Student reflects on holocaust

Tamahere student Jessica Strick will tomorrow be awarded top honours as the winner of an inaugural essay competition reflecting on the Holocaust.

Strick won the Paul Seideman Essay Competition from students across New Zealand and will receive her prize in a ceremony at Parliament marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

After receiving her prize Jessica, a year 11 student at St Peters School, Cambridge, will read her 500-word essay aloud.

Year 10 and 11 students were asked to write an essay on the topic of ‘The Holocaust and its lessons for New Zealand’ and the award ceremony is part of United Nations International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The winning essay will be included in a book, Auschwitz: 70 Years Later, published on the same day by the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand. It and other essays along with contributions to the book from ambassadors representing Russia, Poland, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Israel will also be put on the Holocaust Centre website.

The competition’s namesake Paul Seideman is a Czech Jew who survived Auschwitz and other concentration and labour camps during World War 2. He later emigrated to Australia and then New Zealand, and now lives in a Wellington retirement home.