‘Never give up hope’: Holocaust survivors light candles on remembrance day

Almost 1 000 pupils from 11 schools across Gauteng converged on Johannesburg’s Westpark Cemetery for the annual observance of Holocaust Day or Yom HaShoah on Monday.

Holocaust survivors mark Yom HaShoah

Johannesburg-based Holocaust survivor Miriam Lazarus led the traditional survivor’s testimony, saying “in a world where Holocaust denial is so rampant it is vital that the survivors speak out so that the Holocaust can never ever happen again”.

Of the 6 million who had perished in the Holocaust, 1.5 million had been children; their only crime being that they were Jews, she said. Lazarus was born in a ghetto, when her pregnant mother refused to abort her at six months and instead smuggled her in with her.

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Born blond and blue-eyed, her father was able to place her with a Lithuanian family, managing to reunite with her after the war where he had been in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Her mother and older sister died in the Dachau death camp.

“My sister was too Jewish to be saved,” she said. “Her life had value, my father’s life had value. My life, my three sons, my three daughters-in-law and my 10 grandchildren’s lives have value. Be human, always fight for what is right,” she said.

Welcoming guests to the service, Howard Jacobs, the chair of the Gauteng Council of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, said Yom HaShoah had a particular significance following the attack on Israel on October 7 last year. “It brings to the surface the scars of millennia of antisemitism and the Holocaust,” he said.

‘You smelt the gas’

Irene Fainman, who was only six years old when she was deported from Holland and sent to the first of two concentration camps before being rescued by the Swedish Red Cross at the end of war, lit the first of the six candles commemorating the Jews slain in the Holocaust.

She was followed by retired Johannesburg civil engineer Lyonell Fliss, one of the last living survivors of the Lași pogrom in Romania. Fliss was followed by Lia Stermer, who was born in a concentration camp in 1942, in what is today Ukraine; and then Irene Klass who survived the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto. 

Paul Herskovits, who was slipped off an extermination train at the age of 21 years old, lit the fifth candle. His parents were sent to the death camp and he was hidden in the Budapest Ghetto. Rabbi Joseph Matzner lit the final candle. He was forced to hide, first in the forests of Vichy, France, and then for three years in a convent and then with a Catholic family, before being reunited with his family.

The final testimony was offered by Rena Quint in a video testimony she recorded with SAJBD national director Wendy Kahn. Born in Poland and interned in a concentration camp by the age of five, Rena Quint would lose six mother figures by the time she was 10 – all murdered by the Nazis.

“In Majdanek and in Auschwitz,” she remembered, “you smelt the gas. In Bergen Belsen, you smelt death. Never give up hope.”

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