Resources

Iby Knill recounts her experiences during the Holocaust.

Our Memory Makers project paired Holocaust and genocide survivors with nine British artists, who responded to their stories with works of art for Holocaust Memorial Day 2015. Holocaust survivor Eve Kugler met poet Sarah Hesketh.

Vera Schaufeld MBE, formerly Vera Lowyova, was saved by a man who refused to stand by, Sir Nicholas Winton. She was born in Prague in 1930. In May 1939, following the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, Vera was told that she must move to England on her own. She was only nine years old.

Avram and Vera were drawn by artist Gideon Summerfield as part of his project From Generation to Generation (L’Dor V’Dor). Avram and Vera are both survivors of the Holocaust and were married for 62 years.

In May 1939 the SS St Louis left the port of Hamburg in Germany and set sail for Havana in Cuba. On board were 937 Jewish passengers. They were German Jews fleeing Nazi persecution and hoping to start new lives. They planned to seek asylum in Cuba. This 2011 education case study tells the story of the passengers and Captain Gustav Schroeder.

Joan Salter MBE is a child survivor of the Holocaust. Born Fanny Zimetbaum in Brussels on 15 February 1940 to Polish Jewish parents, she was three months old when Belgium was invaded by the Nazis.

Born in 1900 in Buchach (which is now in Ukraine), Emanuel Ringelblum became a history teacher in Warsaw after completing his PhD on the history of the Jews of medieval Warsaw. He married Yehudis, and they had a little boy, Uri.

The 6 million + installation, which contains over six million buttons, has caught the imagination of thousands of people, inspiring a Yorkshire local authority to build the region’s first permanent Holocaust memorial.

Irena Sendlerowa was a social worker in Warsaw, who directed a children’s rescue group to smuggle Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto, providing them with false papers and placing them with substitute Polish families. Records that Irena kept showed that she was able to save nearly 2,500 children from certain death under the Nazis.

Bob Kirk was born in Hanover, Germany in 1925. In 1933 the Nazis came to power and everything changed for Bob and his family. After the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, at the age of 13, Bob travelled to the UK alone on the Kindertransport.