School pupils have been challenged to pass on a Holocaust survivor's story after it was made part of their history curriculum.
Ike Alterman, 94, from Whitefield, has answered questions from school pupils after he re-told his story of surviving the holocaust so pupils have a better and more personal understanding.
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Around 150 Year 10, 12 and 13 pupils at Wellington School, Timperley, squeezed into an auditorium to listen to the My Voice storyteller.
Ike’s life story has been integrated into the history curriculum to enable students to better understand the Holocaust through personal accounts rather than statistics.
Recounting, his own and his family’s personal experiences of Nazi atrocities, and the rebuilding of his life in Manchester, pupils listened and later asked questions, one of which being if he hated all Germans.
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Ike responded by saying that if he did “I would be preaching like Hitler but I do hate the Nazis who did all the killing and experimentation on twins and all that kind of thing.”
Ike asked pupils to remember his story, the family he had lost and “the 6m slaughtered simply because they were Jewish”.
He added: “Help everybody! Help the person who hasn’t got the facilities and education you have! Do it! Don’t wait for other people!”
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Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham also attended and challenged pupils to remember and re-tell Ike's story.
He said: “If you don't, if we don't, who will?”
Mr Burnham added: “The incredible privilege of hearing directly from somebody, who lived through the worst example of human behaviour in history…to hear first-hand what that was like…in Auschwitz-Birkenau, to go on the death march through Germany, things that we just can't imagine.
“The terrible thing about history is that it has a habit of repeating itself because people don't listen to what they heard.
“They don't decide to make a stand themselves, and then challenge some of those things, when they see them happening again.”
The special assembly, which was coordinated by Jewish social care charity The Fed, which ran the My Voice project, also included representatives of the Heritage Lottery Fund and BBC Radio 5 Live’s Nihal Arthanayake.
At the end of the event The Fed’s next-gen lead, Dan Jeffries, invited pupils to become My Voice Guardians, a new scheme which gives young people the opportunity to partner a survivor-storyteller, learn their story directly from them, support them in giving talks and pledge to continue to tell their story when they no longer can.
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