“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out – Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out – Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.” – Pastor Martin Niemöller
Manchester Metropolitan University’s History Society raised a massive £740 for the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET), with a guest speaker event which is still resonating with staff and students to this day.
The History Society teamed up with HET ambassador, Hannah Hardman, to organise a sold out lecture last week.
The lecture was delivered by Holocaust Survivor Joanna Millan, who had been invited by the History Society to share her inspirational talk with Manchester Met students and staff.
Hardman introduced the event by explaining how and why she got involved in the HET. Joanna took centre stage, with her striking honesty and charisma evident from the start. Joanna went on to share her harrowing personal history.
Joanna, born Bela Rosenthal, told the packed out audience that her painful story began as she had her father ripped from her life in February 1943, as he was snatched from the streets of Berlin by the Nazis. He was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau where he was killed. Four months later, Bela and her mother were taken from their home and sent to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp 50 miles outside of Prague.
The next year Bela’s mother contracted Tuberculosis due to the atrocious conditions facing the detainees and passed away leaving Bela an orphan at the age of two. Bela survived through the kind nature of Litska Shallinger, who smuggled food from the Nazi vegetable patch in her clothes and shared it with Bela and the other children. On 3rd May 1945, the Red Cross took control over the camp and Bela was liberated by the Russians.
After Theresienstadt was liberated, Bela, along with five other surviving orphans, was flown to England. The children had developed such an intense bond that they were impossible to treat individually or discipline and remained glued to each other, fearful of adults and separation. Her description of this intense bond was incredibly emotional. She painted the picture of six broken children clinging to each other for comfort and safety long after liberation from the concentration camp. Joanna explained it was this set of children which Anna Freud conducted her famous study on in her ‘An Experiment in Group Upbringing’.
Bela was eventually adopted by a Jewish couple living in London after being rejected by numerous families who couldn’t cope with her behaviour. Her adoptive parents decided to change her name to Joanna Millan in order to conceal her past and most importantly her Jewish identity so she would no longer be a target to anti-semitism.
Throughout the lecture, Joanna shared intimate family photographs which she had discovered during her lifelong quest to piece back together her past and flourishing present family tree.
Joanna teamed her beautiful images with anecdotes of the people they depicted and explained how the Holocaust had affected these individual family members.
Joanna told how she was aided dramatically by the internet and it was this which secured the final pieces to her puzzle and unravelled her family history.
Throughout the event, Joanna had the audience laughing along with her as she candidly explained how on numerous occasions she jumped at and relished the chance to travel across the world to meet her long-lost relatives.
By contrast to her photographs, Joanna presented a series of slides documenting the sheer horror of the Holocaust. These slides included the number of people killed in Theresienstadt (97,297) and another slide compared the profitable cost of killing a Jew to keeping a Jew alive. Joanna revealed the ways in which Theresienstadt was a death factory in which Jewish bodies became a commodity right down to the fillings in their teeth and the clothing on their backs. Everything taken from the Jews had a price and non-Jews were willing to buy.
Joanna dispelled any myths of the en masse being unaware of the events of the Holocaust while it was happening – an idea which has at times been widely accepted. According to Joanna people did know what the Nazi’s were doing and they chose to do nothing and in doing nothing – they were in fact supporting the death camps. Joanna asked, “What would you do? Would you help? What if it was your family? Is it ever really possible to do nothing?” She highlighted cases of successful resistance made by non-Jewish wives who saved their husbands from the concentration camps by marching in the streets. She also told how no Nazi officer was ever killed for refusing to exterminate Jews.
Resistance was successful and this is Joanna’s main message. Her talk was not of an apocalyptic nature. It delved into the darkest depths of history yes, but it returned to inspiring and rational thoughts of love, kindness and revolution against evil. Joanna was able to highlight just how easily episodes of evil destruction can happen by simple political propaganda and fear. It is easy to be sucked into this type of thinking when social and financial problems take centre stage – but it is not forgivable.
Still to this day Joanna refuses to include her Jewish identity on forms. She explains, “Maybe one day we will have a government who doesn’t like Jews again.” At first this point startled me and the frankness of her comment has stayed with me long after her lecture. She mused that at previous talks she had discussed newspaper headlines about Eastern Europeans evident in the press now and compared them to those printed about Jews during Hitler’s reign, “You couldn’t tell the difference.”
We can all recall headlines of ‘foreigners taking jobs’ and aggressive debates about “Not letting people in.” We have also all read racially motivated language and seen religious messages tarnished and manipulated for financial and political ends. These are the very tools Hitler used in his efforts to exterminate Jews. Joanna is calling for awareness and positive action, non-discriminatory of race and religion. Yes we can and should remember the Holocaust but we should also remember other instances of genocides also.
Joanna’s personal story brings a sense of realism into this horrific, inconceivable chapter in human history. Her survivor story allows for an emotional understanding of the far-reaching horrors of the Holocaust. This happened to Joanna, her family, her friends, her entire world. It is important we do not allow such evil to succeed again in our lifetimes – to anyone.
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2 Comments
Shame I missed this but saying that and according to some prominent historians there is little we can learn from someone who was three years old at the time. That is like asking my war baby grandfather to describe how he felt about the bombing of Coventry the city where he lived during WW2. Pointless and just a money spinner. Sorry.
Jamie, I also had my reservations about Joanna’s age when I heard she would be coming to speak at the event. This changed as soon as I met her. Joanna gave an insight from not only a child’s perspective but as a person who has had to grow up living with the trauma her entire life.
As historians, it is important we gather as many perspectives as possible to discover a true picture of what happened. Yes this perspective was limited and much of what she told us about the camp is what she has been told by elders there also – like Litska Shallinger, the woman who stole food for the children – who Joanna was reunited with several years ago. Without Joanna’s story, we would not know this small testimony. Who would know how this small children were able to survive?
Because of the Holocaust, Joanna grew up as a deeply disturbed child who would not allow other adults near her. Joanna told how if one child was punished, or sent for a time out, all the other five children would stand together. She was returned to the Orphanage repeatedly time and time again as she was so damaged she could not relate to other people and no one could handle her disturbed nature.
Joanna’s experience does tell you limited details about what she actually remembered of being in the camp, yes. But this woman has had to live with the effects long after the war was over – which is just as relevant as any testimony by a person who was an adult at the time.