_oops: Students sent on death camp day trip | NEWS.com.au BRITAIN will help pay for two students from every school in England to visit Auschwitz to learn about the Holocaust. The sixth-form students, typically between 16 and 18 years old, will meet with survivors of the Holocaust and be shown the camp's barracks, see inmates' registration documents, and piles of victims' clothes, shoes and hair. Founded in 1947 at the site of the Nazi-era death camp, the Polish state-run Memorial and Museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Oswiecim, received 1.22 million visitors in 2007. Historians estimate 1.1 million people died at the hands of Poland's German occupiers at Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1940 and 1945, either asphyxiated with Zyklon B gas in the notorious gas chambers or from starvation, disease or exhaustion. "The Holocaust was one of the most significant events in world history," junior education minister Jim Knight said. "Six million people died not for what they had done but simply for who they were. What strikes me is the sheer scale of it and how industrialised and mechanised the process of killing people became at Auschwitz. "It was not hot-blooded brutality, it happened in a very planned way, with some people designing the process of death and others carrying it out. Every young person should have an understanding of this." The program is set to last an initial period of three years, and of the STG300 ($650) that each trip will cost, the government will contribute STG200 ($430), with schools expected to raise the remaining STG100 ($220). The trips will last one day, with students leaving early in the morning and arriving home late at night.
