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MDad is a hero. This is a word that gets thrown around a lot, and it’s no surprise to hear her daughter call her father a hero. But what makes my father different is that tens of thousands of other people think my father, Harry, is also a hero.
Harry Spiro was born in 1929 in Piotków Tribnarski, Poland. He was 10 years old when the Nazis invaded and was immediately forced out of his home with his family and interned in the first ghetto the Nazis established in Poland. He is now 94 years old and a Holocaust survivor.
As a child, my father worked as a slave laborer in a glass factory in the ghetto. One day, while he was at work, his mother (my grandmother), his family, and 22,000 other Jews were removed from the ghetto and sent to the Treblinka extermination camp. Harry never saw them again.
Harry survived the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Römsdorf and endured the death march to Terezin, Czechoslovakia in May 1945. Only 270 people survived that ordeal, and Harry had none left.
Harry came to Britain later that year, one of 732 boys and girls who came to Britain after the Holocaust and settled in Windermere. It was in this small, disparate group of survivors that he formed his life and forged friendships that last to this day. Many of the survivors, including Harry, dedicated their lives to Holocaust education and remembrance. They traveled across the UK week after week, sharing their experiences and paying tribute to families who did not survive. This is why Harry is considered a hero by tens of thousands of people across this country who have heard his story.
I am lucky that Harry is still alive and that I get to see him and his mother Pauline every day. But Harry can no longer speak as much as he would like to at school. He is so frail, yet his determination for the world to learn from the past is as strong as ever. And Harry has two very simple messages: Hitler didn’t win, and don’t hate him. Yes, Harry’s family, my entire family, were murdered in the Holocaust. This family is part of an incomprehensible statistic of 6 million Jewish men, women, and children. But Hitler did not win. Through Harry, my family is here today. Harry has three children, nine grandchildren and even a great-grandchild. And Harry always said to us, and to the thousands of students he met, “I don’t hate you.” He firmly believes that hate never brings anything good. The fact that he said this after everything he had been through is still remarkable to me.
Today, sadly, the number of Holocaust survivors is dwindling and the emptiness they leave behind is immeasurable. In 2023, we lost Gigi Schipper Bem, an Auschwitz survivor and one of my father’s closest friends. We also lost the indomitable Sir Ben Helfgott, Holocaust survivor, Holocaust remembrance advocate and Olympic champion. The giants of our history will not be here forever.
But I am filled with my father’s determination to tell the world what happened and to help young people across the country learn about where anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews ultimately leads. As a Nisei member, my role is to speak at the school every week. To tell the next generation of students about my family, Harry’s experience, and, importantly, that anti-Semitism did not end with his 1945. Today, we are seeing anti-Semitism again in our schools, universities, workplaces, and public squares. There is still work to be done.
On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, I would like to once again address our communities and urge them to remember the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust. If you can’t do that, I urge you to remember my family. But this year I will also ask them to look around and see the anti-Semitism that is ravaging Britain and our entire world. I ask you to do this for me, for Harry, for Gigi, and for Ben. I want you to do this for the next generation and for all of us.
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