University of Sussex, Weidenfeld Institute – Ceremony – HMD 2026
Activity information
Activity type: Public activity
Organisation name: University of Sussex
Address:
Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, University of Sussex Campus
Brighton
BN1 9RA
UK
our annual Holocaust Memorial Day event, which will be held next week at the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts on the University of Sussex campus, on Wednesday 4 February 2026, 11am to 2.45pm.
The programme will be split into two sessions:
SESSION 1:
Two short films followed by a discussion with Judy Ironside MBE, Founder and President of UK Jewish Film/ Founder of the Pears Short Film Fund at UK Jewish Film, and Amanda Rubin, Documentary Filmmaker and Journalist.
Film 1: Humo (Smoke) - A boy, Daniel, travels by train towards a dark destination known as the smokehouse. “Humo takes us on a journey through the life of a child captured and stuck in a concentration camp, and it is as harrowing as you can imagine.” (12 minutes)
Film 2: Girl No. 60427 - Tel Aviv, 1998, summer vacation. Reut finds and reads her grandmother's secret notebook from the Holocaust. Grandma's story resonates in Reut's well-developed imagination, and the fun week in Tel Aviv with Grandpa and Grandma turns into something else entirely. In this stunning combination of live action and animation, a young director takes us back to her childhood experiences with her own grandmother, whose diary she discovered in a hiding place one summer. (21 minutes)
SESSION 2:
Testimony from our guest speaker, Holocaust Survivor, Malka Levine.
Malka was nearly three when the German invaders forced her family into the Jewish ghetto in Volodymyr-Volynski, a city that was in Poland and is today in Ukraine. Of the 25,000 Jews in the city in 1939, only thirty would survive. Malka's father was shot in the first pogrom, but before he died he begged her mother Rivka to 'save the children'.
Rivka kept Malka and her two older brothers alive through eighteen terrifying months in the ghetto. In the midst of the inhumanity, a few people risked their lives to help. A Wehrmacht officer saved them from being shot, and a Polish dressmaker gave them sanctuary when the SS went hunting for victims. Then Rivka implored Mr and Mrs Yakimchuk, a Ukrainian farmer and his saintly wife, to hide her and the children. The Yakimchuks agreed, and kept to their word even after the SS commandeered the farm. They dug a pit under their barn, and there Malka's family stayed through the freezing winter and into the summer until the Red Army came. At the end of the year, Rivka was forced to draw on her strength yet again, as she set out to create a new life for her and her children.
Her story will be followed by a question-and-answer session chaired by Professor Gideon Reuveni, Director of The Sussex Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies.
After her session, Malka Levine will be signing copies of her book ‘A Mothers Courage’, which will be on sale for £7.
We are most grateful to The Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR) who are generously supporting this event.
Places at this event are strictly limited, so booking is essential.
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