Recently in Survivor experiences Category

Last year Journal reporter Sam Wood travelled to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp near Krakow in Poland, along with 200 school children from the North East. Today, Holocaust Memorial Day, he talks about the deeply moving effect the experience had on him and why we should never forget.

PILES of hair, piles of suitcases, piles of glasses and memories.

That is all that remains of more than six million Jews killed at the dozens of extermination camps dotted around Europe in the 1940s.

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day and, as we move further from the events, the calls grow louder for us to stop marking the past in such a way, to let Auschwitz and the other camps fall into disrepair and eventually to crumble away.

But I don't belive that should allowed to happen. The death camps and the Memorial Day itself are vital for our future.

Published in the Huddersfield Examiner on January 27, 2009

THEY sit in the front room of their semi-detached home in a quiet Elland cul-de-sac and Ibi and Val Ginsburg seem like any other pensioner couple, quietly enjoying their retirement.

But the pair are part of the dwindling band of survivors from the greatest crime in the history of humanity.

Ibi, 84, and Val, 86, came through the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau during the Nazi Holocaust - but both lost nearly their entire families in the mass killing.

They are keen supporters of Holocaust Memorial Day, which takes place today and aims to educate young people about human rights abuses, both past and present, and to encourage greater tolerance.

Val said: "I've had my bellyful of hatred. I can tell you the consequences of prejudice."
Waldemar Ginsburg - known as Val - was born in 1922 and grew up in Kaunas, the capital of Lithuania at the time.

Eye-witness accounts taken immediately following the state-sanctioned campaign of hatred against Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe on the 9/10 November 1938 have been translated for the first time to mark the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) and the launch of the theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2009: Stand up to Hatred.

In a joint project between the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT) and The Wiener Library, diary extracts, eye-witness accounts and letters have been converted into English for the first time. All of them were recorded by Alfred Wiener and his colleagues who sought to record the wide-spread programme of hatred that was taking place.

More than 300 reports of the infamous campaign of hatred were collected in the immediate aftermath of the events themselves, between November 1938 and January 1939 (Wiener Library Doc 1375). The translations reveal tales of vigilante violence, arrests, vandalism and fear.

Vienna, 20 November '38

My dear Otto,

You cannot imagine how things have been with us.

Papa with a head-wound, bandaged, myself in bed with severe fits, everything devastated and destroyed.

And the poor child had to look after us, cook, and run errands, although still in a state of serious exhaustion.

Click below to listen an audio extract of a letter written by a Kristallnacht eyewitness