Each year, over 100,000 young people hear from a Holocaust survivor through the Holocaust Educational Trust. Survivors like Joan Salter MBE and Janine Webber BEM – who kindly shared their stories with GLAMOUR – have dedicated their lives to sharing their darkest traumas for the benefit of humanity and to ensure that antisemitism and xenophobia are stamped out wherever they arise.
A video of Joan recently went viral (with over 5 million views and counting) after she asked Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, to apologise for using dehumanising language – such as “invasion” and “swarms” – to refer to migrants. Braverman refused, saying, “I won’t apologise for the language that I have used to demonstrate the scale of the problem. I see my job as being honest with the British people and honest for the British people."
The theme of this year's Holocaust Memorial Day is “ordinary people” as “ordinary people were the ones who made brave decisions to rescue, to hide or stand up [during the Holocaust]. But ordinary people also made decisions to ignore what was going on around them, to be bystanders, to allow the genocide to continue,” according to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.
Karen Pollock CBE, Chief Executive, Holocaust Educational Trust told GLAMOUR, “Holocaust survivors share their darkest memories in order for young people to learn about the past. They describe the murder of the families and their time in the concentration and death camps of Europe, for the benefit of all humanity. They are indomitable and we are unendingly grateful to them.”
Listening to survivor testimony is vital for ordinary people to learn lessons from the past, whether it's calling out stigmatising language – as Joan brilliantly demonstrated – or educating future generations about the history of antisemitism.
Joan's story:
My parents were Polish Jews who lived mainly in Paris for most of their adult life. They married in 1938. And my mother was a widow with a six-year-old when they were married. However, as soon as Poland was invaded...
My father was a very get-up-and-go sort of chap, the black sheep of the family. That's why they kicked him out and sent him to Western Europe. And he knew that France would be invaded.
However, initially, he had been in Belgium. His family apprenticed him to a distant cousin in diamond cutting, so he had been in Belgium for some time. However, he wasn't the type that appreciated being an apprentice. He went and lived in Paris, and he actually got into the fashion business.
And then he'd go back to Poland where his family had this workshop. He would copy Paris fashion, and go back to his family. He was from Tarnow, which is a large town not far from Kraków. And he'd bring back clothing and he'd sell it in the markets. And by 1938, he was quite established and well-off.
He thought Belgium would stay neutral, so my mother, my father, and my half-sister moved to Belgium. And I was born in February 1940. Whenever I give a talk, I say to kids, so how old do you think I am? And some brave soul says “82?”
Belgium was invaded when I was three months old. My father was taken. And it's a long complicated story, but basically, they were only targeting men only at that time. My father was actually deported to, probably, Auschwitz, but he jumped on a train. And in the beginning, they were sent on ordinary passenger trains.
He then went into hiding in Paris with a cousin. And my mother was eventually given permission by the Belgian police, she needed a travel pass. We lived with some of my aunts, who were married in Paris to French professionals with French nationality. We remained Polish, of course, even though I'd never stepped into Poland until I was well in my 50s.
Long story short, we lived a relatively peaceful life for two years. However, we had to sign every week with the police. And in July 1942, my mother went with my sister and me to register. And the police warned us that we were due to be in a roundup. And this became known as the Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup.
It was the first time women and children were rounded up. The mothers were sent to one camp, the children to another. We were smuggled out into Vichy, which was still unoccupied, so-called. We were with my father for a little while. He had escaped because there'd been another roundup in 1941, but he was nearly caught up within Paris.
Then he was taken to a camp in the south. Again, he escaped, went over the mountains, the Pyrenees, into Spain. He sent the guide back for us, but we didn't turn up. Vichy fell. He thought that we'd gone.
He managed to get to the British Embassy in Portugal. And as a Pole, he was able to join the British forces. He came to England in '43. We did climb over the mountains, but we were captured at the border, but the Spanish let us in. However, the expectation was Spain was going to fall. My mother was told, "If Spain falls, there's only water left."
The British government refused to take us. And the Americans actually took until November '42, after Vichy had fallen. And then, my mother did give us up, but we were Polish, and the Americans had quotas. I actually interviewed the woman who was the lawyer we had... And she said she had 500 visas for children. However, the visas were for French Jewish children. And I've found a telegram that the American Consul in Barcelona refused to allow us on because, technically we were Poles.
