Jewish Care is holding Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations across Jewish Care in care homes, Retirement Living and community centres. At Jewish Care’s Holocaust Survivors’ Centre members lit memorial candles and held a Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration service followed by a lunch and heard words of comfort and hope from Rabbi Junik, Jewish Care’s Pastoral and Spiritual Lead and Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, Rabbi of New North London Synagogue. Members, accompanied by volunteers and Jewish Care staff also attended the Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony in Central London.
Holocaust survivor, Susan Pollack, MBE, was born in Hungary. She was sent to a slave labour camp and in 1944 she was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was separated from her family and finally liberated. At the end of WWII, she discovered that more than 50 members of her family had been killed and only her brother had survived.
After lighting a candle at the commemoration ceremony at Jewish Care’s Holocaust Survivors’ Centre earlier this week, Susan said, “I light a candle for my family and for those who have lost so many and for who we grieve. If only people studied what history teaches us and appreciate what Judaism has taught to the world – to be kind and helpful and to be decent to each other. We have come a long way to survive the Holocaust and what we want is peace and for people to talk to one another.”
At Jewish Care’s Betty and Asher Loftus Centre in Friern Barnet, there was a screening of the survivor’s testimony of former resident Tauba Biber z’l, who sadly passed away at Jewish Care’s Stella and Harry Freedman House on 2nd December 2023. Tauba made the film in 1995 when she was 70 with Stephen Spielberg’s Stories of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, set up with the proceeds from his film, “Schindler’s List” to record testimonies of all Holocaust survivors.
Tauba was born in 1925, one of seven siblings in an Orthodox Jewish family in Mielec, Poland. After the Nazi occupation in September 1939, the Jewish population of Mielec was subjected to increased antisemitism, persecution and violence.
Tauba and her family, as part of Mielec’s Jewish community were deported in March 1942 and the residents were forced into a nearby forest. From there, they were moved to a small town where her father obtained forged papers for Tauba and her sister, allowing them to escape. They lived in hiding until arriving in Krakow in Nazi-occupied southern Poland where they were some of the several thousand inhabitants of the Krakow Ghetto and worked for a short time in a shoe factory.
In the autumn of 1942, the ghetto was liquidated and they were transported to the Plaszow forced-labour camp. They remained there until the summer of 1943, when they were deported to Auschwitz Concentration Camp living in inhumane conditions with death all around them. They marched the inmates of Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen in 1944 and Tauba’s sister died eight days after Belsen’s liberation in April 1945. Her sisters, Sara, Rysia, Miriam and Esther, her parents, Jakob and Gitla and paternal grandparents, Raphael and Debora, were all murdered in the Holocaust. Tauba and her brothers, Jonas and Naphtali were reunited at Belsen after they were liberated and remained there until 1947, when it was used as a displaced persons camp.
Tauba met and married her husband, Max, at Bergen-Belsen after the war and they immigrated to Britain in 1947.
For many years Tauba spoke to school children educating them about her experiences during the Holocaust and she received a British Empire Medal for her services to Holocaust education in June 2000 from Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Tauba said, “Whatever religion or nationality, people should behave kindly and respect each other and their differences.”
Rabbi Junik, Jewish Care’s Pastoral & Spiritual Lead, said, “I want to pause and reflect about the effects of the Holocaust and the men, women and children who lost their lives and also to talk about the amazing men and women who survived, and are with us today.
“The Holocaust didn’t begin with violence. Hatred begins with speech. It’s a blessing that we can express our culture in this country, but that’s not something we can ever take for granted. We continue to say never again, and while we see suffering, racism and bigotry we should not be silent. We remember and we should be encouraged to change the world around us and to change the future.”
