Survivors who fled to Britain to escape Nazi Germany lit candles and paid poignant tributes to victims today as they marked Holocaust Memorial Day.
Survivors who fled to Britain to escape Nazi Germany lit candles and paid poignant tributes to victims today as they marked Holocaust Memorial Day. The Prime Minister spoke with a Holocaust survivor and a Second World War veteran and warned Britons not to get ‘complacent’ about the atrocity. Boris Johnson chatted to Renee Salt, a survivor of both Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen, and Second World War veteran Ian Forsyth during a video call from Downing Street to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.
Holocaust Memorial Day 2021
Kate Middleton also spoke to Manfred Goldberg, 90, who was born in Kassel, central Germany, in April 1930. Manfred and his family were initially deported from Germany to the Riga Ghetto in Latvia. In August 1943, Manfred was sent to a local labour camp where he was forced to lay railway tracks, before being transferred to Stutthof the following year where he spent more than eight months as a slave worker.
The camp was abandoned only a matter of days before the war ended and Manfred and other prisoners were sent on a death march before he was finally freed at Neustadt in Germany on 3 May 1945. Manfred explained that his own life was spared when he was 13 as he was able to work in the camps while his brother was killed.
The Holocaust was one of the worst atrocities in human history, and saw Nazi Germany arrest, gas and kill six million Jews.
Roughly two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population were murdered by the Nazis. The Holocaust Memorial Day is held on January 27 because it was the day that the infamous Auschwitz camp was liberated.
The meetings were set up by the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET). Established in 1988, the HET works in schools, universities and local communities in order to educate young people about the Holocaust and has taken students to visit some of the concentration camps in person.
