CURRENTLY celebrating its 175th year, Shebbear College kicked off 2016 with a five day cultural experience for 30 of its Fifth and Sixth form students.

The students enjoyed an enriching historical and cultural trip to Krakow, Poland, which included tours around the city, Oskar Schindler’s factory, the Auschwitz extermination camps, Jagiellonian University, Wawel Royal Castle and state chambers, Nova Huta and Wieliczka salt mines. The trip also included a moving meeting with a Holocaust survivor.

The tours around both camps at Auschwitz were very moving for the students, with a challenging confrontation of the 2,000kg of human hair, from around 30,000 women, shaved off after their murder. The students undertook a minute’s silence for all the victims on behalf of Shebbear College. Twin pupils ended the silence by placing red roses and candles on the memorial, just a short distance from where millions perished and where Dr Mengele performed his horrific experiments on twins.

At the Galacia Museum, in a private conference room, the students met Holocaust survivor Monika Goldwasser. The room was silent as, through an interpreter, she told her heart-breaking story about how her parents were executed by the Nazis and how she survived in a Krakow orphanage protected by nuns until she was adopted by a Polish couple. The pupils asked her numerous searching questions and Monika expounded the importance of love and left them with this thought-provoking message: ‘You are young and your whole life is ahead of you and you will have many decisions to make — remember, your decisions will reflect upon other people.’

During an excursion to Mowa Huta, a ‘communist paradise’ designed and built post-war to Stalin’s communist ideology, the students saw huge buildings inspired by Leonardo DaVinci which housed workers from the Lenin Steelworks. They learned about the Cold War, Lech Walesa, solidarity and the fall of communism.

As a surprise, the students took a tour of Krakow in a convoy of six carriages each pulled by two horses, then visited the salt mines where they saw statues and wall carvings that the miners had created over the centuries and a huge chapel carved out of salt. They stepped out of the mines to find everything white and a heavy flurry of snow led to great excitement and a vigorous snowball fight.