Agnes’ presentation was very well received and covered in the Glasgow edition of the ‘Jewish Telegraph’ for 20 April. It was followed by a remarkable presentation by children from the local Jewish school using some of the stories of hidden children in ‘The Other Schindlers’. They had worked on the stories and some of them were told in the first person.  Agnes found this particularly moving.

Whilst in Glasgow, Agnes had the opportunity to attend a reception held by Anne Frank Scotland for their new exhibition ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’ at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery on 17 April. On Thursday Agnes visited the children at the Calderwood Lodge Jewish Primary School  and found the children very interested in her story and asking the most inventive and demanding questions. She then enjoyed an excellent salt beef sandwich at Mark’s Deli’s new eaterie with many of the team who had hosted her during the trip.

On Wednesday, Gordon Gibb, a friend from the Architects Registration Board took Agnes on a wonderful tour of Rennie Mackintosh’s masterpiece The Glasgow School of Art and later to see the India building at Inchinnan. The India building was where the airships were built in the early part of the 20th Century. It was later the home of the India tyre company and the iconic Art Deco building was designed Thomas Wallis famous for the Hoover building at Perivale. Gordon’s award winning design to renovate the building replicated the shape of the gondola  of the airship. The building was re-opened in 2003.

A remarkable postscript to the trip was provided by Edward Isaacs’ mother-in-law who was a fourteen year old girl in the Budapest Ghetto. She told Agnes that there were hardly any babies in the ghetto and she distinctly remembers seeing a young woman with a baby in the ghetto. She remembers going to see them regularly because they were such a novelty. Was that baby Agnes with her Mother?

For more information on Yom HaShoah in the UK, please visit www.yomhashoah.co.uk

We’ll be posting interesting links, news and information for anyone who has read the book, seen or heard me speaking or would like to find out more.

You can find out how to buy the book on the website.

Agnes was interviewed on Monday 27 February 2012 by Basil Herwald about her book.  You are able to listen to the interview on http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00p3gb6.

You can read more about the history of the radio programme in this news piece from The Jewish Chronicle

You can see photographs from the recording on our Facebook page.

If you would be interested in interviewing Agnes about her book or work, please visit the contact section of the website.

NPTC is one of the largest colleges in Wales with 14,000 students and 800 staff was created in 1999. It is a tertiary college as well as offering general further education over 8 sites with the main ones being at Neath and Afan. A third of the students are full time, with the rest part-time – all following a variety of courses including 50 A Level courses and 90 vocational courses. In addition Adult and Community Learning is delivered in over 70 outreach centres throughout the county.

I first visited the College in April 2010 when I was honoured to open the garden and plant a tree in honour of my maternal grandfather, Armin Klein, who was killed at Auschwitz in 1944. On this visit I was delighted to see the tree had grown quite a bit.

In the garden with Lesley Blower and Bob Priddle

The garden was as impressive as when I first saw it. It is at the college gardens at Twyn-yr-Hydd and is called ‘The Legacy of Hope’  from the 2010 HMD theme. Bob Priddle described it as follows:  ’This garden was constructed by Level 2 students, undertaking the Work Based Studies in Horticulture course. The garden has chains and barbed wire – symbols of imprisonment. The railway sleepers represent the terrible journey that many endured. Birch trees push through the structure as a symbol of growth and renewal.  All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. Edmund Burke.

You can see a full size image of the garden on my facebook page.

The Holocaust Memorial Garden at NPTC

From the garden we visited the Afan site where I showed my PowerPoint presentation which tells my family’s story and how I came to write my book to a group of students. Afterwards we signed the pledge to ‘Speak Up, Speak Out’

Signing the pledge for Holocaust Memorial Day 2012 at Afan.

We then moved to the Neath site where I signed the Library copy of ‘The Other Schindlers’ and signed the pledge again. I left the College uplifted by the enthusiasm of all the students and staff to ensure that the lessons of the Holocaust are never forgotten in this part of Wales and heartened by the warmth of the welcome I had received yet again.

Kemal Pervanic - © HMDT

Later that evening I attended the Launch HMD event  for Wales at Cwmbran Stadium in Torfaen with Charlie Lewis the HMDT Outreach Co-ordinator and Olivia Marks-Woldman the new CEO. We had time to view the exhibition of artwork and photos.  The main event was hosted by the Reverend Canon Harald Thomas MBE who welcomed the HMDT representatives. The keynote speaker was Kemal Pervanic who spoke with great emotion of his experiences as a survivor of the Bosnian war and the Serb concentration camp at Omarska.

