Page 11 - Kol Bogrei Habonim - June 13

HOW I BECAME A HOLOCAUST
SURVIVOR IN NOTTINGHAM, ENGLAND
SIMON WINSTON, SUTTON-IN- ASHFIELD, UK
I and myself - were allowed into Britain. We
was born in 1938 in Radziwillow, a small
town in Poland, now in the Ukraine. About
20,000 people lived in Radziwillow of
whom 7,000 were Jews.
In 1941, Hitler, after making a deal with Stalin
and then breaking his word, advanced his troops
into eastern Poland, and Radziwillow. When the
Germans entered our town they set out to
barbarically terrorise, brutalise, dispossess and
dehumanise all the Jews of the town.
Jewish possessions and property were stolen and
Jews had to obey humiliating and draconian
laws. Soon the Germans built a Ghetto for the
Jews, a prison. A thousand “useful” Jews were
sent to work every day and rewarded with some
food. Five thousand “useless” Jews were kept in
another part of the Ghetto. They were not sent
out to work nor received any food. They were
deliberately being starved to death. When only
2000 “useless” Jews remained, the Germans
took them to a nearby forest and murdered them.
In 1943 my family managed to escape from the
Ghetto. For nearly two years we were fugitives
from the Nazis, scurrying from one hiding place
to another.
When the war ended we came out of hiding and
went back to reclaim our home. But a Ukrainian
family was living there and made us very
unwelcome. This was the case for all other
surviving Jews trying to reclaim their homes.
We became refugees. We applied to go to
Palestine - the British were allowing a quota of
some 70,000 Jews to enter Palestine, per year.
There was half a million of us - Holocaust
survivors! We couldn’t all go to Palestine. In
1947, my family - my parents, my older brother
11
settled in the city of Nottingham.
I was too young to remember the brutality of life
in the Ghetto and only vaguely remember
incidents whilst in hiding and as a refugee. But I
must have suffered the brutality and fear of a
Jew living under Nazi oppression. I did lose my
childhood.
One positive aspect of moving to Nottingham
was that there was a thriving Jewish community
there and this enabled us to integrate into a new
way of life. But even the Jews in Nottingham
didn’t seem too interested in our plight under the
Nazis. Outside the Jewish community, I
encountered some anti-Semitism which caused
animosity and fist fights at school and later on.
So I never talked about my past and some of my
friends didn’t even know I was Jewish.
Then, about the time of my Bar Mitzvah, I
joined a Zionist youth movement - Habonim.
Here was a movement promoting pride in being
Jewish and with a purpose. The bond between
the State of Israel and being Jewish was
impressed on me. I was hooked and soon wanted
to go on hachshara and settle on a kibbutz.
In fact I soon withdrew from my Jewish way of
life. At some point I was questioning God and
asking why he allowed the Holocaust to happen.
I wasn’t getting any satisfactory answers and
soon I gave up on religion and being Jewish
didn’t matter anymore.
Then, about 15 years ago, I was introduced to
Beth Shalom, a Holocaust Memorial Centre in
Laxton, near Nottingham. As far as I knew, there
were no Holocaust museums or centres in
Britain. I remember my amazement on my first