Every year on January 27th, Holocaust Memorial Day commemorates the victims of the Holocaust. To enhance your educational resources and help you reflect on this atrocity with your students in your classroom, TCBC School Tours, in partnership with the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, produced an online tour of the exhibition.
We are very grateful to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum for their cooperation and for allowing us exclusive access to film on the site.
Museum Educator Paweł Sawicki walks TCBC's guide Paulina Jurkowska-Pudełko through both camps discussing a wide range of topics, specially tailored to a student audience, as detailed below:
Auschwitz site
- Preparation - the best way to visit Auschwitz
- The Story of Auschwitz - why the Nazis needed a camp (overcrowded prisons), how it developed into part of the Final Solution and turned from a prison camp to an extermination camp
- Surrounding buildings, size of camp, numbers
- Role of the Orchestra - dehumanisation of the camp
- Inside the barracks / exhibitions
- Why this location?
- Victim groups
- How these groups were moved to the camp
- Archive photos from Birkenau - pictures of Hungarian Jews made by SS documenting logistical process
- Process of extermination in Birkenau
- Unloading, selection process, empty platforms, robbery, individual perpetrators
- Story of victims but also story of perpetrators
- What happened to prisoners’ personal effects
- Every day life of prisoners - their first moments, transfer of person to prisoner, losing individuality
- Children in Auschwitz
- The Block of Death (camp prison) & execution wall
- Auschwitz as a business / profit earner
- Who worked in Auschwitz
- What happened to those who worked in the camp after the war (perpetrators’ fate)
- Rudolf Hess, the 1st commandant
- Gas chamber / crematorium
Birkenau site
- Size of camp, panoramic views
- Railway line
- Unloading and selection process
- Barracks, accommodation, living standards
- Unloading platform
- Survivors’ voices / books
- Gas chamber
- Warning for today
- 1967 monument to commemorate victims
- What can we do today to make the world a better place?