Holocaust Memorial Day: 'Be the light in the Darkness'

Trude Silman is life President of the Holocaust survivors friendship association, she's 91, and is still on a quest to find out what happened to her mother. 

She was just nine-years-old when she fled Czechoslovakia to safety with her aunt and she's made her life in Leeds.

As the world marks Holocaust Memorial day this year, it is being done differently because of the pandemic.

Across the Calendar region many remembrance services have moved online to commemorate the devastation of six million Jews killed during the Holocaust, alongside the millions of others who lost their lives under Nazi persecution and in genocides that followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.

Each year a theme is chosen for the day and for 2021 it is 'Be the light in the darkness'. The theme is intended to encourage "everyone to reflect on the depths humanity can sink to, but also the ways individuals and communities resisted that darkness to 'be the light' before, during and after genocide."

  • Sheffield

The usual commemorative event held at Sheffield's Winter Garden cannot take place. Instead, event organisers are planning to host and stream this year's ceremony online which will be available to watch for free.Sheffield's Town Hall clock face will also be lit up in the colour purple, the Holocaust Memorial Day branding colour, as a nod to this year's theme.

You can watch the event here at 5:30pm today.

  • Bradford

Local authority leaders, faith representatives and local people involved in community projects will share reflections, candle lighting and stories depicted through puppetry. This is the first time that Bradford Council and Kirklees Council have come together with the other partners for this joint commemoration.

Iby Knill, 97-year-old survivor of Auschwitz, will light the first candle of remembrance from home. She says: "I was there in the darkness of the Holocaust. Walk towards the light and take people with you."You can watch the event here now.

  • Leeds

Young people from the Carriageworks Young Theatre Makers, Breeze Arts Foundation at Leeds Playhouse, Opera North Youth Chorus and Pyramid Arts have worked together to increase their knowledge of Holocaust Memorial Day and have recorded a performance reading of WH Auden’s poem ‘Refugee Blues’ which will be included in the online event.

There will be also be a reading of the seven statements of commitments with candles lit by representatives of the different groups persecuted, including Holocaust survivors, people with additional needs, the LGBT+ community and Remembering Srebrenica.

You can watch the event here now.

The 27th of January is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz Concentration Camp in 1945, when the world finally witnessed the scale of the horror inside.