About HMD 2010: The Legacy of Hope

Find out more about the HMD 2010 theme, The Legacy of Hope.

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Carly Whyborn is the Chief Executive Officer of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. Each year the Trust supply an annual theme which provides a focus for activities. In this podcast, Carly introduces the theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2010: The Legacy of Hope.

Below is a transcript of her podcast:

“Each year the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust provide an annual theme for HMD activities. The purpose of this is to give a way in to this particularly sensitive and big issue. When we were carrying out our planning for the theme for 2010, we were particularly struck by the fact it was the 65th anniversary. This means that its 65 years since the Soviet Army liberated the largest Nazi killing camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau and we spent some time thinking about what had happened since then and what happened to the survivors, to those people who did come out of the camps throughout Nazi-occupied Europe and what differences they have made to our communities today. 65 years since the liberation is a very poignant year, it’s one of the last years, difficult though this is to face, it is one of the very last years that we are going to have Holocaust survivors in the quantity that we do in the UK today. We estimate that there are around 5000 survivors left and we really wanted to supply a theme which bought their stories and their experiences to a much wider audience and this is how we came up with our theme – The Legacy of Hope.

HMD 2010 is an opportunity for us all, whoever we are, wherever we are, whatever we do or don’t believe, it’s a day for everybody to take on the experiences of those who suffered this most horrendous persecution and to make their voices and their hopes part of our shared future. The Legacy of Hope focuses in on the experience of survivors and how their experience has shaped their lives and indeed our lives. The Legacy of Hope offers all of us the opportunity to remember. We want to ensure that the people, the individuals, those people like you and I, who were murdered under the Nazi regime, we have to make sure we remember them. There is a well-known story about a young boy, a 19 year old, who was in the Vilna Ghetto in 1941. He wrote to his friend in Palestine about being inside the ghetto and what that meant to him. And he saw the persecution first-hand and what was happening on the streets of Vilna, he wrote to his friend – “I just want someone to remember there was a man named David Berger.” He was murdered a few weeks later. But we still remember, I am sitting here in 2009 and I can remember there was once a man named David Berger and I can tell people. I can tell people his story. I can tell people that he existed and this is what we are trying to do, we’re trying to preserve memories for future generations and to honour those survivors who are still with us today. But there’s more to it than this. I can use my voice. David had his right to speak up against discrimination taken away. I haven’t. I can fight against persecution. Using his example, his plea to be remembered, I can make a change in my life today.

Survivors have been through such an experience that we can’t begin to imagine but they have overcome that traumatic experience and, here in the UK, they have contributed so much to our society, whether it is in their families or communities. Whether it is in business or to the sporting world, Holocaust survivors have helped to shape the society we are living in today, and we want to recognise that. We want to push people to really take on that legacy, these things that the survivors teach us. Holocaust survivors lead on many anti-discrimination groups. We find that we have Holocaust survivors fighting against the right wing in the UK and we have survivors who led on the Day for Darfur. We have found that Holocaust survivors work very closely with other survivors of more recent genocides – those in Cambodia, Rwanda and in Bosnia and certainly with those facing ongoing atrocities in Darfur today. Their experience can become part of our future. We can see that survivors such as Ben Helfgott are making a difference today, they are the ones asking people to not be filled with hatred, to respect difference, to do the very opposite of what was done to them over 65 years ago.

We want to offer everybody an opportunity to become part of our Legacy of Hope and we can do this in a number of ways. We can listen to the stories of the survivors, we can read them, we can watch them, we could even go and see a Holocaust survivor speaking at events across the UK in January 2010. We can spend a couple of minutes on the HMD website during our working day and we could read a survivor testimony and we can go home and tell our friends. We can go out after work; we can tell people: “Today I read this amazing story about this incredible lady called Kitty Hart-Moxon”. That’s something we can all do.

Genocide does not just happen. It starts when celebrating differences breaks down. It starts when exclusion begins. We have to stop discrimination and persecution here in the UK. We are all capable of looking at the language of hatred and how this can creep into our everyday words. We can ask ourselves do we use derogatory terms to describe people that are different to us? Do we not respond if somebody tells us a racist joke, which we find to be unacceptable? That’s a real way you can become part of The Legacy of Hope. Let’s stop using that language. You can make the wishes of the survivors here today, part of your future. You can carry out their hopes. You can strive for that safe and secure society they have talked about. We really believe that Holocaust Memorial Day is a day for everybody. It’s now time for Holocaust Memorial Day to become part of our lives, a time when we can remember the past in order to shape a safer and better future.”

The views expressed in this podcast are of the individual contributor and not necessarily those of HMDT.

For more information please see

Learn more about The Legacy of Hope by reading our HMD 2010 theme paper

Read Kitty Hart Moxon’s testimony

Learn about the Holocaust and subsequent genocides

Read Ben’s story on our dedicated education website.

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