27 June 08 – On Saturday 5 July, 88-year-old Trude Levi will visit The Holocaust Centre, home of the Aegis Trust, as the first of this year’s summer weekend survivor speakers.
She will take her listeners back – 64 years to the day – to the last journey she and her parents shared; five days and five nights, packed in a cattle-truck headed for Europe’s most notorious death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“There was little air. People became hysterical, screamed, went mad; some had heart attacks and died,” she says. “On the sixth day we arrived in Auschwitz. My mother had collapsed and had to be dragged out.” It was the last time Trude would see either her father or mother alive.
Used as a slave labourer in a munitions plant, Trude was among thousands of Auschwitz inmates forced onto the so-called ‘death marches’ back towards Germany as the Allies advanced. At the river Elbe on 23 April 1944, her 21st Birthday, Trude collapsed. “I knew this was the end and I no longer cared,” she says. “Two guards came. They butted me with their guns and then one of them said, “Oh, leave her, she isn’t worth a bullet any more.”
Trude Levi is one of only two Auschwitz survivors speaking during The Holocaust Centre’s 2008 summer weekend survivor talks. She will be followed on Sunday 6th July by Nottingham resident and Child refugee from Nazi-occupies Czechoslovakia Bob Norton, whose parents managed to secure visas for the USA – and transit visas for the UK. Arriving in England in July 1939, war broke out before they could cross the Atlantic.
Other speakers will include Susi Bechoffer, who came to the UK with the ‘Kindertransport’, 10,000 Jewish children given refuge without their parents in 1938-39; Trude Silman, who also came as a child refugee fleeing the Nazis; and Val and Ibi Ginsburg, who respectively survived Dachau and Auschwitz.
This series of talks will see survivors speaking at The Holocaust Centre 1.00pm every Saturday and Sunday throughout July. All members of the public are welcome to attend.
The Holocaust Centre is open to the public 10.00am – 5.00pm, seven days a week to the end of August (but is closed from Monday 28 July to Friday 1 August for building work).
8 September will see the launch of a new permanent exhibition at The Holocaust Centre. Entitled ‘The Journey’, it will focus on the experience of children and take Holocaust education to students as young as nine. Additional installations will also open at The Holocaust Centre on 8 September.
The provisional schedule for the summer talks programme is as follows:
Sat 5th July – Trude Levi
Sunday 6th July – Bob Norton
Saturday 12th July – Susi Bechoffer
Sunday 13th July – Ibi and Val Ginsburg
Saturday 19th July – Susi Bechoffer
Sunday 20th July – Bob Norton
Saturday 26th July – Trude Silman
Sunday 27th July – Bob Norton
