The King’s School receives Generous Gift of Holocaust Literature

On Monday 23^rd January, the King’s School accepted a generous gift of books from Mr Garnett Alderson, a local resident who is passionate about ensuring that the Holocaust is not forgotten by present and future generations. 

The theme for this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day on 27^th January is ‘Ordinary people’. We were therefore delighted to welcome Mr Garnett Alderson to the Library on Monday and to receive his gift of over 50 recently published personal memoirs, survival narratives, and family histories of the Holocaust: all of them are the true stories and extraordinary accounts of ‘ordinary people’. He is a Christian Jew who, in his retirement, serves as a hospital chaplain, supporting families at Worcester Royal Hospital.  He is also deeply committed to promoting awareness of the events of the Holocaust with the next generation, so that they can learn from the past. To help to achieve this, he buys every new Holocaust-related memoir, and, once he has read them, he passes them on to local schools. Mr Alderson’s unprecedented gift will be shared between our School Library and our History Library.

Garnett’s keen interest in the Holocaust has inspired him to visit many of the camps throughout Europe, and to travel to Israel three times. Mr Alderson said, “My aim is to make children aware of what happened and that this should never happen again. The books all come out of my pension, as it’s a real passion of mine to ensure that children are fully educated on all the desperate challenges faced at that time. For the last 30 years, I have done everything I can to make people’s lives easier and to support them (Mr Alderson financially supports Jewish families who are badly treated in various countries, to enable them to relocate to Israel), and I want to share this passion with the children of today.”

The King’s School community thanks Mr Garnett Alderson for his gift, which will enrich our pupils’ education, reinforce their remembrance of those tragic and devastating events and, we hope, promote a more inclusive society in which such inhumanity can never happen again.