Voices from the past telling truth to the future

Since 2003, the Association of Jewish Refugees has been recording the stories of survivors of the totalitarian murder and exile on the 1930s and ’40s. They have accumulated 250 such interviews and are continuing the work. My father and my mother both gave interviews, skilfully conducted by Bea Lewkowicz.

My mother’s story is the more familiar. She tells of her arrest and imprisonment, first in Westerbork and then in Bergen Belsen. She talks of the German Jewish community in Amsterdam before the war, which included the Frank family, and of seeing Anne and Margot in Belsen in the last weeks of their lives.

I know a fair bit about it all but, however many times I see it, I always learn something new. Watching again this week I heard Mum talk about her yellow star and how the Germans made the Jews pay for them.

My father’s story is less well known, not to me so much but generally. Born in Lwow, he was exiled to the borders of Siberia when the Soviets arrested his father. He would surely have died there if Hitler had not invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Operation Barbarossa led to my grandfather’s release and the end of Dad’s Siberian exile. They were reunited and went with the Anders army — the Polish Armed Forces in the East —to Persia and Palestine before coming to Britain.

That they were reunited was a miracle but, as my sister always says, there is always a miracle in every survivor story. Because, if there wasn’t a miracle, you didn’t survive.

At the end of the video, Bea asks my dad to identify some of the people in various photographs. There are the usual family snaps. And then there is one from a birthday party taken in the late 1930s with a fairly large group of happy children sitting in a row on a log. They are all perhaps eight years old. What happened to them he was asked? And Dad replies that he was the only one to survive the war.

The interviews — not just the dialogue with my parents but all the videos — are particularly strong on life before the war, a lost civilisation described with warmth and clarity. Kurt Marx, whom I met for the first time this week, describes his experience of Kristallnacht, and Ruth Edwards her tears when she saw her father’s coat and realised he had been arrested without it on a cold winter’s night.

As Bea puts it: “Each interview is in itself a small memorial, a memorial of words, gestures, images and voices”.

The AJR’s archive is now moving to a new phase. Their website www.ajrrefugeevoices.org.uk allows the archives to be searched and AJR are beginning to provide edited versions of some testimony so that it can be used on social media to reach new audiences.

As a tool of research and education, this is a truly magnificent endeavour.

Daniel Finkelstein is Associate Editor of The Times