Celebrating the survivors

Holocaust survivors and members of the second and third generations gathered at the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre (JHGC) on Thursday, 4 June, to mark International Holocaust Survivor Day. 

The event honoured survivors not only as witnesses to the past, but as those whose presence among us is a gift to be acknowledged while we still can. 

Where Yom HaShoah and International Holocaust Remembrance Day turn our attention to those who were murdered, Holocaust Survivor Day asks something different of us: to honour survivors for what they did after the war, the families they raised, the communities they rebuilt, the lives they insisted on living. 

The idea for an annual Holocaust Survivor Day took shape during the COVID-19 pandemic and it was founded by the Jewish Community Centre in Kraków, Poland in 2021. From a single community in Kraków, the day has since spread to dozens of cities across the world. 

In Johannesburg, Shirley Sapire, who has worked with the Holocaust Survivor’s group for many years, and Tali Nates, founder and executive director of the JHGC, welcomed guests. The gathering was held in the centre of a mini exhibition of photographer Julian Pokroy’s portraits of Holocaust survivors living in Johannesburg. The photos were first shown at the centre in 2019. 

The morning’s most moving moments came from the youngest people present. King David High School pupils performed music and more than once, it brought the entire room to tears. 

It was a fitting expression of what Holocaust Survivor Day was created to do. As survivors grow fewer each year, the responsibility of remembering and honouring them passes to the generations that follow. On 4 June, in a room filled with generations of one community, that passing of memory was not an abstraction but something one could see, hear, and feel.