Lessons from Auschwitz

As part of the High School of Glasgow’s Modern History curriculum two pupils recently spent a day learning from Holocaust survivor Joanna Millan about the Auschwitz death camp.

Mrs Millan is a magistrate who speaks regularly about her experiences during the Holocaust. She was born Bela Rosenthal in Berlin, 1942 and became an orphan after her father was killed in the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) death camp while her mother died of TB in the Theresienstadt concentration camp when she was two. After the liberation, she was flown to England and eventually adopted by a couple in London who decided to anglicise her name to Joanna. She now has 3 children all of whom have visited the camp where their mother was interned and their grandfather died. She also has 8 grandchildren.