Keeping Holocaust memories alive, even as we face the loss of its survivors

The only Jewish Lord-Lieutenant in England reflects on a powerful initiative between St. Albans Cathedral, the Wiener Holocaust Library, Holocaust Educational Trust and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

27th January 1945: who was to know how significant that date would become in the diary of almost all Jews and so many others around the world. Yet here we are 80 years later and the date is perhaps more impactful today than at any time in the past.

With so few survivors still alive and able to tell their harrowing stories why would the man I serve, His Majesty King Charles, along with many other royal and political leaders, feel it necessary to travel to Poland to attend the ceremony at the entrance of Auschwitz II-Birkenau, this being the first time a reigning British monarch has visited this terrible site.

For those of us who have visited Auschwitz, there is no way to describe the feeling of sadness, of tragedy and death that hits you as soon as you walk under the infamous sign “Arbeit Macht Frei”, that ironic and cruel sign that fooled so many poor prisoners walking to their end.

My own family suffered, not at Auschwitz but further east in Poland, in the ghetto town of Izbeca and the death camp of Belzec and my paternal grandparents who were murdered in the gas chambers of Sobibor in June 1942.

In April I will be travelling to Germany to commemorate the liberation by British troops of Bergen-Belsen, the site of some 50,000 deaths including Anne Frank, as well as many who arrived from other camps at end of horrific death marches.

As the only Jewish Lord-Lieutenant ever in England (except Lord Rothschild in the 1880’s), I have had the honour and privilege to present many of the survivors living in Hertfordshire with the British Empire Medals (BEM) or MBE.

They are all so brave telling their stories after so many years. Like others, I feel it is vitally important to ensure that these terrible and painful memories are kept alive, especially when sadly soon there will be no more survivors to tell their stories first hand.

For that reason last year I arranged for an education programme for about 400 local school pupils in 4 half day sessions over 2 days in the magnificent St Albans Cathedral. The workshops on the background to the Holocaust are led by the leading Holocaust education organisations: HET, HMDT and The Weiner Library,  which are followed by a talk and Q&A with a survivor of the Holocaust as well as survivors from other more recent genocides. I also tell my own family’s story and the students end up with a session to reflect on their day and this has now become an annual event.

I am indebted to the three organisations but more so to my good friends at the Cathedral for hosting this event during the week of Holocaust Memorial Day again this year. Whilst I cannot stress the importance of educating young people in this way, to do so in the surroundings of a 900 year old cathedral, one of the largest and most magnificent in the country, gives the whole programme more significance.

These young people and others will be able to carry the stories forward for generations to come and keep the memories of the 6 million alive.