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Out of School
appeared to be stable, it gave way and I ended up drenched from the waist down! Some members of our group were
more enthusiastic about the investigation than others... Though, luckily despite the low flow of the river we were able
to achieve statistically significant results. Back at the field centre we undertook rigorous analysis of our entire fieldwork
day, including writing half a page on how to construct a scatter graph.
Thankfully the next day was slightly warmer and we spent the morning listening to the renowned farmer Buck talk to
us about the challenges of being a livestock farmer in North Wales. His comical yet informative talk and strong held
views, particularly regarding the horsemeat scandal and the European Union, made him a fascinating person to listen
to and then we had the pleasure of sampling some of his delicious local beef, lamb and goat burgers. We then enjoyed
a walk through the mountains to take in the corries, arêtes and moraines left in the landscape from the last ice age. This
brought to life what we had been studying in geography for the past few months.
The next day was my personal favourite, when we went to the seaside at nearby Llandudno. Here we started off by
surveying houses for their value, tidiness of their garden and a variety of other social development factors. Despite
receiving a couple of strange looks from people whose houses we were standing outside, this was a very interesting
insight into the wealth difference of people living on each other’s doorstep. We then went down to the seafront to eat
the long awaited fish and chips for Tsering’s birthday and visit several of the gift shops situated just behind the unique
and original Victorian architecture of the promenade.
The following day was when we had to pack up and say ‘Hwyl Fawr’ to Snowdonia. We wrapped up by finishing off our
detailed notes from the Tuesday’s fieldwork and then took the five hour coach journey back to Marlow, stopping to
queue for half an hour to eat supposedly ‘fast’ food at Burger King. Upon arriving back at home, I proceeded to upload
my typical two hundred photos onto Facebook and reflect upon what had been a thoroughly enjoyable trip, which
definitely helped prepare us for our exams. I hope next year’s trip to the South of France is equally enjoyable, and maybe
slightly warmer!
Matt Chapman Y12
Auschwitz Trip
How do you prepare for a trip to a place where 1.5 million
people were murdered in the most evil anti-Semitic
regime in history? The short answer is that you can’t,
though this was the aim when Mila Dellavedova and I
went to CanaryWharf for the first orientation seminar with
two hundred equally apprehensive sixth formers from
around one hundred different schools preparing for the
day trip at Auschwitz Birkenau. We started off by listening
to an inspirational Holocaust survivor called Lesley, who
spoke about his traumatic experience where he was
forced to sleep in a single bed with eight other people, eat
grass and drink snow just to survive. The worst thing of all,
however, was that he was the only person in his family to
come out of the Holocaust alive. This moving recollection
of the horrors of the Holocaust left us lost for words when
we tried to discuss it in the group sessions that followed.
The next week, we arrived bright and early at 5am in Luton
Airport ready for the flight to Kraków, from where we took
a one hour coach trip to Oświęcim, the nearest town to
Auschwitz. What struck me about Oświęcim was the
normality of it as it seemed like an average town of 40,000
people, with a Mediterranean style architecture of bright
houses and warm sun that seemed more like Italy than
Poland. It seemed impossible that just three kilometres
away was the Nazi’s most notorious concentration camp.
Though looking further than Oświęcim’s seemingly
normal nature, we were struck by absence. The absence
of a Jewish community as there are no longer any Jewish
people left in Oświęcim; before the war it had a thriving
community that made up fifty eight percent of the town’s
population. We started off by visiting the site of an old
synagogue that had stood on the site for hundreds of
years before the war, which was now just flat, empty land.
We then walked along the quiet, empty street that had
previously been the main street for the Jewish community,
without seeing even a single other person down it. After
taking a walk through this mysterious town, we arrived
at the only surviving synagogue in the town to take part
in a moving service led by the rabbi who left us with the
words ‘am yisra’el hay!’ meaning ‘The people of Israel live’,
a moving sentiment reflecting the Jewish belief that good
will triumph over evil.
Next, we arrived in Auschwitz One, which was the working
camp where the ‘lucky’ people who were not immediately
condemned to death went if they were deemed by the
guards to be useful to the Nazis in terms of work. Here,
