Holocaust survivor visits school to give first-hand account

Sam Winser, Hannah Lewis and Charlotte Homshaw. Picture by student photographer Dom Rees SUS-160302-100404001

The aim of the talk was to ensure that this tragic period of history is remembered and used as a lesson to the inhumanity and persecution of the present.

Hannah Lewis, who has talked to Collyer’s students in the past, was born in Włodawa, Poland.

Włodawa was a small market town on the river Bug on the border of Ukraine.

She was the only child of a prosperous and happy family, who fell victim to the despatch of Włodawa’s Jewish population to nearby Sobibór extermination camp and various labour camps.

Hannah and her family were rounded up and forcibly marched in 1943 to Adampol, a labour camp; and over time most of her family disappeared.

Towards the end of the war, Hannah fell very ill and rather than move her, as her father wanted, Hannah’s mother stayed put, which led to her own death at the hands of the German police.

Hannah’s father, a partisan, survived the war and was briefly reunited with Hannah after Adampol was liberated.

.She later relocated to London, where she lived with a great aunt and uncle until she married in 1961.

Since then, she has revisited Poland on several occasions, to reunite with the people who helped her and her family and to see the places of her childhood.

At the end of Hannah’s moving talk, the college’s two Holocaust Trust ambassadors, Charlotte Homshaw and Sam Winser thanked Hannah on behalf of the college.

Charlotte and Sam have recently worked with the Holocaust Trust in their Lessons from Auschwitz project, and, having visited Auschwitz, are now involved in the promotion of student awareness of the horrors of persecution and genocide, now and in the past.

Sally Bromley, Collyer’s Principal said: “It was an honour for us to welcome Hannah Lewis to our college and we are incredibly grateful to the Holocaust Educational Trust and Ann Mutluer for co-ordinating the visit.”

For more information about the Holocaust Educational Trust please visit www.het.org.uk

Report by Collyer’s Ann Mutluer. Picture by Collyer’s student photographer, Dom Rees.