Holocaust survivors' stories

Polish Jews being moved out of the Warsaw ghetto by SS troops in April 1943

As the number of survivors in the UK dwindles to 5,000, Stuart Jeffries commemorates Holocaust Memorial Day by hearing the stories six of them have to tell

Sixty-five years ago tomorrow, the largest Nazi killing camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was liberated by the Soviet army. The Holocaust Day Memorial Trust will celebrate the anniversary of that event. So what, you might be thinking. Another anniversary, another wall of newsprint. What, really, is the point of continuing to commemoratesomething that happened a lifetime ago? There are three good reasons. One is, as all the survivors of the Holocaust I interviewed told me, that the slogan "Never again" has become a sick joke, degraded by the genocides in Cambodia (1975-79), Bosnia (1992), Rwanda (1994) and Darfur (2003- today). We have learned too little and let people die en masse not for what they did but for who they were – just as happened in the Nazi death camps.

Second reason: this is one of the last years we are going to have many Holocaust survivors in Britain to share with us what they went through. The Holocaust Day Memorial Trust estimates there are 5,000 survivors left in the UK. It's urgent that we hear their – often incredible – stories before they die. When the war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945, there were 200,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors, according to one source (Zoe Waxman's 2006 book Writing the Holocaust, Oxford University Press).

But Jews weren't the only victims, nor the Holocaust's only survivors: the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, for instance, defines Holocaust survivors as "any persons, Jewish or non-Jewish, who were displaced, persecuted or discriminated against due to the racial, religious, ethnic, social and political policies of the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945. In addition to former inmates of concentration camps, ghettos and prisons, this definition includes, among others, people who were refugees or were in hiding." The museum has a registry that includes more than 196,000 records related to survivors and their families. Any estimate of the number of Holocaust survivors immediately after the war, though, is likely to be wrong, not least because no one then had as their first priority counting up the number of people who survived the death camps.

Third reason: many of the survivors I spoke to, while hopeful for Britain's future, drew parallels between the Nazi Holocaust and the way ethnic minorities are treated in the UK today. As Carly Whyborn, chief executive officer of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, says: "Britain is not Nazi Germany in the 1930s. It is not Pol Pot's Cambodia. But on Holocaust Memorial Day we can pause to look at how we treat those around us. We can all make the choice to challenge exclusion when we see it happening – we can choose to stop using language that dehumanises others and we can stop our friends and family from dehumanising and excluding ­others." Otherwise, it might be added, we haven't really learned the lessons of the Holocaust or later genocides.

Memories of the Holocaust: Zigi Shipper
Memories of the Holocaust: Harry Spiro
Memories of the Holocaust: Sabina Miller
Memories of the Holocaust: Ben Helfgott
Memories of the Holocaust: Martin Stern
Memories of the Holocaust: Kitty Hart-Moxon

Guardian

HMD Trust
Holocaust Memorial Day events in your area

Eugene Zinn dies at 85; survivor of Nazi death camps lectured on Holocaust

He was sent to Auschwitz in 1942. Three years later Zinn escaped,
served in the Czech army, then moved to Israel. Later, living in Los Angeles,
he spoke to students about the atrocities he witnessed

Eugene Zinn, who spent three years in Nazi death camps and regularly lectured about the horror of the Holocaust after The Times profiled him in a 2005 front-page story, died of pneumonia Sunday at Northridge Hospital Medical Center, his family said. He was 85.

Born in 1924 in the Czechoslovakian village of Huncovce, he was one of four children of Heinrich and Helen Zinn. Sent to Auschwitz with four male cousins in 1942, Eugene was the only one to survive. He soon learned that his parents and two younger sisters had been sent to the gas chamber upon arriving at a Polish death camp, and his older brother had been beaten to death. More than 80 of his close relatives would be killed by the Nazis.

"What I keep asking myself," Zinn told The Times in 2005, "is how come I'm the only one who survived?"

While at Auschwitz, Zinn laid brick to build crematoriums and worked in the stables. "Through luck and cunning," his family said, he dodged three sentences to the gas chamber. In early 1945, he escaped from the Nazis by jumping from a train that was transporting prisoners. He then served in the Czech army and moved to Israel, where he fought for the new state. One cousin, Ernest, had managed to survive, and Zinn eventually followed him to Los Angeles.

