Holocaust Study Visit: Post Visit Workshop!

Welcome back to my blog covering Bann Maine West's Holocaust Study Visit to Krakow Poland. Kindly funded by Triangle Housing. In today's blog I will be covering our post visit workshop that again was hosted by the wonderful Dr Katy Radford MBE and Jerry from the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT).

It was amazing getting to see everyone again on the Monday night after we came home and it was great getting to see Katy. Safe to say their was a completely different vibe in the room between the pre visit and the post visit! Katy joked that at the first meeting we barely spoke and now it was like herding cats! We started off by talking about one key thing that has stuck with us since we came home. A lot of people discussed the effect the camp had on people and seeing it in person. I was one of the last and echoed what everyone else had said however I mentioned how I was amazed with how the new part of the city where the Jewish Ghetto was had a massive face lift with millions being pumped into it to revitalise the area. However given the history of the area they have done it with so much respect and not tried to wipe the history of the area and instead embrace it. This was something that I felt was very important as often we struggle as a society with how do we move on from the past but not wipe the path clean and I feel that the new part of the city has done that perfectly. We continued to talk and got to hear from Jerry and his work with HMDT but his backstory of being a police officer during the troubles.

As always we had some light refreshments and Katy had brought some gorgeous home baked goods that went down a treat!

After our break Katy got us to some more thinking and brought us back to the workshop we done in Poland, "Choices Faced, Decisions Made". However she had tailored it to story's around the troubles and Northern Ireland. This was very interesting as we discussed cases like Soldier F. My group however, we got a bit distracted and trailed off topic. Another case was a man whose wife had been murdered as a retaliation for his actions. This one was very interesting because again he fell into multiple category's and again, my group went off in side tangents. We then regrouped and each group shared some of their discussions and it was really interesting and we even got to hear some peoples very personal story's of the troubles and it was so interesting as many younger generations feel like the troubles was something from a long time ago but it is something that is still very current and the effects are still all around the country more than 25 years on. I felt this was the perfect way to end what had been such an amazing experience. However we are all dedicated to not letting this chance go to waste nor the relationships that we built fade away and are already planning different catch-up events and hoping to plan further events to help build and share our experiences.

Thank you very much as always for reading my blog. This was the last thing we had planned following our trip so for now this is the end of my blogs. I hope you have enjoyed following us on this amazing journey and learned something new that maybe you didn't. As always I would like to thank Triangle Housing for the funding, Bann Maine West for facilitating, Katy and Jerry for being so kind to come and talk to us and most importantly to the people I got to share this amazing experience with. Thank You.

Lenny.