Holocaust survivor Trude Silman’s talk moves audience

Trude was invited to speak at the Holocaust Memorial Day event, organised by the University with the 6million+ charity, which also highlighted more recent atrocities around the world.

SMILING family photographs of men, women and children who would soon be rounded up and murdered by the Nazis were a deceptively powerful reminder of the horror of the Holocaust when they were screened at a University of Huddersfield event that also drew the large audience’s attention to atrocities in today’s troubled world.

Titled Torn From Home, it was the latest Holocaust Memorial Day event to be held at the University, organised in tandem with the charitable trust 6million+.  The University is home to the Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre for the North, which opened last year and was developed in association with the Leeds-based Holocaust Survivors’ Friendship Association.

It began with a town centre procession of five Weeping Sisters – enormous puppet figures symbolising the grief of women lamenting the victims of genocide around the world.  Made by volunteers in Dewsbury, they now include a figure representing genocide in Burundi, marking its 25th anniversary.

After the Weeping Sisters, accompanied by musicians, arrived at the University’s Oastler Building, there was an introduction from the chair of 6million+, Phil Wood, and from the Mayor of Kirklees, Councillor Gwen Lowe, followed by an illustrated talk from Trude Silman, who was born in Czechoslovakia in 1929, into a prosperous Jewish family.

In 1939, as a nine-year-old child, she was able to escape as the Nazis invaded her country.  There was a troubling rail journey across Germany and Austria.  Trude found refuge in England, raised a family and had a successful career, but never saw her parents again.

“I cannot remember saying goodbye to them,” she told the audience.  “It is one of those deep memories that I tried to hide because the pain of leaving home was too great.”

Trude has discovered that her father was murdered in Auschwitz, but is yet to find out the exact fate of her mother.

She showed a series of 1930s family photographs.  Most of the uncles, aunts and cousins in the happy group shots would not survive.

Also, there was a photograph showing her and 50 classmates.  The survival rate of Jewish children in Czechoslovakia was ten per cent, Trude told the audience.  This meant statistically that just five of the boys and girls in the photo would live to see the end of the war.

At the end of the talk, Trude Silman said that her final message was “it doesn’t matter what your colour, creed or race is, just think of yourself as a human being and live at peace with everybody else”.

The Torn from Home event continued with testimonies – some including song – from survivors of genocides and conflicts including Syria, Bosnia and Burundi who had found refuge in West Yorkshire.

Then came a performance from children at Spring Grove Junior and Infant School in Huddersfield.  The youngsters read a sequence of messages that described their response to learning about persecution and genocide and their hopes for the future.

Forming a backdrop to the evening were cloth scrolls, held by participants, depicting events and artefacts from the Holocaust and other genocides.  There was a candle-lighting ceremony led by Trude Silman and the Burundian refugee Dieudonne Manikariza, and a Jewish prayer of mourning sung by Berlin-born Rudi Leavor, who came with his family to England in 1937 to escape Nazi persecution.