The unveiling of 'Speak Up, Speak Out' by Janita Tapp and Eileen Mills-Long

The Leader of Torfaen County Borough Council read Pastor Niemoller’s famous poem and the First Minister, the Rt. Hon. Carwyn Jones gave his thoughts on HMD and was followed by the local MP the Rt. Hon. Paul Murphy. Delightful singing by the Nidus Children’s Choir was followed by the unveiling of a specially commissioned painting by two local artists – Janita Tapp and Eileen Mills-Long – on the theme of ‘Speak Up, Speak Out’. The painting is very moving and a most original commemoration of HMD.

My grandfather, Armin Klein

We eventually arrived back at Paddington at 11.45pm. It had been a long and eventful day. I felt somewhat weary but overwhelmed by the response I had found to commemorating the Holocaust in Wales and I was glad to have been there to help promote the message. I congratulate everyone involved and all those I spoke to for their interest and compassion. With particular thanks to Lesley Blower, the remarkable NPTC Diversity Officer for her energy and hospitality. Our friendship came out of our work for HMD and long may it continue. I am just left wondering what my poor Hungarian grandfather would have made of his tree in Neath planted 66 years after his death.

PS. My facebook fans increased considerably after my trip – so thanks to Lesley and the students. Join them on www.facebook.com/theotherschindlers

See the following links: The NPTC newsletter about my visit - http://www.nptc.ac.uk/en/news/college_news_story.php?newsid=243

News about Bob Priddle –  http://www.nptc.ac.uk/en/news/college_news_story.php?newsid=245

Rt Hon William Hague MP speaking at the launch of the UK copy of the International Tracing Service 14 December 2011.

The archive was created through an initiative in 1943 by the British Red Cross to set up a Tracing Bureau which enabled  the displaced and missing as well the survivors of World War Two to be traced by their families . It is housed in Bad Arolsen in Germany and is one of the largest Nazi archives containing 50 million references on the fate of 17.5 million people. It contains original records from concentration camps, details of forced labour, emigration lists and files from displaced camps. The Archive is available to researchers and visitors but the existence of a digital copy in London in the Wiener Library will make this remarkable record far more accessible. Even today members of families are finding each other.

Eugene Black, a Holocaust survivor of several camps, who now lives in Leeds spoke movingly about using the Archive and so did his young granddaughter.

Rt Hon William Hague MP, Sir Andrew Burns, Lillian Black, daughter of Eugene Black with his granddaughter at the Reception in the Locarno Suite at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

William Hague, the Foreign Secretary spoke at the event and welcomed the presence of the archive to London and said:

“The International Tracing Service archive is hugely significant. Allowing the British public access to the Archive in the UK for the first time will enable Holocaust survivors, refugees and their descendants to obtain information about the fate of their relatives who suffered at the hands of the Nazis. It will also provide an invaluable collection of primary source material for UK based academic researchers and students, and is further proof of the UK’s active approach to preserving the memory of the Holocaust.”

As I came home feeling remarkably uplifted by the enthusiasm of those working on this project, I thought how much harder the Holocaust deniers task would be with all this evidence available in London as well as Germany.

Please do use the service – you can e mail the ITS via email@its-arolsen.org with your queries. I have enquired about my father who was a forced labourer and my maternal grandfather Armin Klein who died at Auschwitz.

The Wiener Library version will be available once funding of about £70k + running costs has been secured. Ben Barkow thinks it would take 3 to 4 months to get the system established once the funding is in place. Digital copies are currently held at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, in Washington at USHMM, the Belgian national archive and in France. Poland also has a copy but it is not available to the public..

Further to the earlier blog below, 2012 has got off to a fine start with the publication of another of my letters by ‘History Today’. Its about Jewish soldiers who served in the German Army duringWorld War I. It was written in response to Tim Grady’s article in the November 2011 edition ‘Germany’s Jewish Soldiers’. My letter is about Jewish soldiers who won the Iron Cross and erroneously thought this would protect them from persecution by the Nazis. I also mention the high proportion of Jews in the German Army in the 1914-18 war.

Much of this appears on pages 109-10 in the hardback copy of ‘The Other Schindlers’ and additionally in the ‘Postscript’ on pages 237-8 of the paperback edition.

22 August 2011 Blog:

I’m delighted that my letter about Varian Fry and his connection with Hannah Arendt and Hiram  Bingham III has been published in the September 2011 edition of ‘History Today’. Click the link on ‘my letter’ and scroll down.

The magazine which is celebrating its 60th birthday was available at my school in the 1950s and I have read it ever since. It is endlessly interesting.

Two other letters of mine were published in the journal in 2008. In January they published a letter about Ramsay MacDonald’s youth when his mother struggled to get him a suit for his first job and in September 2008 I wrote about the Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweiss (1818-1865) who discovered how to conquer puerperal fever which killed so many women after childbirth in earlier times.

