http://www.hertfordshiremercury.co.uk/H ... 130014.htm
WHEN Holocaust survivor Harry Bibring came to England on the Kindertransport with his sister in 1939 to escape Nazi-occupied Vienna in Austria, the plan was for his mother and father to join them as soon as possible.
Tragically, that never happened and that was the last time the then 13-year-old Jewish boy saw his parents.
His father, whose menswear store had been looted and smashed up that year, was arrested in 1940 and died of a heart attack in the van he was being taken away in.
His mother died at Sobibor in Poland in 1942, which was one of the concentration camps alongside Auschwitz.
Harry, who gives talks about his life via the Holocaust Educational Trust and was at Hertford’s Richard Hale School last Thursday (February 14), told the Mercury: “It was ignorance that kept me going, and stamina. I didn’t know what had happened to my mother. I knew she was in an extermination camp but we were ignorant of what happened and we thought we would get together after the war and it would get better.
“I was terribly upset when my mother wrote to us and told us my father died, but she didn’t say how.”
Harry, now 87, and his sister Gerty, who died in 2000, were meant to be looked after by the same family, but they were separated and Harry was placed with a headmaster in Peterborough who taught him English.
When he was 14, he started working as an errand boy for the family he was originally meant to be with.
He eventually became a chartered engineer after 14 years of studying and achieving two degrees.
In 1945 Harry met his future wife Muriel and they went on to have a son and two grandchildren. Muriel died in 2009.
He said: “I’ve been compensated for my childhood by a happy life. I’ve been blessed with a wonderful wife, 61 years of marriage, a son who adores me and looks after me and grandchildren who are angels.”
But he is keen to spread the message of the horrors of genocide and said: “The 20th century didn’t learn its lesson from Auschwitz. You would think there would be no genocides after that but it’s ongoing. Hopefully this generation will stop the discrimination.”
Harry, of Bushey Heath, made a strong impression on the Year 9 students who heard his talk.
Matthew Lewis, 13, said: “You always hear about the army but you very rarely think about the people affected by war at home, like the Jews. He showed what it was like to view the war from someone who was our age when it happened, rather than a historian.”
Henry Vincett-Wilson, 14, said: “To see someone like Harry is amazing. I don’t know how he managed to cope. It was quite emotional for me and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet him.”
Year 13 students Ed Kendall, Sam Fowler, and Joy Dasgupta visited Auschwitz last year.
Ed, 18, said: “It was such a surreal day. It was so cold and the camp was huge.
Sam, 17, said: “It brings home how racism and discrimination is completely unacceptable and needs to be eradicated from society.”
Joy, 17, said: “It was so dehumanising. The person running the camp lived by it with their children while at the camp, children were separated from their parents never to see them again. Hopefully nothing as big as this will happen again.”
and this gem here .... Pretty incredible that he was a Jew but was sent to orphanages instead of a camp....
http://www.jaxnews.com/pages/full_story ... =1st_right
Mr. Max Herzel, a Holocaust survivor, spoke with Jacksonville High School’s eighth grade students on Tuesday, February 12. Mr. Herzel was born in 1930 in Antwerp, Begium. Upon the invasion of France, he and his family was sent to the internment camp of Agde and then later to Rivesaltes. The family escaped to Marseilles but was soon separated, and Max was sent to several orphanages and eventually to a remote farm in the French Alps. His father died in Buchenwald concentration camp, but Max was eventually reunited with his brother and mother. He immigrated to the United States in 1948, settled in New York, and served in the US Air Force. he married Cecille Herman in 1955, has two children, and currently resides in Birmingham, where he was an executive with the Veterans Administration Medical Center and a past Lions Club District Governor. Mr. Herzel received a B.A. Degree from Florida State University and attended Graduate School at Sonoma State College in California and Wright State University in Ohio. He also graduated from the Health Services Administrative Development Program from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Mr. Herzel is currently serving as the treasurer of the Alabama Holocuast Commission and of the Birmingham Holocaust Education Center.
Tegan Singleton expressed her thoughts about the program by saying, “It was really interesting how he dealt with the stress and fear of knowing that people were after him and wanted him gone.”Raine Harris said that the best part of the program was “knowing when and how he escaped from the Nazis.”Nic Gangwer’s reaction to the program was “I thought that it was very
brave of him living each day, knowing that one day he may get caught. He lived in fear... it takes a lot of bravery to live each day like that.
Read more: Jacksonville News - Holocaust survivor visits Jacksonville High’s eighth graders
I like to keep up on the various lies errr... Survival Stories... If this out of rules to post these I can stop.. Thought you guys would like to know too...