In June 1943, my sister and I sailed with a small group, and landed in America. She had a different surname. She was ill, and they knew her father had died of tuberculosis. And America, my God, if somebody was ill. Anyway. She was put in the hospital. I was put in an orphanage, and I was fostered. I was four at that stage.
Basically, they changed my name and they told me I was adopted, which of course, didn't really mean anything. I came home from school one day, a little American girl. My language was changed. My name was changed. My original name was Fanny Zimetbaum. I now was Joan Farrell. And I was put on a plane to come to England, to people I had no memory of, no understanding of what was going on. They were completely broken, all their family. My father had one sister remaining. But all my grandparents, all my aunts and uncles and cousins were gone.
I actually trained in the East End in a Jewish settlement. What would it be called? A community centre. I was 19. I became a youth leader and community worker. I was then headhunted by the Inner London Education Authority, and I became a youth community officer there.
I went to the London School of Economics and did a Social Science and Public Admin. My work was so problem-orientated, I actually started writing, which I enjoyed doing. Then people started being involved in Holocaust education. And I started speaking and got involved. Now I'm a trustee of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.
And then, I did a Master's in Holocaust and Genocide. And I've done the research, so when I speak, it's not just my story. I bring in the politics that was going on and facts. I think it's very important. Because [inaudible 00:11:07]. Everyone thinks, oh, Britain was wonderful because of the Kindertransport. Politics is politics, as we know. It never changes.
That's my story.
Janine's story:
I was nine during the war. I was born in 1932, so I'm 90 now. I was born in eastern Poland in a town called Lvov, now Ukraine. It's not Poland anymore; it's called Lviv.
I had a very big family because on my mother's side, there were 10 brothers and sisters, and most of my family perished. When the Germans came, they started shooting people, not the north, but our eastern Poland and eventually they found that the soldiers who were shooting children couldn't stand it. So they decided to send them to concentration camps [instead].
So they built one in the north, actually, Janowska, and there were two death camps in eastern Poland as well.
I was in the ghetto, I spent a lot of it in hiding. The longest was under the ground, in a hole underground, for about 10 months or a year. But then I had enough with life actually. This young woman, she was 18, she managed to get me some false papers. So, with those paper, I travelled around Poland, and eventually, I found a job at 11 and a half as a maid. And so I lived with people who hired me out also to work for another family because they didn't know I was Jewish.
Then the war stopped, when I arrived at the village I was working as a maid, now going to church, and I did my communion and everything. I wrote to the Polish man who hid 14 Jews, I wrote to him to give him my address, and he gave it to my aunt, who came to fetch me.
After the war in Poland, there was still a lot of antisemitism. I was put in a children's home for Jewish children, but people in the town where we lived, knowing that there were Jewish children, threw stones at us. So they decided, as a result of this, to leave, and we left for Paris. And the idea was that they would take the children to Israel. My aunt was with us; she didn't want to go to Israel. And I had a cousin who also managed to stay in hiding, so my aunt asked us what we wanted to do. If we wanted to go to Israel with the children, or, she was staying in Paris, she was only about 19, she was young, and she wanted to go to university.
We both said we wanted to be where she was, she was our only family, really. So she put us in a children's home for French children. So I went to school and my education is French and I speak French as well, you see. When I was 24, I studied English for many years, but my English wasn't very good. So I decided to come to England for a few months to improve my English, and I met an English man.
And eventually we got married, and I had two sons, and two grandsons. So we went, before we had the children we went back to Paris and we lived there for a while, but my English husband didn't find it... Well, his French wasn't very good, so couldn't find a job. So eventually he came back to England, and I've been in England since then.
I was happily married and I have wonderful sons, two sons, and my grandsons, they are lovely. They are so good to me.
Joan Salter MBE and Janine Webber BEM share their testimonies in schools and colleges across the UK through the Holocaust Educational Trust’s Outreach Programme, which gives tens of thousands of young people every year the unique opportunity to hear the first hand testimony of Holocaust survivors. The Holocaust Educational Trust works in schools, colleges, workplaces and communities across the UK, ensuring that everyone everywhere has the opportunity to learn about the Holocaust. Find out more about the work of the Trust at www.het.org.uk.