‘I was fascinated by Rebecca Abrams’s article about Alexander Gordon (‘A Prophet in his Own Country’, August 2008), the Aberdonian doctor who studied puerperal fever which killed so many mothers at childbirth. His treatise on the disease published in 1795 was ignored. As she wrote, ‘… he was personally vilified and professionally ostracized…. Four years later he was dead …’

He was not alone. I recall the doctor my Hungarian mother told me about–Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865). He, too, was disturbed by the deaths he came across in the Vienna Hospital where he worked as an obstetrician. When he developed his theory that doctors who went straight from autopsies to maternity wards without any washing of hands were passing on the disease, he introduced the dipping of hands in chlorinated water before entering maternity wards. In 1847 this simple procedure had a remarkable effect and deaths fell from 18 per 100 one month to 1 per 100 the next. However he was not an easy man and he antagonized colleagues. He could not cope with the failure of others to recognize his proven principle. By 1862 he was committed to an asylum and died there in 1865.

How ironic it is that the simple discipline of hand-washing is again the source of debate as hospitals again become a source of disease rather than cure 150 years after Semmelweis.’

There is also one letter from 6 July 2000 about Varian Fry and Walter Benjamin in the London Review of Books.

Perhaps my greatest success in my letter writing career was when my letter of July 2000 complaining about John Birt’s appointment as crime Czar by Tony Blair was published in ‘The Times’ and subsequently quoted in Trevor Grove’s book called ‘The Magistrate’s Tale’.  The jist of the letter as quoted in the book was that Birt knew nothing about the subject but:

I have been a magistrate since 1984 ….I have been continually trained….I have read hundreds of pre-sentence reports….I have three sons….and chair a safe house for women in Sheffield. I think I, and many others like me, have a better idea of what causes crime and what to do about it. Why does No. 10 never ring us?

Eleven years later I am still waiting for the call!!!

On 27 January 2012, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945, the world will mark Holocaust Memorial Day.  As a Holocaust survivor and a Trustee of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust I will be urging everyone to take note of this year’s theme and ‘Speak Up, Speak Out’.

The Holocaust rescuers I wrote about in ‘The Other Schindlers‘ chose to use their voices and actions to save the lives of others.  In my own way, I use my voice and the story of my own family every time I give a speech or interview.  As a survivor I feel an enormous responsibility to speak for those whose lives were taken from them in horrendous circumstances. But we each have a responsibility to speak up for those who have no voice or have had their right to speak taken away.

Hundreds of local events take place every year to mark Holocaust Memorial Day and I ask all of my UK based website visitors to attend their closest event so that we can join together to remember the past in order to create a safer, better future. If nothing is happening in your town, why not organise an event? The HMDT website can give you help and support – click www.hmd.org.uk.

You can see more about this project on their website  http://www.gariwo.eu/ where you can read the Call and the current signatories. You can also show your support by adding your name to the supporters by sending an e mail with your details to:   segreteria@gariwo.net

I have written to all UK MEPs to seek their support for this amazing project. The written Declaration to go to the European Parliament explains:

1. The wish to commemorate the courage of all who fought against the Nazis and other genocidal regimes by courageously saving the lives of their fellow men and women.
2. The significance of teaching these lessons to the younger generations throughout Europe so they understand the need to fight persecution and hatred.
3. The desire to establish an International Day of the Righteous on 6 March which is the anniversary of the death of Moshe Bejski (whose idea it was to create the Garden of the Righteous in Jerusalem. Moshe Bejski was one of the Jews rescued by Schindler, he was his chief document forger and later he became a Supreme Court Judge in Israel and was heavily involved with Yad Vashem and Righteous Awards. (see http://www.forward.com/articles/10298/)

If you have any queries please feel free to contact me or Gabriele Albertini MEP, who will be presenting the Declaration to the Parliament and the Chairman of the Committee, Gabriele Nissim an Italian historian who is contactable through the website.

From 1st February the Written Declaration Tabling Office in Strasbourg will welcome signatures both in person during plenary sessions and electronically. Any MEP who’s interested can obtain information about these signing options from Dr. Gazzara (see below) or the Tabling Office itself.

I do hope you will support this initiative and spread the word to your friends and networks for the sake of all our futures and to remember the best of our past.

Dr. ELISA GAZZARA -elisa.gazzara@europarl.europa.eu 

Assistant to Gabriele Albertini, MEP

European Parliament

Tel +32 (0)2 28 37366

You can download the Call to the European Parliament in the Call Document – European Day of the Righteous – English which contains the current signatories and the Declaration for a European Day of Remembrance for the Righteous.