Guildford Holocaust Memorial Day Commemoration 2005
By Jacqueline Lubin
On 27th January 2005, a commemoration ceremony was held at Surrey University, with an audience made up of the Guildford Jewish Community and other Jewish organisations and members of the University. Representatives of Surrey Police were also in attendance.
People outside these groups were also attracted to the ceremony, having heard Alex Goldberg's broadcasts on Guildford's local radio station. The occasion not only marked the day designated in England as Holocaust Memorial Day, but also commemorated the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
The audience was welcomed by representatives of Guildford Borough Council as well as Professor Patrick Dowling, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Surrey and University of Surrey Chaplaincy. Alex Goldberg introduced and interviewed the various speakers, while Aryeh Nusbacher provided a historical perspective on the events that took place and our failure to ensure that genocide would not be repeated in modern times.
Alex Goldberg's interviewees were all survivors of the Holocaust, and by their nature these stories were both of amazing good fortune at having escaped, but equally of the tragedy of the deaths of many members of their respective families left behind.
Mimi Conway
Mimi Conway, together with her late husband, Walter, were newly married and hoping to leave Czechoslovakia for America, when, before the onset of war, they were picked up and imprisoned. Mimi described their cruel treatment whilst in prison. However, a Czech Legionnaire guarding the prison, who later was hanged by the Nazis, helped them to escape. They crossed the Czech-Polish border, and knowing that the Nazis were shooting people, they posed as local lovers out on a country stroll.
Across the border, they were helped to get to the Polish city of Katowice (only a few miles away from Osweicim or Auschwitz) where they lived in a refugee commune and were married by the rabbi. The community put on a show, to raise money, and Walter, who had been an amateur opera singer in Czechoslovakia, took part. In the audience was the British Consul who was so moved by his performance that he invited him to the Consulate the next day, where Walter passed queues of people trying to get visas out of Poland. Purely as a result of the impression he had made on the Consul, he and Mimi were given passes on a special transport (one of the last to leave Poland before the War) in August 1939. In England, in Sept 1939, they were married for a third time by a Woking Registrar, and until Walter's death, the couple remained in Guildford where Mimi still lives.
Barbara Frankiss
The second Surrey resident to describe her experiences was Barbara Frankiss, who was born in Warsaw before the war. The war separated her parents, her father being a conscript soldier, but both returned to Poland, when her father returned from defeat in the Ukraine. Initially, Barbara and her mother stayed in the ghetto, but later left and went into hiding. She described how, as a small child, she lived with a Polish family, while her mother stayed in the basement of the house and paid the family to look after her. One day, Germans arrived to round up the Jews and all the residents of the house were summoned to witness the execution of these Jews. Although she heard the sound of shooting and screaming, Barbara was literally too tiny to see these harrowing sights and was spared the vision of her mother being shot with the other Jewish victims.
Without the money from her mother, the host family no longer cared to look after her, and abandoned her on the outskirts of Warsaw. Miraculously after lying freezing for two days, she was found by other children, who tried to warm her up with their own coats. They thought she was a gypsy and took her to a local police station, and although questioned by the Gestapo, she managed to remember Catholic prayers and was able to hide her Jewish identity. A kindly policeman and his wife adopted her and gave her a happy childhood. In Easter 1946, her father having survived eight concentration camps, came in search of her, and succeeded in following her trail. Their reunion brought her great sadness, for she was taken away from the adoptive parents she loved, although she kept in touch with them, even after she had left Poland in 1958.
Martin Benet
The third and final account came from Martin Bennet, a survivor from Auschwitz. He told how as a fourteen year old boy, he followed his brother on to a lorry supposedly going to a work camp, only to end up in Auschwitz. One would not imagine that to be branded with a concentration camp number would be a welcome event, but when this occurred, he realised that it meant that he was not to be sent to his death. His older brother had told him to say he was a cabinet maker, and because he was able to work, he remained alive. When the end of the war came, Nazi officers started marching their victims away from the camp on a march of death. Somehow Martin Bennet's resilience triumphed and he survived. He paid tribute to his wife for the support she had given him over the years.
The service culminated in a moving rendering of 'El Male Rachamim' by Cantor Helen Leneman. Then members of the audience including the leaders of many different faiths and diverse groups, listed below, survivors of the Holocaust and their families, and, in addition, some children, lit candles in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.
Kat Rassudin, University of the Surrey Jewish Society delivered the final message.
