Key survivor is remembered

One of the UK's best known Holocaust survivors was remembered at a memorial service on Sunday, a year after his death at the age of 97.

London-born Leon Greenman endured six Nazi camps but lost his wife Esther and two-year-old son Barney at Auschwitz.

He honoured the pledge he made in the camp to tell what happened "with every breath until his last," recalled Ruth-Anne Lenga, education consultant at the Jewish Museum, who organised the commemoration at the Sternberg Centre in Finchley.

For more than 60 years, Mr Greenman addressed countless school, youth and other groups a

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BNP activist fined after racial abuse of his neighbour

A BNP activist has been fined after racially abusing a neighbour whose grandmother died in the Holocaust.

Roy West told German-born Bernd Kugow to “go back to krautland and kill some more Jews” during an argument outside their homes in Dukinfield, Lancashire.

Unemployed West, 44, had denied a charge of racially aggravated abuse in August last year, but changed his plea moments before appearing at Tameside Magistrates’ Court last week.

He began the tirade after trying to fix a Union Jack flag to his neighbour’s shed.

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Auschwitz plans on display

Blueprints for the Auschwitz concentration camp have gone on display in a Berlin exhibition for the first time. The 29 sketches, discovered last year in a Berlin flat and bought by the Bild newspaper, date from 1941-1942 and show plans to extend buildings in the camp.

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Tory leaders join students on Auschwitz visit

Conservative Party chairman Francis Maude and Barnet Council deputy leader Matthew Offord accompanied students on a trip to Auschwitz last week. Visiting under the aegis of the Holocaust Educational Trust’s Lessons from Auschwitz project, the group’s itinerary took in the town of Oswiecim and its Jewish cemetery, as well as the Nazi death camp site.

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Pope tells Holocaust denier to recant

Pope benedict XVI has responded to international pressure and ordered a maverick cleric to recant his Holocaust-denying views.

Jewish-Catholic relations were plunged into crisis last week by the Vatican’s rehabilitation of English-born Richard Williamson, along with three other bishops associated with an ultra-conservative breakaway sect.

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Lessons of Holocaust

The 600 people at Sunday’s Leeds civic ceremony for Holocaust Memorial Day were urged to learn the lessons of the Shoah.

“It all started with such small little acts,” HMD Trust chair Dr Stephen Smith cautioned. “Small statements, small-minded politics. Eventually, it killed and it killed and it killed.”

Dr Martin Kapel, who was nine when he arrived in the UK on the Kindertransport, likened criticism of the government’s immigration policy to the fears voiced in the 1930s when Jews fled the Nazis.

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Survivor’s harrowing memories

For survivor Joseph Kiersz, Coventry’s HMD service brought back memories of the horrific scenes he witnessed as a boy.

The Nazis captured his family, who lived near Lodz, in Poland, and he was interned first at Belsen and later at Auschwitz. His mother, brother and sisters died in the gas chambers.

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‘Hamas supporter’ speaks at Scottish HMD event

A Scottish anti-Israel fringe group has held what it claimed was a Holocaust Memorial Day event, with a guest speaker who openly supports Hamas.

The Scottish Palestinian Solidarity campaign hosted two all-day events in Edinburgh and Glasgow on Sunday January 25 entitled Resistance to Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing : from Europe in the 1940s to the Middle East Today.

The key speakers were Dr Azam Tamimi, director of the London-based Institute of Islamic Political Thought, and Liliane Kaczerginsky, daughter of Yiddish poet Shmerke Kaczerginsky.

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Horror email links IDF to Warsaw Nazis

Holocaust images displayed in a viral email alongside pictures taken during Israel’s military operation in Gaza have been condemned as grossly offensive.

Forty-two Shoah pictures and an equal number depicting what areclaimed to be equivalent scenes from Gaza have been emailed all over the world.

Eric Moonman, president of the Zionist Federation, said: “These pictures are grossly offensive and I am reporting them to the police as a malicious communication.

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Sounds of survivors go online

The British Library has put its complete collection of oral testimonies of Shoah survivors online.

Over 440 hours of interviews with 66 people recorded by the library’s sound archive can now be publicly accessed.

Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust covers refugees who escaped Nazi Germany pre-war, and those who survived in hiding or endured the camps.

Rob Perks, curator of oral history at the archive, said: “These oral testimonies personalise the enormity of the Holocaust in a very direct and human way, emphasising the variety and complexity of individual experience.

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