Inside Britain’s only Holocaust survivors’ club: ‘There’s joy that we’re all together’

Around a table in a nondescript room overlooking the Golders Green Road, a group of nine nonagenarians is taking a Yiddish class. Jokes abound, and even the old ones from the teacher go down well. There was the man arriving at Ellis Island who, when asked for his name, responded, “Shoyn fargesen [I already forgot]”. The immigration officer looked up and said, “Welcome to America, Sean Ferguson!”

“Etleche menschen lachen!” the tutor is pleased to note. “Some people are laughing!”

For the members here, this is not just an academic exercise in what is predominantly a dead language. Joe Szlezinger, 90, still works at the property company he founded that his son now runs, but makes time to come every week for the “Yiddish with Kiddish” – the latter a generous spread of herring, pickles and smoked salmon – because it is the only place he can speak in his mother tongue.

Does it bring back childhood memories? He looks wistful. “I mean, it brings back everything.”

I have been given access to the Holocaust Survivors’ Centre, the first of its kind in the world and still unique in Britain – a sacred haven for the country’s final few camp survivors, hidden children, Kindertransport exiles and refugees from Nazi Europe.

The past cannot help but hang over this north London building where every detail, from the interior decor to the consistency of the food, has been thoughtfully curated. Since it was founded in 1991 by psychotherapist, Judith Hassan, the centre run by the Jewish Care charity has been careful never to serve a watery broth – lest it evoke memories of the meagre substance doled out in the concentration camps.

“We make sure that it’s a thick soup,” explains the centre’s coordinator, Sarah-Jane Burstein. “We always offer a soup, even on a boiling hot day outside. It’s very important.” The team is keen not just to make sure that a hot dish is on offer at all times, but one that symbolises a stark contrast to the food they ate in their darkest hour.

Burstein adds, “We always ensure that there is tea, coffee, cakes and biscuits available to our members as soon as they come in. They never have to queue for food.”

Its clients also sit on an advisory committee that discusses everything “from the batter of the fish lunch to the colours of the walls”, says Burstein. This is in service to more than a vague idea of consultation. “It’s because their power was stripped, absolutely.”

Not that any of the members let history alone define them. Ivor Perl, 94 next month, is as much the whip-smart wisecracker as the Hungarian boy who survived the sadism and starvation of Auschwitz. Miriam Freedman, 91, is the meditation maven, as well as the girl forced to cower in a hole in a basement in Czechoslovakia.

And 98-year-old Maurice Peltz is the boy who escaped Poland aged four, but also the man who can be relied upon to perform a soft-shoe shuffle as soon as the visiting musicians strike up their instruments at the centre’s new year “Welcome Back Party”. They never miss a chance to celebrate here – the exuberant embodiment of the Jewish toast “L’chaim! [To life!]”

“Is this going to be Morris dancing?” asks the clarinettist, as Peltz eases himself out of his chair. “A Maurice dance,” comes the reply, a twinkle in the eye at his pun. “Maurice danced with the King, you see,” one of the doting staff whispers to me. “I’m sure he told you.”

Sylva Herzberg first visited the centre more than 20 years ago, but has not been attending as much as she used to. “I had a major operation last year,” says the 94-year-old, immaculately dressed in a cream and navy cardigan with gold buttons, and pearl earrings.

“But now I push myself to come more because it’s necessary.” She is about to add how special it is to be in a place where she can talk freely about her childhood, but, like others I will speak to, she hesitates. “First of all, my story is not as bad as some other people’s,” she emphasises. “What I’ve gone through is nothing compared to some of the other people.”

Herzberg fled her birthplace of Antwerp, Belgium, on foot. But at the crossing to France, she vividly recalls “hundreds and hundreds of Jewish people sitting on the floor, and the French wouldn’t let them go through to save their lives”. Her father’s Turkish passport proved the paper-thin difference between free passage and murder on the Continent.

In France, she and her family “ran into the ditches when we were machine-gunned by the Germans”. They got on a Norwegian coal boat that arrived in England in May 1940.

At the centre, “we talk and we commiserate”, she says. “People on the outside who never went through any of these things, they listen and they sympathise, but they don’t really understand.”

