The birds still sing at Auschwitz
Birds sing high up in the green branches, which sway slightly in the breeze. A blanket of delicate white flowers covers the ground, as the warm spring sun shines down. It’s hard to believe this was the site where over one million jews were put to their deaths in gas chambers, through starvation, from disease or exhaustion. This was what I learnt when I headed on a trip to Auschwitz organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust , for a feature with pupils from the Selby area while I was working as a reporter for the Goole and Selby Times. The start of the experience was a seminar at the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds, where around 200 students and teachers gathered to find out more about the roots of the Holocaust and explore difficult issues surrounding it. We were asked to remember one important fact: the Holocaust was 6 million seperate murders of individual people who were Jewish. At the seminar, we heard the testimony of Steven Frank , a Holocaust survivor originally from