Sixth form students from Headlands School visited the National Holocaust centre at Beth Shalom
Sixth form students from Headlands School visited the National Holocaust centre at Beth Shalom last week as part of their A-level coursework. They were 
privileged to meet and listen to the story of a Holocaust survivor, Simon Winston, who was born in 1938 and escaped death from a Polish ghetto in Radzivillov (now in the Ukraine) when his father hid gold in a clothing brush and bribed guards to free his family.
His father has witnessed the murder of most of his village by firing squad into a lime pit and the family spent the rest of the war in hiding. Simon did not speak a word of his experience until seeing an advert in a local newspaper about the Holocaust centre and has now been telling his amazing story for over thirteen years.
The opportunity to meet Simon proved a fascinating (yet humbling) experience for all the students and will undoubtedly remain with them forever. Headlands hosted the Holocaust Memorial commemoration in January 2007 and the part of the project involved making a film with survivors which was show on Teachers TV. Simon commented that the Headlands students were “a pleasure to meet and extremely knowledgeable about the Holocaust”. Two students are also able to visit Auschwitz (also in Poland) every year through the schools links to the Holocaust Education Trust, this year it is the turn of Alice Stainthorpe and Jack Patterson.