Ashfield Today, UK
February 2, 2005
Holocaust survivor shares memories at memorial event
A HOLOCAUST survivor now living in Sutton recounted his childhood
memories of the genocide at a special memorial event on Sunday.
Simon Winston spoke to an audience of more than 100 people at
Kirkby’s Festival Hall in an event organised by Ashfield District
Council to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.
Last Thursday signalled the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the
notorious Auschwitz deathcamp, where more than a million Jews were
killed by the Nazis during the Second World War.
Simon (66) was just a small boy living in Poland when the genocide
began, but still has vivid memories of the persecution of Polish Jews
under the Nazi regime.
He and his family survived by hiding from the German authorities, but
many other Jews in his home town of Radzivillov were not so
fortunate.
Simon told Chad one of the main themes of his speech was how the
lessons of the Holocaust have still not been learned.
“After the Holocaust the caption was ‘never again’, but that has
fallen on deaf ears,” he said. “We have had lots of genocides since
the Holocaust – Bosnia, Rwanda and more recently Darfur. We need to
tell the leaders of these countries that what they are doing is wrong
and what they are doing is genocide.”
As part of the Holocaust memorials last week, Simon travelled to a
high-profile ceremony in London where he met the Queen and spoke to
other Holocaust survivors. He told Sunday’s audience of the
significance of that day for many of them.
“I met a lot of survivors who had more horrendous histories than I
had got,” he said. “Many were saying who would have thought that 60
years on they would be shaking hands with the Queen?”
Sherwood MP Paddy Tipping also spoke to the audience about a genocide
which took place in Europe during the First World War.
Around 1.5m people in Armenia were killed in 1915-18 during a
territory dispute with the Ottoman Empire. Many of the victims were
taken into the Syrian Desert and left there without food and water to
die.
There are close links between Ashfield and Armenia because the poet
Lord Byron, who once lived at Newstead Abbey, was a hero figure there
and many refugees relocated to Nottinghamshire. Even 90 years on,
efforts are still on-going to get the Turkish Government to
acknowledge that what happened to the Armenians was genocide.
Mr Tipping said people and politicians must put pressure on
Governments which deny genocide is taking place ? like the slaughter
happening in the Darfur region of Sudan today.
He told Chad: “I was keen to say to people at the meeting that we can
make a difference. We should not deny these things happen, we should
get onto the backs of politicians and say it is completely
unacceptable.”
Simon added: “I was very pleased with the response of the audience,
and particularly the questions they asked. I was also very impressed
with Paddy Tipping’s speech about the Armenian genocide.
“I was able to point out to him that it is worth recollecting that
when Hitler initiated his extermination policy against the Jews he is
reported to have said: ‘Who remembers the Armenians?’ In other words,
it was alright to kill the Jews because one day nobody would even
notice they were gone.”