Dr Adam Dunning, Senior Chaplain and Director of Communities, Charities & Partnerships

A reflection first given on the evening of National Holocaust Memorial Day 2024 in the Council Chamber of Cheltenham Borough Council. The same reflection was then shared with the gathered College community in Chapel.

There are times in our lives when our cherished beliefs are challenged.

In light of recent troubling reports of antisemitic symbols appearing in our town I was ready to counter these by highlighting philosemitic actions carried out by the founders of College and our predecessors.

One of the round windows of the Cricket Pavilion clearly represents the Star of David. I was convinced that this symbol had been intentionally placed into the Pavilion by those who established the College back in the 1840s. These were all clergymen of an Evangelical persuasion who, I believed, wanted to make an architectural declaration that went against the pervasive antisemitism which was common in. English society during the Victorian era.

Pupils in Corinth House, 1919.

I thought too that College had opened a Jewish Boarding House in the mid-nineteenth century.

To find out more, I employed the services of College Archivist Hannah Dale, and very quickly was told that most of what I believed was false – that it was fake news. The Star of David in the Cricket Pavilion is, in fact, a standard piece of mid-Victorian architectural design. It has nothing to do with Judaism.

The Jewish Boarding House did indeed exist and was called Corinth House, but it didn’t come into existence until the 1890s. Support of Jewish people had nothing to do with its creation, as I had thought, but rather it was Jewish parents in prosperous Manchester who were looking for an alternative to Manchester Grammar School for their sons because it couldn’t open up the same access to English Society.

Corinth House functioned until the 1920s. It had its own Kosher diet and its own timetable. The boys did not work or play sport on Saturdays so that they could mark the Sabbath. Nor did they have to attend Sunday Chapel services.

My research then led me to a boy called Robert Platschek who was born in 1924 in Hungary. He was Jewish and sent to College during the late 1930s alongside several German Jewish boys sent here as part of the Kindertransport.

In the summer of 1939 Robert returned home for the holidays. War broke out, the national borders were closed, and Robert could not return to College for the new term. The handwritten report in Robert’s College file still exists. In the Autumn Term of 1939, his Housemaster writes with his fountain pen, ‘Unable to return from Budapest.’ And then, underneath, just empty, empty lines. Robert disappears into the tumult of the European war. He became College’s lost boy, lost into the catastrophe of the Shoah.

Robert Platschek’s report card from 1939.

But those empty lines do not mean that Robert’s story was completely lost to us. We know that his father Hugo was exterminated at Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1945. We know too that Robert was transported to Auschwitz Birkenau extermination camp when the Budapest ghetto was closed.

But, unlike his father, Robert survived the war.

He not only survived but, at age of 23, he gave sworn testimony to the War Crimes tribunal. Here is part of his testimony.

In the Birkenau camp in Poland, the SS men gathered there would place a rope at the height of four to five feet, somewhat like in football, tightening it from side to side and forcing several hundred people to go underneath it. If a man was able to walk under the rope without stooping, he was taken to the camp to work. If not, he was taken to the gas chambers, where they used hydrogen cyanide. The killing took from one to two minutes.

As far as the sending of people to gas chambers is concerned, there were no exceptions. However, they would usually take people from the hospitals, who were very sick or weak. The prisoners knew about it, so they did not admit that they were sick and did not ask to be put in the hospital, because they would be included in the next group destined for cremation.

The camp itself was clean and commanded by Dr Mengele. I saw a three-day-old Jewish child, born in the camp, wrapped in a newspaper, still alive, who was thrown on a pile of corpses destined for cremation. We all heard that it was Dr Mengele who gave that order.

Such testimony is far, far more meaningful than a window in a Cricket Pavilion. It is the anti-thesis of fake news. It is utterly real, and to see the original typed transcript is to look upon something almost holy.

To think that the eyes that once looked out on Leckhampton Hill, the eyes that took in the Promenade and Pittville Park, also took such crimes, horrors and moral evils.

That Robert saw such evils and survived is a miracle of God’s Providence. That Robert survived and was able to give his testimony is a miracle of God’s Justice. That Robert survived and lived on until 2015 is a miracle of God’s blessing. His survival and his long life remind us that, despite all the evil of his time and our own time, the arc of the moral universe still bends towards justice.