Families of Holocaust survivors are their legacy, charity head says

The families of Holocaust survivors are their legacy, a charity leader has said, as the world prepares to mark Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) at a “crucial juncture”.

The theme of this year’s HMD on Tuesday is "bridging generations," highlighting the role that younger people will play in preserving memories of the Holocaust.

Holocaust Educational Trust chief executive Karen Pollock told the Press Association that commemorations are falling at a crucial time in the face of rising antisemitism and dwindling numbers of survivors.

She said: “I think we’re at quite a pivotal time, a crucial juncture, when it comes to Holocaust education and memory.

“Survivors of the Holocaust are in their 80s and 90s and, sadly, they are diminishing in number.”

In early January, Auschwitz survivor and stepsister of Anne Frank, Eva Schloss, died aged 96.

Harry Olmer, a survivor of Terezin and Buchenwald concentration camps, died a few weeks later.

Pollock said: “These are survivors in terms of eyewitnesses sharing their testimony, but they are champions of the memory, and when their light goes out, there’s a question mark about, well, what happens afterwards?

“Our theory has always been (that) we have to teach future generations.

“We need the next generation to know and understand what happened during the Holocaust, to carry the baton, to say to those survivors, reassure them, ‘you mustn’t worry, because we’re going to always remember. We’re going to remember you, and we’re going to remember the family that you lost’.”

Pollock believes there has been a shift in recent years, with the second, third and fourth generations of survivors’ families more eager to tell their family’s stories.

She said: “There has been a strong feeling, I’d say, over the past decade in particular, where children of survivors are becoming much more vocal and committed to taking on the responsibility of sharing their parents’ story, whether in a school classroom or just at a public event.

“And that’s because they are so aware that, in a sense, they are the legacy.”

Gunmen targeted a Hannukah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, on December 14, killing 15 people and wounding 30, and two worshippers were killed in an attack on Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue in Crumpsall, Manchester, in October on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

In the wake of the two attacks, Pollock said there is “no getting away” from the fact that there has been a rise in antisemitism.

“This threat of antisemitism is very real,” Pollock said, “so I think that you can’t mark Holocaust Memorial Day and simply look back and say, ‘we will remember’.

“It’s important to remember, and that’s why we teach about it. We should remember the six million individual Jewish men, women and children murdered. They all had names. They all had families. They all had dreams, and their lives were cut short.

“They deserve to be remembered, but it would be an empty pledge to say ‘never again’ if we didn’t also say we have to be aware and fight back and stand up against the anti-Jewish hatred we’re seeing today. It has to be a meaningful remembrance.”

Pollock said although hope can be difficult to find, it comes from those who stand against antisemitism in “the battle of the good”, and the survivors themselves.

“They are real heroes,” she said. “They are models of how to behave and how to communicate and how to be.

“They remind you to live life to the full and grasp every opportunity and to be positive. And that’s a strange thing, when you think about the darkness of the Holocaust, the light that they bring.”