The Roundup - Edition 89

A message from 
Rich Jones, Head.

This week’s Senior School Morning Talk, given ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day, focused on remembrance -  and on what it asks of us now. I am sharing it here:

"Tuesday is Holocaust Memorial Day. It is a day we pause. A day we remember. And it should be a day we choose not to look away.

When we talk about the Holocaust, we often hear numbers. Six million Jewish people perished, alongside other groups deemed "inferior" or "undesirable," including Roma (Gypsies), Slavs (Poles, Russians, Serbs and others), LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, Jehovah's Witnesses, Freemasons, Soviet POWs, and political opponents like communists and socialists, alongside others, all deemed threats to Nazi racial ideology.

Six million.

Those numbers matter, but they can also feel distant. Abstract. Almost impossible to hold in your head.
So this morning, I want to focus on something very small. Something ordinary. Something tangible.

I want to talk about shoes.

At the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, there are thousands of shoes that once belonged to people who were murdered there. Shoes like this shoe here – look at the detail, the care, the mending, the wear – then look at the size... 

Alongside this solitary shoe there are thousands of children’s shoes. Tiny shoes. Worn shoes. Shoes with scuffed toes and softened heels. Shoes that once walked, ran, jumped, and played.

In recent years, museum conservators have been carefully restoring these shoes. Stitch by stitch. Lace by lace. Not to make them look new, but to stop them from disappearing. To preserve them so that we can still see them. Still learn from them. Still remember the people who wore them.

This is slow, painful, and emotional work. And it exists for one reason: dignity.

Each shoe belonged to one person.

Not a statistic. To a person, a real person who could laugh, cough, cry and everything in between.

One of those shoes belonged to a boy named Amos. He was six years old. Inside his shoe, museum conservators found something extraordinary: his name, written by hand, along with identifying transport and registration numbers. Proof that he existed. Proof that he was real.

What do we know of little Amos? Well we know he lived in Prague. He had parents. We think his name was Amos Steinberg, and that he had just turned six years old when he arrived at the death camp. His family was deported from Czechoslovakia during the Nazi occupation in early 1944.

The handwritten name in his shoe tells us something deeply human. That someone cared enough to write it. Possibly a parent. Possibly Amos himself, copying what he had been told. It suggests fear, hope, and an attempt to hold on to identity in a system designed to erase it.

Historical records indicate that Amos and his mother were likely murdered shortly after their arrival at Auschwitz. His father was deported separately and is believed to have survived the war. Beyond that, there are no school reports, no photographs, no favourite games recorded. No future.

And that’s a point for us all in the Theatre today to sit with.

For millions of victims, especially children, the historical record is painfully thin. Names appear on transport lists. Ages are guessed. Lives are reduced to fragments. A shoe. A suitcase. A name scratched into leather. 

He did not survive. 
His shoe did.

When you look at a child’s shoe from the Holocaust, it forces a different kind of understanding. It stops history from feeling distant. You realise that the person who wore it had mornings and evenings. Favourite foods. People they loved. A future that was taken from them.

Shoes are powerful because they are so ordinary. We all wear them. We barely think about them. And yet, they carry us through our lives.

These shoes never got the chance to carry their owners into adulthood.

So why does this matter? Why are we talking about this today, here, now?

Because the Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. It began with words. With prejudice. With the idea that some people mattered less than others. With the slow normalisation of hatred. 

And with silence.

Ordinary people looked away. Institutions failed. Systems were used to dehumanise. And step by step, unimaginable cruelty became policy.

This is why Holocaust Memorial Day is not only about the past. It is about recognising where dehumanisation begins. It is about noticing when people are reduced to labels. When jokes turn cruel. When exclusion becomes acceptable. When silence feels easier than speaking up.

The shoes at Auschwitz are not preserved to shock us. They are preserved to remind us of responsibility.
Our responsibility.

To remember names, not just numbers.
To challenge prejudice, not excuse it.
To protect the dignity of others, even when it is uncomfortable.

Those children cannot speak for themselves. But their shoes still speak. They tell us that every human life has value. That hatred has consequences. And that indifference is never neutral.

So today, as we remember the Holocaust, I want us all to hold that one thought.
In how we treat one another.
In how we speak.
In how we choose courage over comfort.
That is how memory becomes action. 

We will now have our Silence…"