A SPECIAL project is being run in Kirklees schools to remember The Holocaust.
‘Food for Thought’ is a scheme being used to raise awareness in the run-up to Kirklees’s Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration in January 2010.
Groups of adults have already had meals where food reflected the experiences of Holocaust survivors and victims of other persecutions.
Now it is the turn of children to find out how food has been used as a weapon of war.
Year 5 pupils at Carlinghow School, Batley, have been investigating rationing during the Second World War and how it affected home life and have been using wartime recipes to cook carrot fudge crunch and mock marzipan.
They will also be looking at the diet of people who lived in the ghettos and prisoners in the concentration camps.
They will have first-hand accounts about the food they managed to survive on, and the lack of it, from Trude Silman who came to England in 1939.
Aged just 10, Trude was put on a train by her parents in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, and never saw them again.
Mrs Silman, who initially lived with a non-Jewish family in Wallsend before being moved to London, will talk to the pupils about her journey and her food experiences.
She studied and worked at Leeds University as a medical biochemist until she retired in 1993 and is a member of the Holocaust Survivors Friendship Association.
She has been involved in educational projects with Kirklees Museums since 2001.
The children will be sharing refreshments – a drink and biscuits – with Mrs Silman.
They have chosen Fox’s Classics biscuits – of significance to them because they are made in Batley and because many of their parents work there.
Some of the children, who are also doing a related art project in school, will be attending the Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration event at Huddersfield Town Hall on Thursday, January 28 to talk about the ‘Food for Thought’ project and their art work.