The joy, energy and mutual recognition of this one-off community are vital for Herzberg. “Without it, I think I would be dead,” she says. “It keeps me alive.”

Unspeakable loss is only ever just below the surface, but Szlezinger was not expecting to break down while retelling what he calls “my war”. “There’s a compartment in your head that makes you forget,” he explains, and says he is still taken aback by the intensity of his emotion “about something that happened 80 years ago”.

He was born in Brussels in 1935 and had a brief, happy childhood until the Germans invaded Belgium in 1940. His parents, Gita and Samuel, had to put up a sign in the window of their draper’s shop declaring, “Jewish business”.

“You can’t really imagine a mother giving her child away,” he says. But that is what Gita was compelled to do to save her seven-year-old son. On the brink of being betrayed for a cash reward by the man she was paying to keep Joe safe, they found themselves in a park forbidden to Jews, in tears, covering their yellow stars under their lapels.

A passerby took them in for the night before they were directed to a Catholic headmaster. Father Clement said he could not risk endangering the Jewish children already in his care. “So my mother got on her knees, and she got hold of his cassock. She kept on crying, ‘This is the house of God.’”

Joe was hidden – as Joseph Dupont – in a convent near the French border and was separated from his mother, who was hidden in a damp cellar for two and a half years. Though Father Clement risked his life to smuggle food to her in his robes, she never saw daylight and “her eyes were damaged after the war”.

Szlezinger’s father was captured in 1942 and murdered at or on the way to Auschwitz, aged 32. “He’d never done anything wrong in his life.”

Of his friends at the centre, Szlezinger says, “We’re all the same. We laugh at each other.” But he is still conscious of pain he cannot know. “I mean, some have got horrendous stories.” Through his tears, he insists, “My story is really quite a nice story.”

The variation in experiences is huge, but Mala Tribich, 95, who was incarcerated in Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, says simply, “I don’t think that we sort of compare notes or anything.”

Kurt Marx, who came to the UK on the Kindertransport, however, says he was once told by another member that he was not a true survivor. “He said, ‘I was in Auschwitz… You were here [in the UK].’” But, as the “klezmer [music]” drifts in from the party next door, Marx tells me, “In the meantime, people have agreed that we all have a story to tell.”

The 100-year-old has been coming to the place he describes as “a kind of anchor” for at least two decades, after hearing about it from a fellow survivor – and James Bond and Benny Hill actress – Bettine Le Beau. Here, he was reunited with Maurice, whom he had known back in 1945 by his Polish name, Moniek, when they were both working as teenage diamond polishers in London’s Hatton Garden.

Although Marx did not grow up speaking Yiddish, it was still what first attracted him to the centre. The language is just a part of an entire culture that disappeared into mass graves and crematoria. “At one time, our group had 20 to 30 people, and they were all Yiddish speakers,” he says. “Nowadays, there are only one or two who were actually born in a Yiddish-speaking house.”

Marx arrived in Britain from Cologne on the Kindertransport in 1939. The last letter he received from his parents, Siegmund and Irma, was in 1942, a day before their deportations to “the east”. He would have to wait 53 years before learning of their murders in the forests of Maly Trostenets, in today’s Belarus. On the same train was the headmaster, Erich Klibansky, who had saved Marx’s life by arranging his journey to London. Marx went on to marry Ingrid, a survivor of Auschwitz.

The trauma has inevitably filtered down the generations. Marx does not want to go into detail, but refers to his son’s lack of grandparents at school events. “It’s quite a thing for a small boy to say, ‘My grandparents were murdered by the Nazis.’ You don’t know how it affects their whole life.”

A report about this place, written in 2011, said of the members that “in 15 years, they assume, they will all be gone”. Predictions of their demise, not for the first time, were premature. However, the years are doing what the Nazis could not. Membership back in 2011 numbered 550. Today, it stands at 141.

The quarterly newsletter lists the passing of four members, including former Stutthof slave worker, Manfred Goldberg, described by the King in a tribute as having become “an integral part of the fabric of our nation”. In the week of my visit, we learnt of the death of Eva Schloss, the Auschwitz survivor and posthumous stepsister of Anne Frank. She held the King’s left hand here in 2022 when they danced an impromptu hora, while Maurice Peltz clutched His Majesty’s right.

