Remembering the Holocaust

 

Grove School and College have marked Holocaust Memorial Day in recent years with a programme of awareness-raising events for students.

This year we were pleased to welcome Holocaust survivor Edyta Klein-Smith to speak to College students. Edyta was born in Warsaw in 1929. In November 1940 the Nazis forced the Warsaw Jews into a closed Ghetto. The family lived in hunger abd misery until July 1942 when, after the Nazis' decision to create the "Final Solution", the deportation of Warsaw Jews started. Slave labour factories inside the Ghetto employed thousands of Jews, but with the selection process, few survived. The destination for most of the half a million Warsaw jews was Treblinka.

At the end of March 1943, she managed to escape with her mother from a work unit outside the Ghetto and joined a Polish underground organisation, where they were given forged papers as Catholics. She was able to keep up the false identity during the rest of the war, whilst delivering guns and messages for the underground resistance organisation. She was liberated together with her mother 20km outside Warsaw by troops of the Red Army on 18th January 1945.

After the war, she illegally crossed the border to Czechoslovakia, the to the American zone in Bavaria, Germany. In May 1947 she was transported with a group of children to New York where she initially lived in an orphanage in the Bronx. After rebuilding her life in New York, Edyta moved to London with her hisband and two sons in 1967.

The visit was arranged by Grove International.