He worked as a cabinetmaker and attended Los Angeles City College at night. Over 34 years, he worked his way from junior draftsman to manager of engineering at Everest and Jennings, a wheelchair manufacturer.

Through his cousin, Zinn met his future wife, Sarah Haim, a Greek Jew who survived the Holocaust by hiding in Athens. For decades, they lived in what is now West Hills. She died two months ago at 80. In 1992, Zinn took his wife and two children to visit his birthplace and the remains of Auschwitz. After he videotaped his recollections of the Holocaust for the USC Shoah Foundation Institute archives, Zinn was moved to search for his Auschwitz comrades.

While viewing a PBS Holocaust documentary, he saw Otto Pressburger, his "Soul Mate in Years of Horror," according to the headline on the 2005 Times article. The article led Zinn to connect and reconnect with Holocaust survivors around the world. After decades of near-silence, he also began speaking in classrooms about the Nazi atrocities that he had witnessed.

Zinn is survived by his son, Harry; and daughter, Helene. Services will be held at 11 a.m. today at Mount Sinai Memorial Park, 5950 Forest Lawn Drive, Los Angeles.

LA Times

Re-living historic WWII train journey

Video here

A steam train has arrived in London carrying a group of people who escaped the Holocaust thanks to a British former stockbroker. The journey was commemorating the transport from Prague of more than 600 children, most of them Jewish, who fled the outbreak of war in 1939.

A vintage train carrying 170 of them was greeted at Liverpool Street by Sir Nicholas Winton, (pictured, above) the man who organised the trains.

BBC

300 schools to become Holocaust specialists

£1.5m national programme will train a teacher from every secondary school in England

Hundreds of schools across the country are to become specialist centres of Holocaust education under a national scheme launched today. The plan, which will be rolled out in 300 schools, forms part of the new £1.5 million Holocaust education programme run by London University’s Institute of Education.

As The TES revealed in November, the Holocaust Education Development Programme will provide extensive specialist training for 3,500 teachers - one from every secondary in England.

The first cohort of 150 will attend a one-day workshop in London at the beginning of November and a second workshop three weeks later. This will be followed by similar sessions in Liverpool. The training will then be introduced across the country over the next two years. From these teachers, 300 will be able to follow up their training with a masters degree module in Holocaust education. Their schools will then become designated beacons of excellence in the subject.

The masters module, which will be delivered online, will be free to participating teachers. The cost will be covered jointly by the Pears Foundation and the Department for Children, Schools and Families.

Stuart Foster, director of the programme, said: “Professional development can be quite short-lived. We want it to be a continuous process rather than people going away and forgetting about it.”

The specialist teachers will co-ordinate Holocaust education in their schools. Often, the subject is discussed during history, English, RE and citizenship, but with little collaboration between staff.

“Are those teachers working together?” Dr Foster said. “Is there a sense of collaboration in schools? Often, planning is a little bit arbitrary. We want schools to think about how they organise their curriculum.”

The Holocaust specialists will also pilot new teaching materials and provide feedback and suggestions for improvement. Eventually, they will work with local authorities, bringing co-ordinated Holocaust education into all local schools. They will also liaise with teachers across the country as part of an online network supporting the national training programme.

Paul Salmons, the programme’s head of curriculum and development, said: “One of the greatest assets of the programme will be this pool of teachers with classroom expertise, ideas and knowledge. They will really immerse themselves in cutting-edge research into Holocaust history and education.”

At present the Holocaust forms a compulsory part of the national curriculum, but teachers often find it a difficult subject to teach effectively.

“You’re talking about mass murder - some of the worst atrocities humans are capable of,” Mr Salmons said. “That can be very disorientating and distressing for young people. We’re looking at how to move them, without traumatising them. Teachers want to encourage deep reflection about the Holocaust, but not revulsion, horror and disgust. The key is to enhance learning, not to shock.”

Judith Vandervelde, an educator at the Jewish Museum in London, agrees that there is an urgent need for effective methods of teaching about the Holocaust in schools.

“The understanding that pupils get through face-to-face interaction with Holocaust survivors is quite incredible,” she said. “But they’re not going to be here for ever. We have to look into how we’re going to continue to have that connection without survivors speaking to pupils. We need to look ahead a few years and make Holocaust education tangible and accessible.”

TES

Holocaust Education Development Programme