A survivor on Friday urged the world to “never forget” the horrors of the Holocaust amid the surge in antisemitism in London.
Speaking ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day on Saturday, Freddy Berdach, 93, who lives in Pinner, north-west London, said the world must continue to be vigilant as he warned that hatred against minority groups was “still happening”.
The great-grandfather said: "All the talks I give, I always end with one line: ‘Forgive but never forget.’
"And that’s the only way we can remember is marking the day, making it a solemn day, and letting people know. Because it’s still happening, and not just the Jewish people, there’s Holocaust all over the world, and it’s still happening and we need to highlight this.”
Figures show antisemitic hate crimes recorded by the Metropolitan Police in the wake of Hamas’s October attack on Israel were more than 13 times the number for the same period in 2022. A total of 679 offences were recorded from October 7 to November 7, 2023, compared with 50 in the equivalent period the previous year and 81 in 2021.
There was also a sharp jump in Islamophobic offences, with 258 recorded in the month following October 7, compared with 73 in 2022 and 72 in 2021.
Mr Berdach was born in Vienna in 1930, but his childhood changed when the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938. He told the Standard: “The first time I knew things had changed was that the following day the headmaster came into my class and said, ‘All the Jewish boys, get out, and don’t bother to come back’.”
He vividly remembers the terror of Kristallnacht in November 1938, the wave of vicious Nazi pogroms launched against Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues.
“The noise was terrible,” he said. “And the one lasting memory I have of that time is abject fear. You cannot believe how frightened I was, or people generally. They intended that, they wanted us frightened."
The family was forced to flee and were reunited in Britain just weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War.
“A few of the family managed to escape, but the vast majority of my father’s family, eight, were taken to the camps,” said Mr Berdach, who works with the Holocaust Educational Trust to give talks about his experiences in schools.
Meanwhile, another Holocaust survivor called on people to “stand up against hatred and prejudice”. Ivan Shaw, 84, from Highgate, north London, was just five when he was saved by his aunt from a train bound for Auschwitz.
Karen Pollock, Chief Executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said it was “more important than ever” to remember that anti-Jewish racism didn’t start or end with the Holocaust “as antisemitism once again sweeps across the globe.”
“When the concentration camps of Europe were liberated, the reality of the Nazi attempt to eradicate world Jewry became clear,” she said.
“In newspapers, cinema and radio broadcasts the atrocities were laid bare. The phrase ‘Never Again’ was coined, reflecting the hope that the Holocaust would forever represent the ultimate result of anti-Jewish hatred; a warning signal for generations to come of where unchecked antisemitism could lead.”
