Resources

Eva Clarke BEM was born under unimaginably harrowing circumstances in the final days of World War II. Her birth, on 29 April 1945, just outside the gates of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, came just one day after the Nazis had run out of gas for the chambers and less than a week before liberation by the US Army.

Li-Da Kruger, an award-winning filmmaker and producer, was born in Cambodia in 1974. She was evacuated from her homeland as a young baby, just days before the Khmer Rouge orchestrated the genocide that claimed around two million lives between 1975 and 1979

Mala Tribich MBE was born Mala Helfgott in 1930 in Piotrkow, Poland. She was the second of three children with an older brother Ben, and a younger sister Lusia. Her early childhood was lost to the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. Mala and her family were forced into the Piotrkow Trybunalski ghetto – the first Nazi ghetto established in Poland. Life there was marked by overcrowding, severe malnutrition and the constant fear of deportation.

By the age of 30, Peter Lantos had endured the horrors of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, lost most of his family, suffered abuse at the hands of Hungary’s Communist police, earned a medical degree and defected to England.

Yisrael Abelesz was just 14 years old when he was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most infamous of all Nazi camps. Whilst there he escaped selection for the gas chambers and survived typhoid and a death march.

Dorit Oliver-Wolff BEM was just five years old when war came to her home country of Yugoslavia. She spent the following years moving from one hiding place to another, and narrowly escaped imprisonment on a number of occasions. After recovering from her experiences during the Holocaust she moved to Germany and became a star.

Sabina had a happy childhood in Bosnia until the Bosnian War forced her family to flee the country. The family went at first to Slovenia, before they were finally resettled in the UK. Now living in Scotland, Sabina is a social justice campaigner focused on the rights of refugees and people with lived experience of homelessness. She is the Vice Chair of Beyond Srebrenica, a charity dedicated to raising awareness of the Bosnian genocide and promoting tolerance in Scotland.

Marianne Grant was a young artist from Prague. Having survived Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the final days of Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, using her skills as an artist to survive, she came to Glasgow where she raised her family.

Tomi Komoly, born in Budapest in 1936, survived the Holocaust in hiding with his Mother. Post-war, he struggled under Communist rule, leading Tomi to escape to Austria in 1956. He completed his education, reunited with his mother, and was awarded a British Empire Medal in 2020 for his contributions to Holocaust education.

Alfred Garwood was born in a Nazi ghetto, imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, and later put on a train destined for Terezin Concentration Camp, when he and his family were liberated by the Red Army. Alfred spent the rest of his childhood in Britain and grew up in the centre of a community of Holocaust survivors. He has since written extensively on the psychological implications of trauma relating to genocide whilst also working as a General Practitioner.