A former Newcastle teacher is returning to the city to share the story of her father's gruelling experience in concentration camps as part of events to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day.
Marta Josephs will speak in Newcastle this January about her late dad Andrew Frankel, a Hungarian Jew who survived two camps in Austria and later settled with his young family in England. Former chemistry teacher Marta, who has given talks here before but is no longer based in the regon, will be telling her father's story at Discovery Museum as part of a free programme of events.
Her talk will be on Holocaust Memorial Day itself, January 26, and she said: “It is very hard to tell dad’s story as he died not long after I started telling it. Talking about my wonderful father always makes me very emotional, but I feel the burden of the second generation to keep telling these stories so what the survivors went through stands as a warning to future generations."
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Andrew Frankel endured the Mauthausen and Gunskirchen concentration camps in Austria. He went on to flee the country with his family during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.
Marta added: “After the Holocaust, we the Jewish people thought that nothing like this could ever happen again and that antisemitism on that scale would never happen again. Yet less than 100 years later antisemitism is on the rise again here and in the rest of Europe as well as in America, Canada, and the Middle East."
She quoted late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, saying: "Antisemitism is like the canary in the coal mine. It warns the world that there is something very wrong with society as a whole and we ignore this warning at our peril."
Free tickets are available for the 2.30pm talk at Discovery Museum whose day of fee events, focusing on Jewish heritage, are part of Newcastle City Council’s wider Holocaust Memorial Day programme. It also will be available to view as a livestream.
Kylea Little, keeper of history at the museum said: "We’re grateful to Marta for sharing the painful story of her father and her family’s courage with us and looking forward to showing our new display featuring archive material from two Jewish Heritage projects in the North East.”
These are the Lahav Jewish Heritage Project and Unlocking North East Jewish Heritage which are to feature in a display called Shalom! opening at the museum on the same day, January 26. Tyne & Wear Archives also will be hosting an archive tour so that people can look at material relating to the region’s Jewish heritage.
Ordinary people are this year's theme for Holocaust Memorial Day's commemoration: raising awareness of the fact that as well as being victims, it was ordinary people who were involved as perpetrators, bystanders, witnesses and also rescuers during the Holocaust and also in the genocides that took place in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur.
Tickets for Marta's talk - and for the museum tour - are free but booking is essential. The talk will take place from 2.30pm to 3.30pm and to book to attend see here. There is also the option to watch it via a live-stream session and those wanting to book online can do so here.
For more information about the tour, whose online option is already sold out, see here. Further details about this year's Holocaust Memorial Day see Newcastle City Council's website.
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