Holy Cross is proud to be one of the schools chosen earlier this year by the Institute of Education (IOE) to develop sensitive and innovative ways to help young people explore the traumatic history of the Holocaust. As an IOE Beacon School, Holy Cross will support a network of at least five further local schools, sharing the IOE’s innovative approaches to enhance the way they teach and learn about the Holocaust.

As a Catholic school, Holy Cross is understandably strong on faith and community values. These are important principles and the Catholic ethos is a lived experience which permeates every aspect of school life. Life at Holy Cross is centred on mutual respect in a caring community. Through universal beliefs, the school takes pride in its desire to break barriers such as those built by prejudice and racism. The word Catholic means ‘universal’: Holy Cross upholds and celebrates such universal values as integrity, inclusiveness, forgiveness, justice, care and respect. At Holy Cross we recognise the importance of bearing witness – ‘You are my witness’ Isaiah 43:10, Deuteronomy 4:9 – and we understand that a Holocaust and genocide programme is a process of collaboration and reflection: a journey rather than a destination.

Events such as the Holocaust have been said to expose both the very best and very worst of humanity and the school aims to celebrate the former and stand up against the latter so as to commemorate the life of the victims, to understand their individuality and to speak up against the silence. Being a faith school adds another dimension to the study of the Holocaust.

“The silence of Birkenau is a silence unlike any other. It contains the screams, the strangled prayers of thousands of human beings condemned to vanish into the darkness of nameless, endless ashes. Human silence at the core of inhumanity. Deadly silence at the core of death. Eternal silence under a moribund sky.” Elie Wiesel