SHEFFIELD CC HMD EVENT

26 January 2023

The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is “ordinary people”.

My grandparents were ordinary people.  They fled Nazi persecution in central Europe, attacked for who they were.  This country took them in and gave them a home. 

Without that act, I would not be here today.  My mum, here in the crowd, would not be here today.

I want to tell my grandparents’ story.

My grandfather Hans was training to be a doctor in Vienna.  When Germany occupied Austria, he fled to Prague.  There, he met and proposed to my granny, Ilsa.

He was not safe for long.  As the Nazi regime marched into Czechoslovakia in early 1939, he fled for the UK just days ahead of the German tanks.

When he arrived on this island, he managed to get a visa for my granny to join him too - on the bureaucratically romantic condition that they marry the moment she got to England.  

By now, my granny was living under Nazi occupation.  As a Jewish woman, she was not able to leave the country.  

She was smuggled across the border to Poland in an animal truck, in the summer just before the Nazi’s invaded their next target.

From there – in a journey that still echoes today – she boarded a small boat in the Baltic, loaded with herring.  

In that cold, dark, nauseating hollow in the boat, Ilsa had to hold her breath as her journey took her back into Nazi Germany itself via the Kiel canal.

I remember as a kid that, for the rest of her life, she never ate herring again.

They left everything behind – their families, their friends, the lives they had mapped out – for safety.  

Given jobs as a farmhand and a carer, they had to put their life on hold for years, then decades.  My grandfather Hans was never able to complete his medical studies, something he regretted for the rest of his life.

But they knew they were the lucky ones.  

Over the past few years, my family have laid two Stolpersteine memorial stones – one in Vienna, and one in Prague.  One to commemorate my grandfather’s family; the other my granny’s.  

My great aunt and great grandfather – my granny’s sister and father - were murdered at Auschwitz in 1943.  Bernhard and Katerina Sonnenschein.  My grandather’s family too were murdered in Chemnitz.

They were ordinary people.

Across Europe, you will find 90,000 Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones”.  They have been laid since 1992 by another ordinary person – Gunter Demnig, a German activist.  

They are small, brass plaques which replace pavement bricks in front of the homes of victims of the Holocaust.
They are a reminder not just of the Holocaust, but that its victims were ordinary people who walked the streets of Europe.  Ordinary people who lived, played, argued, worked and celebrated in ordinary communities.

The people responsible for the horrific crimes of genocide, to this day, are often ordinary people.  Those fleeing discrimination and extermination are ordinary people.  Those who commemorate them are ordinary people.  

But we should also remember the ordinary people who helped my family settle in this country.  The people who were their friends; their neighbours; their champions; their allies; their bosses; their students.

We should remember the ordinary people who helped them escape to this country.  The ordinary people who stood up to the Nazis, risking their own lives.  The ordinary people who today stand up to intolerance and hate.

Being passive is not a neutral action.  

We celebrate in film those who took action in the Second World War, like Oskar Schindler or Dietrich Bonnhoeffer.  But we should celebrate the ordinary people today who are still called to action.

Someone like Joan Salter, herself a Holocaust survivor, who earlier this month challenged the dehumanising rhetoric aimed at those crossing the Channel on small boats today.

Or those in Sheffield, South Yorkshire and across the world who have taken in Ukrainian families fleeing homes under attack.

[Pause]

When we gather for events like this, we say “never again”.

Never again should families like mine by ripped apart by racism.

But “never again” does not mean we should forget the millions murdered simply because of their faith, their race or their politics. 

Nor does it mean forgetting the heroism and bravery of those ordinary people - of all faiths and none - who stand up against hate and persecution.

That’s the lesson I will take from this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day.