Right time to pull plug on costly trips to Auschwitz

Published on Friday 10 October 2008 21:08

As a history graduate, I, for one, applaud the plug being at last pulled on taxpayers funding the self-serving Lessons From Auschwitz scheme (your report, 4 October), more a glorified PR opportunity for career politicians and the Holocaust industry than any practical device for ensuring future generations remember history's blackest hour.

If Sally Chambers – a beneficiary of this scheme – truly believes her tired clich that "nothing is like the experience of being at Auschwitz", (Letters, 10 October) then she needs to get out more. The Tower Of London – a short hop in comparison to Poland – boasts a near millennium of man's inhumanity to man, whilst Clifford's Tower in York remains a lasting testimony to our own homegrown Jewish massacres.

There is a wealth of books and factual films – including the nightmare- inducing autobiography of Auschwitz commandant Rudolph Hoess – readily available in high street shops, which could be made available to all schools and libraries for a fraction of the cost of the LFA, with what's left over used towards a proper commemoration to the Jews and others exterminated by the Nazis at the Sylt death camp on Alderney in the Channel Isles – Britain's own dirty little secret.

MARK BOYLE,

Linn Park Gardens

Johnstone, Renfrewshire