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Holocaust

Hostage situation underlines need for Holocaust awareness

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“We look at our survivors who were liberated from camps in 1945 and the Israeli hostages – our survivors today – and we see similar things,” says second-generation Holocaust survivor Janice Leibowitz, whose father, Michael Kelvin, originally Miklós Katz and aunt, Veronica Phillips, survived the Holocaust.

Leibowitz was speaking about how it was essential for us to remember what happened during the Holocaust, not least because of the 80th anniversary of International Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January.

“I don’t think we can compare these survivors to the survivors back then who came out and didn’t and wouldn’t speak about the horrors they saw for years and years, with some even staying silent now.

“As much as we assume that there’s awareness, we can assume nothing,” Leibowitz says. “We need to carry these messages continually and remind people that the Holocaust happened. It will happen again. It has happened again, and it can happen again. And we need to remind people that we need to remain aware and educate ourselves and others as much as possible to equip ourselves and our children.”

Leibowitz says she never knew her father was a Holocaust survivor until she was 12 or 13 because he never spoke about what he went through. All she knew was that he would go to the cemetery every year on Yom Hashoah.

Her father never spoke about his past, and never returned to Hungary. Her aunt kept the memory of those years alive. She would keep in contact with family members in Hungary, travel back to Hungary, share her story, and donated childhood items to the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre (JHGC).

“When you look at the survivors who are coming out of Gaza now and you look at the exposure, there’s social media and everything like that, and the support structures that are in place,” Leibowitz says, “There wasn’t anything like that 80 years ago. One can only wonder how different it might have been if there was anything similar all those years ago.”

Third-generation Holocaust survivor Courtneigh Bernstein, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivor Israel Gurwicz, says what she wants people to take from this International Holocaust Remembrance Day is the need to keep listening to the stories of survivors.

Gurwicz was adamant that the JHGC be constructed in order for all South Africans to visit and learn about the Holocaust.

“If we forget the past, we’re doomed to repeat it, as we see going on around the world at the moment,” Bernstein says. “We need to educate constantly and tell stories, even if it’s through watching films and reading books.”

It’s also important to tell children the stories of the Holocaust when they get to the right age so that they keep the memory alive, because if we don’t, who will, Bernstein says.

Miriam Lazarus, a child Holocaust survivor from Lithuania, says she wants people to remember the worst parts of the Holocaust and will share her story with others because she wants people to remember the six million souls that were murdered, of which there were one and a half million innocent children.

Lazarus says even all these years later, she’s still haunted by the horrific things that she witnessed as a child in Lithuania. She particularly remembers her adoptive mother, who was a virile antisemite, taking her into the forest and showing her “how the wonderful Germans are killing the horrible Jews”.

Lazarus shares the story of her life in the ghetto through the JHGC because she hopes that by sharing it, she will teach youth how to be “decent human beings”.

Similarly, Irene Fainman, who was the youngest person to survive the Ravensbrück concentration camp, implores people to remember what happened all those years.

“It was the greatest tragedy that the world has ever seen,” says Fainman, “Someone lost their family members, and we need to remember that.”

Fainman advocates for a way of life that preaches tolerance.

“Hate destroys you,” she says, “We have to learn to be tolerant of the other. We don’t have to like each other, but we have to tolerate each other, because otherwise, we risk the chance of there being another Holocaust.”

Fainman says after her liberation from Ravensbrück, she would go back to Germany to visit the camp and educate youth about what happened there and the effect that it had on her. For her, it’s special to go back for commemorations because it demonstrates to her that hate didn’t win.

Similarly, Rolene Brasg, the daughter of Cecilia and Salomon (Solly) Boruchowitz, says that after her parents survived the horrors of the Holocaust, they ingrained a sense of Jewish pride within their children.

“My siblings and I were brought up with a love for Judaism,” she says. “We know that having Jewish pride, no matter how religious you are, is the only way that we can keep the memory of survivors like my parents alive.”

Brasg says her parents would have been horrified by the scenes of the Hamas attacks on 7 October, and says the rise in antisemitism proves that Jewish people need the state of Israel.

“Listening to my mother’s story, it was clear that Jews in Europe more than 80 years ago had no refuge,” she says. “We had no hope. My mother was so excited about the establishment of Israel in 1948 because it gave Jewish people around the world refuge. We in the diaspora know all too well how important Israel is to us, especially over the past 15 months.”

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