10 January 2014 WATFORD SYNAGOGUE TO WELCOME STUDENTS FOR HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY Date: Thursday 30 January 2014 Venue: & District Synagogue, 16 Nascot Road,. WD17 4YE Morning session: 9am to 12.15pm Afternoon session: 12.30pm to 3.30pm Guest Speakers*: Holocaust survivor Harry Olmer (morning) Holocaust survivor Susan Pollack (afternoon) *subject to change On Thursday 30 January 2014 Synagogue will hold its first ever event to mark Holocaust Memorial Day within the wider non-jewish community. Pupils in school years 9 to 13 from West Herts College and schools in, Rickmansworth and Pinner will attend an educational workshop and have the rare opportunity to listen to a Holocaust survivor recount their personal experiences of the Holocaust firsthand. Mayor Dorothy Thornhill has confirmed her attendance on the day. Synagogue s event is part of a bigger programme of Holocaust Memorial Day activities involving over 54 schools from Hertfordshire, the London Borough of Harrow and the London Borough of Hillingdon and now in its 13 th year. This year s event, the biggest to date, will see more than 3,000 local secondary school students attending one of the 20 half day sessions organised by local synagogues of various denominations. Students will hear moving testimony from Holocaust survivors Harry Olmer (morning session) and Susan Pollack (afternoon session) and participate in a workshop relating historical facts about the Holocaust to contemporary issues such as racism, discrimination, persecution and citizenship. Each of the sessions will conclude with closing reflections from Synagogue s Rabbi Ephraim Levine and the lighting of a memorial candle. The theme this year is Journeys. The experience of those affected by the Holocaust and genocide is characterised by forced journeys. Many of those journeys ended in death: persecutors forcibly moved huge numbers of people in trains, cattle trucks and on death marches, from homes in villages and towns and across countries. Some journeys ended in survival when those persecuted made journeys to escape, some in disguise, some into hiding. There were journeys made after liberation too: to life in new countries, or returning home to the places where neighbours may have contributed to the persecution. /
Notes to editors: Confirmed schools and colleges attending Synagogue s Holocaust Memorial Day event include the Royal Masonic School, Rickmansworth; Stanborough School, Garston; Heathfield School, Pinner; and West Herts College,. Participating synagogues include Northwood United Synagogue, Northwood & Pinner Liberal Synagogue as well as at St. Albans Masorti, Belmont United, Bushey United, Borehamwood & Elstree United and & District United Synagogue. This year will see a 30% increase in participants in these unique sessions and brings the total to over 30,000 students who have attended these events since the programme s inception 13 years ago. The workshops, run by trained facilitators, enable students to form a valuable link between the historical facts about the Holocaust and its impact on contemporary issues such as racism, discrimination, bullying, persecution and citizenship. They learn how, as individuals and as part of a wider group, they can make a difference and become agents for change. Each 2¾ hour session is free of charge, non denominational, has no religious content and meets the national curriculum requirements for many subjects including Citizenship, English, History, RE and PSHE. The Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR) provides social, welfare and care services to Jewish victims of Nazi persecution living in Great Britain. Founded in 1941 by Jewish refugees from central Europe, the AJR has extensive experience attending to the needs of Holocaust refugees and survivors who came to this country before, during and after the Second World War. Speaker biographies are attached. Any school or college wishing to register their interest in taking part in a Holocaust Memorial Day event next year should email enquiries@northwoodhmd.org.uk ends For further information, please email writer@melaniesilver.co.uk or call 01923 212048.
About the speakers: Harry Olmer I was born on 15 November 1927 in a town called Sonsowiec, Poland. My parents were called Hirsch and Chana Olmer. I was the fourth child in a family of six children. Of the other five children, three perished in the Holocaust. After the outbreak of the war, I ended up in Plaszow Concentration Camp near Krakow, which became infamous following the Spielberg film, Shindler s List. In 1943, I was moved to Skarzysko munitions factory, where I was forced to pour liquid sulphur into bomb shells. In July 1944, I was sent to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, where I spent two weeks, following which I was transferred to Shlieben, a satellite camp to Buchenwald where I continued to work in terrible conditions in another munitions factory. In April 1945, I found myself transferred to Theresienstadt, where I was liberated by the Russian Army on 8 May. After the war I was brought by the Central British Fund, an Anglo Jewish Relief organisation together with several hundred other youngsters who survived the Camps to Windermere, to recuperate and from there to begin the road to reintegration into life studying and working in Glasgow. I studied in Glasgow for the equivalent of O and A Levels and then qualified as a Dentist in 1953. After National Service in the Royal Army Dental Corp in Hanover, Germany, I married Margaret, a Kindertransport refugee from Vienna. We now live in North London and have four children and eight grandchildren.
Susan Pollack Born in 1930 as Zsuzsanna Blau to a Hunagrian Jewish family, Mrs Pollack grew up with an awareness of anti-semitism at an early age. While most of her childhood was peaceful, she did experience occasional acts of vandalism against her family home and in 1938 her uncle was murdered by fascists. However, Mrs Pollack considered her family to have been well integrated into Hungarian life, a situation that would change horrifically during the Second World War. During wartime, Hungary allied with Nazi Germany and gradually implemented laws enforcing discrimination and segregation against the Jews. In April 1944 the leading Nazi Adolf Eichmann visited Hungary to pressurise its government into deporting Hungary s Jewish population to Nazi-occupied Poland. The following month, Susan Pollack and her family were deported in cattle trucks to the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau where her mother was sent to the gas chambers on arrival. Susan repeatedly survived selection at the hands of the infamous Josef Mengele. Deemed fit to work, after ten weeks in Auschwitz Susan Pollack was transported to Germany where she worked as a slave labourer in a munitions factory in Gubben. As the Third Reich collapsed in the spring of 1945, she was force-marched in hideous conditions to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen where a typhus epidemic was raging. Susan Pollack describes Auschwitz as a place of fear but Bergen-Belsen as a place of death due to the appalling risks of infection from thousands of unburied corpses. She attributes her survival to the rescue mission sent to Bergen-Belsen by the British Army on 15 April 1945 and believes that she could not have lived more than a couple of days longer in the camp as she was severely malnourished and no longer able to walk. She is committed to sharing her experiences with school pupils and has done so for the last
20 years.