LOOKING back to the week that was January 15 to 21, twenty years ago...

YOUNG performers were preparing for an emotive event planned for the town, twenty years ago.

Pupils from Eastbourne School, in Darlington, were set to host a ceremony at the town's Dolphin Centre on January 27, 2004, in recognition of national Holocaust Memorial Day.

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The event marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi concentration and death camp.

The 2004 theme was From the Holocaust to Rwanda, Lessons Learned, Lessons Still to Learn.

Eastbourne's head of music, Alec Jackson, said pupils would give readings, as well as performing music and dance.

"We are trying to be a little bit confrontational about the subject and say to people that there really is something they can do to stop this happening again, " he said.

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"It will be hard-hitting. The pupils doing the readings have found it quite emotional and I have managed to find lots of images from the past 50 years, from places like Rwanda, Croatia and Armenia."

A Darlington Borough Council spokeswoman said: "The event offers local people an opportunity to come together and reflect on the Holocaust."

Fire service and police investigators searched the wreckage of a derelict working men's club that burned down overnight, in January 2004.

People in Oakenshaw, near Willington, looked on as seven fire crews fought the blaze in the centre of the village.

The club closed in August 2001, despite a rescue campaign by villagers who put £25,000 of their own money into repairs and furnishings.

In the early 1990s, the building had been taken over by the Federation Brewery, which wrote off a £40,000 debt in exchange for the deeds.

Firefighters noticed signs of forced entry when they answered the emergency call.

A fire brigade spokesman said the blaze had probably been started deliberately.

He said: "Children have been going in to the building and we have been called out to a number of small fires there."

Although the club was gutted, no other buildings in the village were affected.