A hundred students in Auschwitz

A hundred students at Auschwitz to commemorate
the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the camps

Brussels, January 16, 2020 -

75 years after the liberation of the camps, a hundred secondary school pupils will leave this Thursday, January 16, for Auschwitz. This memorial trip is organized by the War Heritage Institute in collaboration with La Défense.

A hundred students between the ages of 16 and 18, from 13 schools across the country, will spend a day in Auschwitz. In the morning, they will visit Auschwitz I with the famous "Arbeit Macht Frei" gate and the barracks, where people have died from asphyxiation, gassing, starvation, exhaustion or executions. In the afternoon, they will visit the Birkenau extermination camp.
This memorial trip aims to make young people aware of the consequences of one of the greatest tragedies in our society.

Auschwitz, a place with a rich history
The Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp shows in a palpable way what horrors political extremism - like Nazism - can lead to. Almost 1.1 million deportees - most of them were Jews, Gypsies and political prisoners who were killed on an industrial scale. Hence the importance of this site as a destination for a journey of memory.

Keeping Memory alive: one of the missions of the War Heritage Institute
The transmission of Memory to young people has a twofold purpose: on the one hand to show respect for those concerned and on the other hand to warn against the extremism which has recently been revived. The War Heritage Institute, the benchmark organization for military heritage and memory in Belgium, created in May 2017, thus defends values such as peace, freedom, tolerance and democracy. It organizes numerous commemorative projects each year and offers a vast program in 2020 to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.

A joint commemorative initiative
The memorial trip to Auschwitz, a joint initiative between the War Heritage Institute and Defense is done each year in commemoration of the liberation of the two camps on January 27, 1945.