Leeds marked this year's Holocaust Memorial Day on Sunday with a keynote speech by the son of the man dubbed ‘Britain’s Schindler’
Holocaust Memorial day 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
The Leeds memorial event, hosted by the Lord Mayor of Leeds, Councillor Abigail Marshall Katung, took place at City Varieties and had the theme ‘For a Better Future’.
Nick Winton, son of Sir Nicholas ‘Nicky’ Winton MBE, spoke of the role his father played in organising the rescue of 669 mostly Jewish refugee children from Czechoslovakia, whose families had fled persecution by Nazi Germany. Due to the similarities in helping those suffering under Nazi persecution, Sir Nicholas is often compared to the German industrialist, Oscar Schindler.
Sir Nicolas’s heroism on the eve of the Second World War went nearly unnoticed for half a century until the British television programme ‘That’s Life’ highlighted his achievements and reunited him with some of those he saved. A major film, ‘One Life’, starring Anthony Hopkins, was released in 2023 based on Sir Nicholas’s story.
The annual Holocaust Memorial Day event is part of a wider international day of remembrance. The day focuses on the six million Jewish men, women and children killed in the Holocaust, together with people from other minority groups that died through Nazi persecution. The day also remembers those people murdered in subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.
This year’s event has a special poignance in being the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp in Poland in January 1945 and the 30th anniversary of the genocide in Bosnia. To mark the anniversaries, The Opera North Youth Chorus, the junior performing wing at Opera North, worked with writer Tom Hastings to create a piece that embodies this year’s theme using contemporary source material as the basis for this original writing. The music that accompanies the writing was all selected from composers who lost their lives in the Auschwitz camps.
The proceedings concluded with a reading of the seven statements of commitments, with candles lit by representatives of the different groups persecuted in the Holocaust and in the subsequent genocides which followed. A memorial prayer was sung to close the event.
The Lord Mayor of Leeds, Councillor Abigail Marshall Katung, said: “It has been a great honour to host Leeds Holocaust Memorial Day as we mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and welcome Nick Winton to Leeds.
“The story of Sir Nicolas Winton is an inspiration in how the selflessness of a single person can impact so many lives.
“As we remember the horrors of the Holocaust and the other genocides that have happened since, we learn why the virtues of peace and tolerance are so important.
“Through acts of remembrance and by educating ourselves on the consequences of hate, we learn to challenge intolerance in all its forms and to accept and celebrate our differences.”
Leader of Leeds City Council Councillor James Lewis said: “As a multicultural global city, we take the opportunity each year on Holocaust Memorial Day to remind ourselves of the consequences of hate, racism, and xenophobia of all kinds and to stand shoulder to shoulder as one community.
“Holocaust Memorial Day also plays an important role in reaffirming our commitment to stopping the inhumanity of genocide in the future and building bonds of trust between our many and varied communities here in Leeds.”
In 2024, secondary school students in Leeds learning about the impact of the Holocaust became the first in Britain to experience a groundbreaking online live-guided tour of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial in Poland, the site of the infamous former concentration and extermination camp.
Funding for the first year of the programme was made possible thanks to individual councillors who used some of their community funding allowances to raise necessary fees.
Leeds took part in a trial of the virtual tour system in May 2023, following the then Lord Mayor, Councillor Robert W. Gettings’ visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial in November 2022. A reciprocal visit to Leeds by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation chief executive, Wojciech Soczewica, took place in January 2023 in which Mr Soczewica met Leeds City Council’s executive member for economy, culture, and education Councillor Jonathan Pryor to discuss the project.
For those wanting to learn more about the Holocaust, Leeds Libraries have also curated a list of Holocaust Memorial Day-related books that can be accessed here: https://shorturl.at/JUCjw
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