News

Working with the Anne Frank Trust at JRC

UK education charity The Anne Frank Trust have been running a project at John Ruskin College, which aims to educate students on Anne Frank, The Holocaust and how to speak out against modern day discrimination. 

The charity uses the Diary of Anne Frank as a starting point, aiming to help build a society safe from prejudice and discrimination. 

As part of the project, the students were asked to paint memorial messages on pebbles, which is the Jewish equivalent of leaving flowers by graves. Chief Executive of The Anne Frank Trust, Tim Robertson, then took pebbles with him on a recent trip to Holland and Germany to be placed in meaningful locations. 

One pebble was placed at Westerbork - the transit camp in north-east Holland where Anne Frank and her family were first imprisoned by the Nazis in 1944. A second was placed by a symbolic headstone for Anne and her sister Margot, on the site of the Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp where they both died. 

Tim commented: 

“It is 75 years since the terrible death of 15-year-old Anne Frank. Today we use Anne’s story to empower young people, like students at John Ruskin College, to speak out against all forms of prejudice. I felt proud and honoured to take messages from the John Ruskin students to leave as symbols of memory and hope at the sites of two of the concentration camps where Anne was held, including Bergen Belsen where she died.”

Thank you to the staff at The Anne Frank Trust for helping our students gain an understanding of these tragic events, and the impact on society today.