To mark today's (Friday 27 January) Holocaust Memorial Day, our Junior and Senior Chapel services this week have focussed on this day. Led by the History Department in Mr Player and Miss Lane, Chapel provided our pupils the opportunity to remember, as well as reflect on, one of the most devastating events in history when six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, in addition to the genocides which followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.
Ordinary People is the theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2023. Speaking in Junior Chapel, Miss Lane said:
'It will help us to remember that the victims of genocide are ordinary people with ordinary lives, while those who commit genocide and initiate it are also ordinary people. The normality of the origins to the Holocaust, or any genocide, is one of the things that make those who carry out and enable it all the more chilling.'
'It was ordinary people who were the victims and it was ordinary people who committed the crime. As years go by these ordinary people who witnessed and experienced this chilling event are no longer with us. It therefore becomes all the more important to share their stories and make sure that they are not forgotten, so that the world does not forget what ordinary people have the horrific tools or building blocks to do.'
During Chapel, our pupils read out the stories of ordinary individuals and Miss Lane also shared her own personal story - you can read their stories below:
Toby Biber
Toby Biber was born in 1925 to an Orthodox Jewish family in Mielec, Poland. When Germany took over Poland in 1939, Mielec’s Jewish community was persecuted and faced antisemitism - the Jews had to wear the yellow star badges and were therefore targeted to violence. Their homes were burned and there were limited hours for shopping. Eventually, she was forced out of her village in 1942.
Her father got some forged papers, and she was in hiding in southern Poland until she was captured and sent to a forced labour camp, eventually ending up in Auschwitz and then Bergen-Belsen. Sadly, her sister died just before liberation in 1945. Toby stayed as she had nowhere else to go, until 1947, when she met and married her husband before emigrating to the UK where she lived for the rest of her life.
She tells her story, so that we remember.
Daniel Falkner
Daniel Falkner was born in 1912 and grew up in Poland as a Polish Jew. He was sent to a military academy and after his training was called up to fight in WW2. Daniel’s division unfortunately had to surrender where he then became a prisoner of war. When he escaped in 1940, he travelled to Warsaw but shortly after, Warsaw’s Jewish population was forced into the ghetto which was a part in a city where minority groups lived. Rooms were turned into houses, where often up to three families could live in one room.
Daniel and his wife managed to escape the ghetto and lived in hiding until they were eventually discovered in 1943. Daniel was then taken to Sachsenhausen Camp in Germany, split from his wife who went to another camp. He managed to avoid being moved to a killing camp by hiding under the floorboards. After the war had ended, Daniel joined the British Army and became an interpreter. In 1946 he was finally reunited with his wife.
He tells his story, so that we remember.
Ralph Blumenau
Before 1933, at eight years old, Ralph wasn't even aware he was Jewish. However, when Hitler came to power, people began to point it out to him. He used to walk to school with posters plastering the walls telling them that “Jews are not welcome” and soon the bullying in his school became too much that his parents had to move.
Recently Ralph Blumenau was interviewed for a podcast so that his story was not forgotten. He talks about how he remembers when his brother was just six years old, he was playing in a sandpit in a local park with someone of a similar age - a son of a Nazi official. Somehow the young boys started talking about Hitler, where the child of the Nazi member said that Hitler was fantastic and that his parents thought he was a great leader. But Ralph’s brother, having picked up on conversations at home replied, 'no he isn’t, my parents think he is a pig'.
Ralph quickly took his brother home and when telling his parents, noted how their faces turned white in horror. Soon after that event, because his parents could afford to, the Blumenau family moved to England. He managed to come to England and gain a scholarship at St Paul’s School in London.
After teaching at Malvern College, where he taught history to Miss Lane's father, Professor Blumenau moved on to become a lecturer and, only recently now in his 90s, has stopped lecturing.
Ralph was one of the lucky ones - he managed to escape when over six million did not. Ralph, Daniel and Toby are just three voices of victims affected by the Holocaust. Ordinary people who had ordinary lives, but became victims because of who they were.
They tell their story, so that we remember.
