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Rebecca Hardie

March 16th, 2016

LSE Holocaust Memorial Commemoration

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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Rebecca Hardie

March 16th, 2016

LSE Holocaust Memorial Commemoration

0 comments

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

HolocaustMemorialCommem2016LSE Faith Centre organized the Holocaust Memorial Commemoration on Tuesday 26th January in the Shaw Library. The theme of this year’s Commemoration is ‘Don’t Stand By’. The Holocaust is constituted of millions of personal tragedies and stories of suffering and loss. The historical undeniability of the Holocaust is borne out in how it has shaped our institutions in concrete ways that we may take for granted. This includes the LSE which played an extraordinary role of hospitality to refugees from the Holocaust (at a time when antisemitism was common in England too) and benefited immensely from their expertise, including that of the great Austrian Jewish philosopher Karl Popper. This need not have been so and former Director Ralf Dahrendorf remarked:

It is a comment on the LSE that those who came were made to feel at home, and that those who received them on the whole felt at ease with the newcomers.

At this year’s Holocaust Memorial Commemoration we were grateful for contributions from the LSE Choir, Professor Janet Hartley, Rebecca Hardie (Faith Centre Coordinator), Bryn Laxton-Coglon (LSE LGBT Officer) and Joe Grabiner (LSE Politics and Philosophy Student). Below Joe Grabiner transcribes his honest and moving story of what the Holocaust Memorial means to him and his family.

“Thank you. Talking about genocide, and thinking about the lost lives of many millions of innocent people is not an altogether obvious or easy way to spend a Tuesday afternoon. So thank you for being here.

The official theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is ‘Don’t Stand By’- it’s an urgent and important call to action, specifically regarding the ongoing genocide in Darfur. Last year’s theme was about reflection, looking back, seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz and twenty years after the genocide in Srebrenica. I promise I will get to this years’ forward looking, perhaps even positive theme, but I’m a little reluctant to just now. For me, the legacy of the holocaust, the Shoah, is both reflective and active at once. As a Jew the holocaust is the shadow in which I’ve grown up, the trauma of my people, the story to which I follow. Frankly, the legacy of the holocaust is everything. I’d like to tell you about my late maternal grandparents.

My grandfather, Herbet Loebl, was born in Bamberg, Germany in April 1923 into a prominent Jewish family. His father owned and ran a small engineering factory in the city. They were proud Germans. The men of his family had fought in the First World War with his uncle reaching the rank of lieutenant and being awarded the Iron Cross and other honours. They were not outsiders. They were Germans who perhaps even thought of their Jewishness as second to their Germaneness. My grandfather wrote extensively about his experiences and I’d like to share his account of the night of 9th November 1938, known as the Night of Terror or euphemistically called the ‘Night of Broken Glass’- Kristalnacht.  He wrote:

The Nazi leaders and some of their followers were drinking in the well-known wine house and were ready when the order came. They set the Synagogue alight and forced their way into a number of Jewish homes, beating up the residents and wrecking furniture and works of art. Willy Lessing, a member of the Board of the Community, who thought the fire had started accidentally, went to the scene to save at least some Torah scrolls. He was beaten up and so seriously injured that he died a few weeks later. His principal attacker- eventually murderer- was awarded a medal by the Hitler Youth.

My grandfather was able to escape Germany just before the War started, he came to study here in the UK, and his sisters and parents were able to join him. However, much of his extended family and the wider Jewish community of Bamberg were murdered in the following years.

My grandmother, Analyssa Wertheimer was born in Prague, in December 1931. In the summer of 1939, only weeks before the War started, she took a seat on one of the ‘Kindertransport’ trains that brought her to safety in the UK. These train were organised by the British stockbroker Nicholas Winton to rescue Jewish children from soon-to be Nazi Europe and the fate of certain death. Although my grandmother made it out of Europe her brother, parents, and the rest of her family were rounded up by the Nazis and murdered. Winton, who died last year at the age of one hundred and six was a remarkable person. His story is increasingly well known and yet for me cannot be repeated frequently enough. Shortly before the end of 1938 he had planned to go on a skiing holiday to Switzerland. A business associate appealed to him to come to Prague instead to see the work being done by the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia. Understanding what horror was on the horizon Winton worked tirelessly to raise funds, lobby the government, and secure housing. Between November 1938 and September 1939 he was responsible for the rescue of 669 Jewish children. If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be alive. Nicholas Winton did not stand by. In a time of darkness, he was, as my parents would say, a mensch.

Both my grandparents died in 2013. In Judaism one buries a body, and then returns to the grave around a year later to consecrate the tomb stone. It is called a ‘stone-setting’. In the summer of 2014 we held the stone-setting for grandmother. It was a sunny day and was an occasion for celebration. The small crowd by the grave was mainly made up of family but I also spotted Suzanne Pollack, a friend of my grandmothers’, who lived in the same apartment block as her in North London. I approached Suzanne and we talked of happy memories of my grandmother, her love of Shakespeare, and her hate of herring. I couldn’t remember if Suzanne was a refugee like my grandmother and so I asked if she too had been on the Kindertransport. She responded immediately ‘no. I was in Auschwitz’.

Standing close to my grandmother’s grave and talking to Suzanne I realised that this group, this generation, of Jewish survivors and refugees will soon be gone. They are astounding individuals. I have been privileged to meet many, and have never met one of their kind who does not have a story that, in some way, begs belief. Suzanne herself is a remarkable woman. Only recently she has appeared in a short video for this years’ Holocaust Memorial Day that features her, a survivor of a Nazi death camp, reading the testimony of Abdulsalam a survivor of the genocide in Darfur. If you haven’t watched it then I suggest you go to Holocaust Memorial Day website and take a look.

I know we must all die eventually, but it feels almost sadder that this generation of survivors will too. It feels like their victory prize was life, their achievement was survival, and even now, even in their old age, it feels cruel that it will be taken away. However, we all must die. And for this rapidly departing generation I recite the words of my tradition, Zichronam Livracha, may their memory be a blessing.”

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Rebecca Hardie

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