Bridging Generations on Holocaust Memorial Day (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Today is an incredibly important day. And the first thing I'll say is how sad I am not to be sat alongside my great grandmother and how sad I am not to be joined by Harry Ulmer, who passed away only a few weeks ago, and my condolences to Julia and her family. He was a great man and a great inspiration of mine. And I went to Poland with him in 2023. My great grandmother's story touched the hearts and minds of so many millions of people while she was alive, her going out sharing that story, the harrowing things that she saw in the hell of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where her mother, her younger sister, her youngest brother were murdered. But I think that today the theme of Holocaust Memorial Day is bridging the generations. And it's more important than ever, as you say, when the number of schools marking this has seemingly gone down, when clearly in the consciousness of the human mind, what led to the Holocaust, that antisemitism is being forgotten, because we're seeing the antisemitism resurgent in society again, I think it's important that we preserve those stories. So I do that through social media, I ensure that whilst hate on social media is so rife, and where it can spread so easily, we have those true survivor stories, even whilst they're passed away, those videos, I'm posting them every single day, to ensure that people can remember my great grandmother, not only for the incredible woman that she was, but for the incredibly important messages that she shared about hate, about where that hate, if left unchecked, and unchallenged can lead to. And that's to places like Auschwitz-Birkenau, that's to a person like my great grandmother being reduced to a number, A10572. That was the number that she was given in Auschwitz-Birkenau, a permanent reminder of the Nazis' crimes against humanity. And those are things which I try to share every day on social media, along with the light, the fact that you can rebuild, that you can get through any darkness in life, and that you can smile and that you can build a family. My great grandmother had 10 grandchildren, 38 great grandchildren, of which I'm a proud member, and one great, great grandchild in her final year.

[00:01:40] Speaker 2: My father, sadly, passed away quite suddenly, actually, only 12 days ago. And he was educating pretty much until the end of his life. He absolutely would not refuse to go to any event, to any school, to any organisation, to speak and tell about his horrors and what he went through. But really, his story is a story of survival in the truest sense of the word. He never wanted to be defined by what happened to him in his early years and the trauma that he went through and the murder of all his family, pretty much every member of his family. He was always an incredibly positive person who wanted to look forward and build a life and build a future for the family that he created. He was very keen that the legacy that he began and that we now have to take over the mantle of is continued. He was a particular advocate of going to schools and educating anywhere and everywhere in the country. And he had been very involved over the last nine years with a project called Echo Eternal, which got children from all over the country, many of whom had never even met or seen a Jewish person before, to engage in the Holocaust through the medium of dance and music.

[00:03:17] Speaker 1: The Holocaust is unique in human history in the scale, the systematic nature of it. Auschwitz-Birkenau, where over 1.1 million people were murdered. My great-grandmother, a Hungarian survivor, over 500,000 murdered in a period of six weeks. Something like that had never been seen before in history, but not just that. The Holocaust, of course, is important today. And we can see that just by the statistics of anti-Semitism over the past three years. I'm sat here as a British Jew in 2026 on Holocaust Memorial Day. And how shocking is it to say that I don't know one single friend of mine who's 22 years old. In fact, I don't know one single British Jew who hasn't considered their future in this country. Not because they fear that they might be slaughtered on the streets, because they fear what this country might be for their grandchildren, for their great-grandchildren. And they see this anti-Semitism, this anti-Jewish hatred, which didn't start in 1933 and end in 1945 with the Holocaust and with the whim of one dictator. It's been throughout history and it mutates and it's a virus. And that virus is infecting society again. And the fact that people are worried about community tensions, I think that speaks to a whole nother part of the social fabric of this country. But it clearly shows that there are people who think that the Holocaust is some sort of thing that can be played with. And that's even something which we can just discard as if the Holocaust couldn't happen again. Of course, there won't be gas chambers again. But violent anti-Semitism is returning. We've seen that in Bondi, with Manchester. And these are the direct cause of words, words which are, again, prevalent in society. Yes, absolutely.