In December, a gathering of survivors that took place in New York every week for 82 years ended after the last member died aged 102. Yet the London club, like its clientele, endures. It has a packed calendar ahead of guest speakers, art classes and tai chi sessions taking place four days a week.

Eighty-six members ask for a delivery of challah bread for shabbat every week, which also serves as an opportunity for a welfare check. Another 40 meet for “outreach teas” at volunteers’ homes across London. It is all funded by donations and contributions from the Claims Conference – restitution paid by the German government.

At the same time as members grieve the regular loss of their friends, remarkably, new ones are still joining. Referrals, largely as a result of the elderly and frail calling on Jewish Care’s wider services, saw an average of one new member joining every month last year.

Jan Goldberger resisted visiting the centre for many years. His wife, Sara, tells me he spent decades not talking about the past, until the dam broke with the release of Schindler’s List in 1993.

The 98-year-old was born in Poland and torn from his father’s arms by the Gestapo. He was liberated from the Theresienstadt labour camp aged 17 in 1945, and never found out what happened to his father, mother, sister, two brothers and grandparents. He became one of “The Boys” – the 700 or so children given a new start in the bucolic paradise of the Lake District.

Goldberger started coming to the centre twice a week “as a favour to me”, says Sara. “I thought it was time, just to start to talk. They give you a sense of security.”

Her husband has never taken up the offer of the specialist therapy services. “But my son became a psychotherapist,” she says. “And I’m sure it has something to do with it.”

Burstein, who has worked here for 11 years, says anyone expecting a mournful environment will be surprised. “It’s a really vibrant place. Our members have such a zest for life.” At the weekly “Jews with Views” discussion group, they have “really dynamic and lively debates. They are on the pulse of everything. They follow the news. They know exactly what’s going on”.

That means they have been closely following the record rises in anti-Jewish racism in recent years. More than a century after the Nazi Party was founded, they are still a target. Since Oct 7, security outside an already heavily fortified building has been increased.

It is all familiar to Szlezinger. “Within a few weeks of being back at school in Belgium, they called me a dirty Jew. They used to stand outside my mother’s shop and say, ‘Isn’t it funny she’s still alive? They didn’t take her away.’”

Yet Britain felt different. “When I came to this country in 1952, this was a Garden of Eden. It was the most beautiful country in the world. I said, ‘This is the end. There will never be anti-Semitism again, we are all equal now.’ And how wrong I was.”

Marx says, “It’s horrendous. Years ago, we used to say, ‘Don’t think it can’t happen in England. It can happen anywhere.’ It’s happening here now.”

Is he anxious about the future? “I’m too old to worry about it. But I look at it, and it’s starting again.” When asked by visitors what can be done to stop history repeating, he replies: “All you can really do is tell the truth about what happened.”

Herzberg, for one, will continue to tell that truth. “It has to be carried on with each generation,” she tells me, “so it stays alive, what we went through. Talking is not a problem with me. My mother always used to say I talk too much. But I think, in a way, it’s important.”

Many have written memoirs. Having asked for my address, Szlezinger delivers his to my door first thing the next morning. He rings the bell and, without saying much, puts the book in my hands and leaves.

An Israeli study in 2019 found that Holocaust survivors in the country – home to about half in the world – suffer from poorer overall health, but manage to outlive their peers by an average of seven years. The researchers put this down to a genetic predisposition that helped them survive the Holocaust in the first place and the resilience they developed as a result of experiencing Nazi atrocities.

But it would not be a surprise if a driving sense of purpose were also a factor. Although hearing a survivor share their testimony at a public event is increasingly rare, Tribich still accepts any invitation that comes her way. “I mean, I’m not really keen to speak, but I feel that I should.” Marx, too, says he feels “obliged”. “If I’m asked, I go.”

And after everything that was stolen from them eight decades ago, this sanctuary seeks to give a few precious things back: agency, identity and a sense of belonging.

“When I walk in here, I have such a greeting, it makes me feel so good,” says Herzberg, beaming. “I don’t get that anywhere else. They are really my family here.

“I walk in, I look around, and there’s joy everywhere, that we’re all together. I feel I’m home.”

[Source: Daily Telegraph]