Week thirteen: (07/05/12-13/05/12) Cultural - Fort VII

As this blog might be read by someone who is planning to go to Poznan on Erasmus, something I would like to highlight is to visit the concentration camp: Fort VII. Whilst my boyfriend, Liam and two friends, Jonny and Stevie were visiting they asked to visit the camp and I was in complete shock that there was one in Poznan! Not one person had mentioned there was a concentration camp here and my Erasmus friends seemed just as surprised. I would definitely recommend that people visit the camp as it was one of the best ways to show visually (through models, exhibitions and pictures) some key events during the Holocaust. However, the camp is not set up for ‘promoting tourism’, it is for remembrance, therefore does not have English descriptions to explain the exhibits (so it is important to research the camp beforehand.)

Fort VII was created to exterminate people with Special Needs and disabilities. When you first enter the camp it has memorials inside each of the three gas chambers, with the names and ages of the people who were murdered. When you go further into the camp there are prisons with stone models (shown in the pictures) skulls and barbed wire. The museum section shows pictures and an exhibition of the medical experiments. It was hard for me to walk through this section as I couldn’t imagine what the children, twins, and disabled people would have went through on those medical beds. The last section of the museum has pictures of eight different concentration camps in Europe, each with their name and photos surrounding it. It is disturbing to see all the photos with people smiling whilst doing these terrible things to human beings.

At Auschwitz I had been told that during a Polish child’s education they must visit a concentration camp, as the Holocaust had such a dramatic effect on Poland’s history. If I was to compare the importance of remembering history to our situation at home, it surrounds the question should the children in our schools be taught about ‘The Troubles,’ by visiting museums and places of significance at least once in their school career? Although many people may currently feel that the conflict is a ‘thing of the past,’ Northern Ireland is hugely divided through religion, due to its history – even within the university I attend.

It is important for people to remember the past as it can still have an impact on the future. I am aware that by teaching about the Troubles in schools it can create other problems e.g. religions having different perspectives, (bias towards one side), as well as knowing what age is appropriate for the children to begin learning about certain events. However, I personally feel I wasn’t educated enough on Northern Ireland in school and felt I could have benefitted from this. The Ulster Museum has now dedicated a whole section to the history of the Troubles, which is a good example of how teachers can introduce the topic. It is strange that my Erasmus friends were taught about the history of Northern Ireland in school and I was not!