A Wavertree school has unveiled a "Liverpool first" memorial to one of the darkest periods in human history.
King David High School, on Childwall Road, has revealed a public memorial sculpture that acts as a harrowing reminder of the Holocaust. The school has been working on the project for the past 18 months as it wants to continue its commitment to ensuring Holocaust education remains a key feature of the curriculum.
Julian Taylor, the artist responsible for the Superlambanana and Hillsborough Band of Light, and art teacher Elaine Ball, created the sculpture. Pupils took part in half-day workshops learning about the Holocaust and then were photographed by Julian. These photos were turned into tiny metal figures which form the sculpture's structure.
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Deputy headteacher, October Wright, told the ECHO: “Holocaust Education feels more important now than ever before. We are duty-bound to keep talking about the Holocaust so that we can ensure that hatred, prejudice and discrimination are always challenged.
“The beauty of the sculpture is that we – the community, the evidence that Hitler’s evil plan did not ultimately succeed – are the sculpture and Julian has built it in such a way that the light will always shine through the sculpture's tiny figurines."
The sculpture was unveiled last night, on Thursday, May 30, with Lu Lawrence, the daughter of Holocaust survivor Zigi Shipper, in attendance.
Zigi was only 10 years old when Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. The dad went from spending time with his friends and cousins to being too scared to leave the house and seeing his school closed.
Over the space of five months, the entire Jewish population of Łódź – a city in then-Nazi occupied Poland where Zigi was born and raised – was moved into a ghetto, including Zigi. This was when Zigi recalled hardship starting to impact the 150,000 Jews in the city.
Lu previously told the ECHO: “The main thing he talked about was hunger and how hungry everyone was. Food was extremely scarce and his grandfather died very early on in the war from starvation. My dad used to talk about coming out of his apartment building in the mornings and stepping over dead bodies."
The school hopes the sculpture will start a conversation around the Holocaust and in doing so, remember what the likes of Lu’s dad Zigi experienced at the hands of Nazis.
Headteacher Michael Sutton said: "We decided to use the fact that Liverpool had no commemorative sculpture to the Holocaust as a starting point. The sculpture stands as a testament to our enduring commitment to Holocaust education."
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