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Activities for Community Groups: Survivors, Liberation and Rebuilding Lives

These activities are designed to be introduced by youth workers and other leaders of children's and young people's groups. They can be used as part of learning activities, drama presentations and community work.

These activities draw on story extracts from the Archive. Story extract titles appear in bold in the activities below, eg A Child Remembers the Outbreak of War. These extracts can be found on the Story Extracts page.

Liberation

Activity 1

Print out sets of the extracts 'Ich Habe Kranke!' (I Am Sick!), Letter from Lubeck: After Belsen, D-Day and Belsen Concentration Camp and The Liberation of Belsen Concentration Camp from the Story Extracts page.

Read the extracts out loud with the group of young people, then discuss the questions below, and be prepared to answer any other questions raised.

On reading through again, ask the young people to use highlighter pens to pick out phrases that indicate that:

• The liberators wanted to help the prisoners, but did not know how
• The liberators nevertheless managed to do some things to help

Points to highlight

The Liberation of Belsen Concentration Camp
'At the time, some politicians and religious leaders criticised the British Army for not doing enough to relieve the suffering of the prisoners. As one who was there, the task before us was the like of which nobody had any knowledge or experience. Neither had we the slightest idea of what we were to discover. All of us were in a state of utter shock - young soldiers (most were in their teens or early twenties) as well as senior officers. What SHOULD you do when faced by 60,000 dead, sick and dying people? We were in the army to fight a war and to beat the enemy. What we were suddenly thrust into was beyond anyone's comprehension, let alone a situation which could have been organised and effectively planned for.'

D-Day and Belsen Concentration Camp
'It was so terrible we cried ourselves to sleep for many nights in our tents two miles away. We had been through the war but this was something so terrible that it took some time for us to come to terms with what we saw.'

Letter from Lubeck: After Belsen
'I shall make no excuse for saying something about our experiences there. I feel it is the duty of those who have actually witnessed these places to say out loud what they have seen - all the more necessary because the facts are almost incredible to those who have not witnessed them.'

'I could go on, but to describe the place properly would demand great detail. Let me say simply that Belsen is the most horrible thing I have seen and I hope that we shall see this thing can never happen again. I cannot help feeling that we bear a share of responsibility for these happenings. Remember the complacencies of the pre-war years?'

'The job of helping to clean up the mess was perhaps the best job we have done since we came out here; certainly our most constructive job. It was very interesting and many-sided. One little job BHQ had to do was to mass-produce about 100 babies' cots! I had to switch the equipment repairer from mending vehicle canopies to producing little mattresses for these cots!'

Split the young people into groups of four, and ask them to discuss the following questions.

• Why was it so difficult for the liberators to provide immediate help in the concentration camps?
• Why do you think that so few liberators' stories have been recorded on the 主播大秀 WW2 People's War site?
• What parts of these testimonies would you tell a friend in order to remember the bravery of the liberators?
• Can you suggest the names of organisations that provide support for the victims of war today?

For the final question you could mention the UN, the Red Cross and/or Red Crescent, and M茅decins Sans Fronti猫res.

Still in small groups, use the internet to look up details about international aid agencies, and link to the humanitarian disasters they are dealing with in today's society. The young people could email or write to the organisations, and arrange for a speaker to visit them. The groups could then plan fundraising activities to help the organisations that interest them the most.

Rebuilding lives

Activity 2

Write the word 'Refuge' on a board / large sheet of paper. Ask the young people to write other words around it to show what it means. As a group, discuss the words, in order to create a definition of 'refuge'. Split the group into pairs, and ask them to discuss what the word 'refugee' means. Then discuss as a whole group how the two words are linked.

Discuss the reasons why people become refugees and come to live in the UK. Make a list on the board. Discuss which of these reasons might have been more prominent in World War Two.

Split the young people into groups of four. Read the extract Fleeing from East Germany to England on the Story Extracts page.

Ask the groups to discuss the questions in the task sheet below.

Feedback and discuss as a class. Explain about the Kindertransport - see note below.

Survivors

Activity 3

Discuss the problems that the child refugees faced - for example, separation from their parents, language problems and past persecution that continued to haunt them in the present.

Split the young people into groups of four. Ask each group to prepare a guide to help people to understand how difficult it is to be a refugee, and be prepared for misunderstandings that could arise. They should use the problems that they identified that refugees face and attempt to think of solutions for them. These could then be updated to produce leaflets to help modern-day refugees.

Split the young people into new groups, and ask them to begin to create a Charter for Tolerance and Peace by listing the things they can do to ensure that society remembers, and learns from, the past. They should write these ideas on large sheets of paper, which could be displayed on the wall where your group meets.

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