‘I will never forget or forgive’

HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR: RECALLS DREAD OF NIGHTLY LIST OF DEPORTEES TO DEATH CAMPS >a Cruel SS officers used horsehide whips on the inmates.

- Ian Hughes

Irene Fainman, born Krausz, is a survivor of the Holocaust.

Almost 89, she lives in Rosebank, Johannesburg. Immaculately groomed, the blue-eyed and fair-haired Irene's razor-sharp memory belies her age. Her easy recall of those terrible memories that scarred her childhood indicates their endless repetition - to herself and others - trying to make sense of the unimaginable.

Her early childhood memories were pleasant. Her lightly accented English is the only reminder of her mixed European heritage. Bela, her Hungarian father, was the grandson of a rabbi. “My mother Rachel was English the daughter of Russians who had emigrated to London's East End. She was an English teacher. They married in London and moved to Rotterdam.”

It was there that Fainman was born in October 1935. Their home language was Dutch.

She remembers the constant bombing by the Royal Air Force. “But we would go down to our cellar. I slept quite peacefully.” She can even recall being happy. “Every Friday we would keep Shabat with my father's nine brothers, three of whom survived the Holocaust.”

Those idyllic days ended for the family on 16 September, 1942. “My mother announced that neither my brother Don nor I were going to school that day. “No Jewish children could go to school because of a Dutch Nazi Party ruling.”