Need for Holocaust memorial is more urgent than ever

ANYONE who has had the immense privilege of listening, first hand, to a Holocaust survivor recount their harrowing wartime experiences will know that their shattering testimony carries an urgent imperative: never forget the six million men, women, children and babies murdered in a grotesque act of state-sponsored extermination simply for being Jewish.

- Angela Epstein

Artist's impression of a London Holocaust Memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens

Yet, meeting survivors — as I have had the honour of doing many times over the years through working with a Holocaust memorial charity — carries something beyond grief and remembrance. It yields an overwhelming sense of awe.

How is it possible to be in the same room as someone who knows what it is to be crammed on to a cattle truck, dehumanised in the concentration camps, separated from beloved parents or siblings with the casually cruel flick of an SS officer's hand, or to have seen the black smoke of the crematoria spiralling into the night sky?

I remember one remarkable gentleman rolling up his sleeve to reveal the number that had been inked on to his arm on arrival at Auschwitz. With his permission, I asked if I could touch the tattoo — perhaps an instinctive, futile desire to stroke away the pain. But also to grasp, physically, the connection between myself, a Jewish woman who, born decades after the war, escaped the Holocaust, and those who did not.