'Eighty years ago I saw where hate can lead... yet here we are, in 2025, still facing the same hatred'

THE whirlwind of antisemitic hate hitting Britain frightens Holocaust survivor Mala Tribich, because she knows where it leads.

- Giles Sheldrick

The Nazi death camp inmate whose parents, sister and many relatives were slaughtered fears history is repeating itself.

Held as a child slave at Ravensbruck and Bergen-Belsen, she was later made an MBE by Elizabeth II for her work to educate people about humanity's most heinous crimes.

But eight decades after she was liberated by British soldiers and provided with safety and sanctuary in the UK, Mala, 95, delivered a damning indictment of life here, saying "prejudice and discrimination still live on".

She said: "Eighty years ago I experienced the full horror of antisemitism. I saw where hate can lead. I never thought I would live to see this happening again. And yet here we are, in 2025, still facing the same hatred.

"I think people in this country are generous. They believe in freedom. But freedom must never mean allowing hate to grow unchecked. We have seen where hate leads. I have seen it. I am deeply worried." Her words follow the recent killing of two Jews in Manchester and the continuation of inflammatory protests on the streets of London where pro-Palestinian marchers were urged to "globalise the intifada".

The call for violence against Jews has left followers of the faith in Britain petrified.

Last January Mala returned to Poland, where she was born Mala Helfgott in 1930, as the only Holocaust survivor from Britain to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz death camp and to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day.

There, accompanied by the Daily Express, she relived the systematic murder of six million European Jews in the years after the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939.

Now the killing of Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66, at Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, has sent shivers down her spine.

Extremism