Year 11 History Trip

Our Year 11 History group attended a seminar on the topic of the Holocaust at the Silver Birch Hotel, Omagh. The theme to mark Holocaust Memorial Day in 2026 was ‘Bridging Generations’. The guest speaker at the event was Seymour Kelly who spoke passionately about his mother, Lushka Kelly (née Klapholz), a Holocaust survivor originally from Southern Poland.

Pupils learned of how Lushka’s village was occupied by the Nazis in 1939 and how she and her family was forced to move to a nearby ghetto in Sucha. After being separated from her family, some sent directly to extermination camps, others used for slave labour, the survivors reunited in Poland after the War. It was from there that Lushka, and her surviving brother came to England with other orphaned children where she made a new life for herself. Although a traumatic and harrowing story a very important positive message was conveyed – that the human spirit cannot be defeated and that there is hope even in the most difficult circumstance.

It is of the utmost importance that remembrance doesn’t end with the survivors but that it lives on through their children, grandchildren and all of us.