Haven for Holocaust refugees (From Times Series)

Haven for Holocaust refugees

11:29am Wednesday 26th January 2005 in

• Skip social links
• Print
• Email
•  

A centre in Hendon provides a lifeline for Holocaust survivors who for years could not come to terms with the suffering they experienced. In the week of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp, ALEX GALBINSKI found out about its work and met some of its members

For years concentration camp survivors who had lived through unimaginable horrors in Nazi-occupied Europe had no way of dealing with their pain or learning how to speak of their experiences.

But then a centre was set up in the borough to offer a social lifeline, as well as therapy, to those Jewish refugees who had started arriving in the UK after Kristallnacht the Night of Broken Glass' when Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues in Germany were attacked, looted and burned in November 1938.

Judith Hassan, 58, who trained as a social worker, has spent the past 25 years developing, with survivors, a way to address the traumas suffered by people who experienced starvation, torture and the murder of close family members.

The result is the Holocaust Survivors' Centre (HSC), based in Hendon and run by the charity Jewish Care, which offers its 600 members social activities including art workshops, creative writing classes and theatre outings. It also runs a drop-in cafe for informal get-togethers and hosts festive meals.

For many survivors, whose families died in the Holocaust, this is invaluable.

"The idea of time as the healer was a naive assumption," said Ms Hassan. "It proved a false comforter as horrific memories came flooding back as the survivors grew older.

"A bereavement, retirement or loss of health could trigger memories of the massive losses experienced in the Holocaust, including losses of entire families and communities."

Twenty-five years ago, Jewish Care's predecessor, the Jewish Welfare Board, recognised the need for survivors to support each other and feel a sense of belonging. On the whole, the few who sought professional help were not understood.

"Listening to survivors became the key to creating new and innovative ways of working with the delayed effects of their severe traumas," said Ms Hassan, whose book A House Next Door to Trauma was published in 2003.

Adjoining the HSC is Shalvata meaning Peace of Mind' in Hebrew a specialist therapy and social work centre for survivors, refugees and their families. The centre also records the testimonies of survivors.

As well as Holocaust survivors, it has also helped refugees from war-torn Bosnia to adapt to life in the UK.

Leon Greenman OBE, who was born in London's East End and now lives in Ilford, has been a member of the Holocaust Survivors' Centre since it opened. He explained: "It's good to be amongst survivors of the Nazi camps, and later on, the children, the kindertransport became members."

Mr Greenman, 94, spent three years in six concentration camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, and made a vow to relate his experiences if he got out alive. He started talking publicly about the camps from March 1946 and now speaks in schools and to members of the public each Sunday at the Jewish Museum in Finchley.

He is the only English Jew to have gone to Auschwitz. Mr Greenman's maternal grandparents had arrived in London after fleeing widescale persecution in Russia. But when he was five, the family moved to Rotterdam. Having failed to leave when the Nazis invaded, he was taken to Westerbork concentration camp in October 1942, and then Auschwitz, where his wife, Else, and their two-year-old son, Barnett Barney', were murdered.

"I arrived with 700 people," he said. "Only two survived me and another man who has since died."

He also survived a 92km death march from Auschwitz to Gleiwitz, before being transported in open cattle trucks to Buchenwald camp, from which he was liberated.

Speaking of the benefits of the HSC, he said: "Camp survivors all had the same life and I think it is good to be amongst these people. You have somewhere to go to for a few hours. I need to talk about my experiences to make sure it doesn't happen again.

"In the centre you are accepted as a survivor. I find it good to go and talk to other people who had the same life. Outside on the street, who knows you? Nobody. Some people go to the pub, I come here."

Renee and her husband Charles Salt, from Hendon, have been members for around eight years.

Born in Zdunska Vola in Poland, about 40km from Lodz, Mrs Salt was forced to move into the town's ghetto in 1939 at the age of ten with her family and was put to work in a factory making shoes until the ghetto was closed in 1942. After being put into another ghetto, she was transported to Auschwitz.

From there, Mrs Salt, now 75, was sent to work as a slave labourer in Hamburg, before being moved to Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, when the Germans realised they were losing the war. Her mother died two days after being taken into the camp hospital upon liberation.

Mrs Salt became secretary to the camp survivors' group at the HSC and has been there ever since.

"It is comfortable to be with other survivors," she said. "We have a lot in common. When you go there, no matter what the conversation is, you always end up talking about the war."

Mr Salt, 87, who was born in Stepney, east London, was a member of the British Army and one of the 17 British volunteers to liberate Belsen, although he only met his wife in 1949.

Referring to many members of the HSC, he said: "They live on their own and they never see a person. At the centre they can meet people and have a good lunch."

Mrs Salt added: "For some, it's a home from home, it's a God-send. They come and spend a few hours. One member told me that life wouldn't be worth living if she didn't have the centre."

Those who attend the centre appreciate the opportunity to talk to and meet others who can understand exactly what they have gone through.

Another Auschwitz survivor, Roman Halter, described the HSC as bringing relief into the dark crevices of our spirit'.

Mrs Salt herself did not speak about what happened to her in the Holocaust for 50 years afterwards.

"I couldn't talk about it it was too painful," she said. "And when I came to this country, people didn't want to hear about it. I didn't even speak about it with Charles, and he saw as much as I did in Bergen-Belsen. When anyone talked about Belsen, he had tears running down his face."

To contact the Holocaust Survivors' Centre call 020 8202 9844.