The Trust's Holocaust Memorial Day Activities

ANNE FRANK EXHIBITIONS IN FIVE LOCATIONS TO MARK HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY

January 25th 2008

The Anne Frank Trust UK are marking Holocaust Memorial Day 2008 with an unprecedented level of activity.  There are five different Anne Frank exhibitions, accompanied by education programmes, on show at Liverpool Anglican Cathedral; the University of Northumbria; Brent Town Hall; Glen Parva Young Offenders’ Institution in Leicestershire; and at a gallery in Hackney.

The Trust is also running a programme of workshops at Northwood Synagogue and a young people’s project in Luton, which is funded by the Government’s Tackling Violent Extremism programme.

Thousands of people have been visiting the flagship Anne Frank + You exhibition at Liverpool Cathedral, which is the first children’s event to launch the Capital of Culture year for the city.  The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rt Reverend Rowan Williams, will make a Holocaust Memorial Day address at the exhibition this weekend. The Anne Frank and You exhibition has been sponsored by Vincent Tchenguiz’s Consensus Business Group.     

Meanwhile 650 members of London’s business community will mark Holocaust Memorial Day at the Anne Frank Trust’s annual lunch in central London on 31^st January.  The keynote speaker will be the BBC Creative Director Alan Yentob.   Memorial candles will be lit at the event by survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides, including Holocaust survivor Mark Goldfinger and Reverend Werner Oder, the  son of a senior SS officer.  Mr Goldfinger and Reverend Oder live close to each other in Dorset and regularly speak to schools together.  (See further details below).  As in previous years the lunch is sponsored by Mrs Daphne Schild.

For further information on any of these events please call Gillian Walnes on 020 7284 5858.

The Stories of Mark Goldfinger and Verner Oder

Mark Goldfinger is a survivor of the Holocaust.  He was 9 when war broke out.

In 1940 the SS set up a training camp in a former Army barracks near Mark’s home town of Rabka, in Poland. In the early phase of the war, the SS platoons, the Einzastgruppen, shot their victims in the local forests - fifty, a hundred, even a hundred and fifty people a day.

The SS troops were being hardened at the Rabka training camp to become insensitive to murder, to the agonizing cries of women and children.

Mark’s 19 year-old sister was ordered to work for the training camp commander and in 1942 she got a tip-off from his mistress that they should 'clear off' that night.  With his mother and sister they left the town immediately - those who remained behind were rounded up and transported to the extermination camp of Belzec.

After two to three weeks Mark and his family arrived at Krakow and endured the hell of the ghetto.  During a short escape from this horror they hid with an uncle about 20 miles from the city. 

On the journey back to Krakow his mother was murdered, and there followed another period in the ghetto. Mark was then sent to two concentration camps; first Plasczow, the factory camp that became infamous through Schindler's List,  and finally Buchenwald, from where he was liberated.  He moved to England in 1946 and established an engineering factory which he ran until the early 90s.

Werner Oder was born following the war in Linz, his family's home town in Austria.  He was brought up in the 1950’s in an anti-Semitic household.  His family lamented the fact that Hitler wasn't able to eradicate the Jews completely.  Werner’s  uncle, Wilhelm Oder, was a leading member of ODESSA, the notorious organisation that helped former Nazi officers find refuge abroad after the war. 

Werner’s father was Herman Oder, an SS officer who was the deputy commander of the Einzatsgruppen training camp in Rabka.  Werner’s uncle Wilhelm Oder was also involved in the camp and was known for his cruelty. 

As a troubled teenager, Werner had a conversion experience which brought him to find a faith in God and he is now a Church minister.  Since that time has rejected his family’s views. 

Now living in Dorset, Werner recently decided to seek out survivors of the persecution at Rabka and through an article in the local newspaper discovered that Mark Goldfinger lived only 2 kilometres away from him in  Bournemouth. When Werner first contacted Mark Goldfinger on the phone and gave his name - Mark just said, ' ODER.  I think I know who your father was'.

Since then they have become good friends and have given talks to schools together, including the Anne Frank Lecture in Southampton to mark the 60^th anniversary of the publication of Anne’s diary. 

As a further act of reconciliation, at the Holocaust Memorial Day Anne Frank Lunch, Mark and Werner will light two candles together in memory of all those who perished in the Holocaust throughout Europe.