CTC students help mark Holocaust Memorial Day

PUPILS from the CTC Kingshurst Academy have taken part in a special event to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day.
The moving commemoration service was held at the Civic Suite, with Year 10 students Rachel Ajayi and Kiah-Parris Keenan invited to read poems, which had been specially written for the occasion.
The CTC has a long tradition of marking Holocaust Memorial Day, which is held every January – having organised visits to Auschwitz-Birkenau and incorporated the Holocaust into the history curriculum.
A school spokesman said: “We need to ask ourselves what we should be doing today to build a safer, stronger society so that the building blocks of genocide, such as race hate, are removed.”

Dr Martin Stern, a Holocaust survivor, paid tribute to the “wonderful” verses and the work the school had undertaken to promote the event in previous years.
The retired hospital doctor gave a moving account of how he was dragged from school at the age of five. He and his sister were subsequently incarcerated at a prison camp in the Netherlands.
“The first thing I can remember being told is ‘see that barbed wire, don’t go anywhere near it – you will be shot dead.’
“Each week there was a train of cattle trucks and goods trucks... I saw these trains being loaded with fellow prisoners being crammed in like sardines.”
He was later taken to a ghetto in Eastern Europe, which he described as a place of “filth and fear” and was one of just a handful of children who were spared the journey to the concentration camps.
Mayor of Solihull, Coun Glenis Slater, said: “It is an old adage that all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
“It is now our responsibility to spread this message – the message that we must not stand by. Together, united in remembrance by the tragic events of the Holocaust, we must make the world listen.”