Holocaust Memorial Day: Survivors tell LBC their stories
27 January 2021, 20:41
Daughter of Holocaust survivor
LBC marks Holocaust Memorial Day by sharing some incredible stories of those who survived.
Holocaust Memorial Day is the international day on 27 January which remembers the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust alongside the millions of other people killed under Nazi Persecution and in genocides that followed.
Sandra Miller is the daughter of Sabina Miller, a resilient and brave Holocaust survivor.
Sandra told Eddie Mair: "She was a formidable woman born in Poland in Warsaw in 1922. The war completely devastated her life so she was put in to the Warsaw ghetto as a woman of 16, stayed there for two years, got out illegally."
After working on a farm, Sabina was warned the Germans were coming and she ran off in to the woods and lived in a trench for some winter months. Her only way of getting food was to beg.
Sabina managed to take the identity of a Polish girl and was eventually captured by the Gestapo and interviewed by them five times and thrown into a notorious prison in the middle of Warsaw.
"She was very lucky, she kept denying her faith and was thrown in to a cell with Polish prisoners, as opposed to the Jewish cell where her end would've been certain."
Sabina Miller managed, due to her "resolve" to swap identities, to be sent to work on farms in Germany which saved her life.
Ernest Simon's Kindertransport story
Holocaust survivor Ernest Simon told Iain Dale about his experiences, having grown up in Vienna.
"Luckily what happened was that the Kindertransport was started in England.
"The Quakers were very instrumental in helping the Government at that time and persuading the Government at that time to do something about getting children like myself out of Germany and Austria into safety."
Mr Simon said that his parents managed to find a place for him on a Kindertransport leaving Vienna on 11 January 1939. "Luckily, my aunt who had come to England previously on a domestic service VISA, she managed to find a home for me."
The foster parents found for Mr Simon were a very kind Jewish family in Leeds.
Happily his biological parents survived the Second World War, he told LBC.
