‘Memory is the greatest safeguard for the future’ says Chief Rabbi

From left: Grace Loncraine, 15; Mitzi Golsorkhi, 15; Alexandra Gonzalez, 15; Frederick Smith; Shaki Akinjobi, 14; Rudi Oppenheimer and Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

A SURVIVOR of the Nazi death camp at Bergen-Belsen visited a Camden school last week with Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on the 60th anniversary camp’s liberation – and met Frederick Smith, one of the first British soldiers to reach the site in 1945.
Rudi Oppenheimer, a retired engineer from Primrose Hill, told history students at Camden School for Girls in Sandall Road, Camden Town, how his family was rounded up in Amsterdam by the Nazis when he was 12, and taken to the notorious Bergen-Belsen camp.
Around 70,000 people were murdered there – his grandparents and his mother and father among them – but he and his older brother Paul and younger sister Eve survived, taking the last train ever to leave the camp on April 10, later liberated by the Red Army.
The three joined family in London in 1945-1946.
Mr Oppenheimer said: “We were incarcerated because we were Jewish and the world stood by and did nothing.”
He said that attitudes had changed little in the subsequent 60 years.
He said: “Back then, nobody wanted us refugees, all countries closed their borders. Of course it’s nothing new to you, there’s still quota systems. Look at what happened with Bosnia, and what’s happening with Iraq.”
He visited Bergen-Belsen, in Lower Saxony, with his siblings last weekend. He said: “My sister hasn’t been back since we left. I don’t mind so much now. I used to be very angry. But now I just think of it as my parents’ grave.”
Rabbi Sacks, invited to the school by the Holocaust Educational Trust, stressed the importance of commemorating the liberation of the concentration camps.
He said: “Memory is the greatest safeguard for the human future. If all of us remember what has gone before, we can stand up and say no and stop it from happening again.
“Never think that what you can do can’t make a difference – sometimes a slice of bread or even a smile could be enough to save someone.”
Frederick Smith said he would never forget entering Bergen-Belsen.
He said: “You can’t understand the feelings that came over us as we went in. Some people couldn’t walk, they were just skeletons with skin hanging off. And the smell was dreadful.”
Pupil Grace Loncraine, 15, said: “I have started to realise history will never be a thing of the past. When I turn on the TV I see we’re repeating mistakes of the past. Today a car bomb killed 20 in Iraq and it hardly makes the news. Cruelty has become so common it isn’t even interesting any more.”