This year, 2025, marks several significant anniversaries connected to the end of World War II and the liberation of the Nazi death camps.

I was privileged to have paid my first ever visit to Bergen-Belsen just a few months ago, and as the co-founder and former director of the Anne Frank Trust UK, it was a profoundly moving experience to walk along the very paths Anne and Margot Frank would have done in the last months of their short lives. Unlike Auschwitz, there are no barracks or gas chambers to enter: the victims here died a long slow death of starvation and deadly disease, and there were no gas chambers in this camp. Following its liberation, all the barracks and buildings were in fact blown up by the liberating forces, in an effort to eradicate the danger of lingering disease to soldiers and survivors. Despite a collection of gravestones put up to memorialise a few of the victims by their descendants, these do not mark individual graves, as the bodies lie piled up in their thousands inside the many huge burial mounds.

It is a sobering experience.

As a longtime Holocaust educator myself, I feel it is highly important to show that the Jewish people lived full lives before and after their persecution. Survivors talk warmly about their happy times as children before they were persecuted and isolated by the Nazis. It is also important to explain that many Holocaust survivors, being determined that evil would not win, rebuilt their lives after liberation. Despite losing everything, family, home, community, friends, business, work, they adopted a positive and determined attitude. Many survivors went on to have very successful careers and create a happy family. In fact, some who came to the UK after the war, gave back to society and became great philanthropists. Others became educators; in later life receiving royal recognition for their work in the form of honours. 

One such educator is my dear friend Mala Tribich who devoted many years to teaching young people about the Holocaust. The town in Poland, Piotrkow Trybunalski, that she and her brother, the late Ben Helfgott, were born in, was the first in Poland to become a Jewish ghetto. The conditions living inside the ghetto were extremely cramped and unhygienic. 

Mala was to then suffer the concentration camps of Ravensbruck and Bergen-Belsen in Germany, but before she had been deported from Poland, her personal courage had helped her in a dangerous situation in the ghetto. This is how she described it:

‘My cousin Ann and I were among those to be deported, we were lined up in a column surrounded by soldiers with their rifles at the ready. When I spotted the officer in charge, I went up to him and told him that I had been separated from my father and brother, and asked if I could please go back to them. He looked shocked and a little surprised that I had the audacity to approach him, but he smiled, called over a Jewish policeman and said ‘take her back inside the ghetto’. I tried to take Ann with me but the policeman said she did not have permission. So, I was faced with the dilemma of leaving Ann or missing the chance of being reunited with my father and Ben. However, I continued to argue and eventually he let me take Ann with me.’

It is highly important to show that the Jewish people lived full lives before and after their persecution.

When Mala was liberated from Bergen-Belsen camp in April 1945, she was very ill and near to death. She arrived in Britain in 1947, and was reunited with her brother Ben. She learnt English, attended secretarial college and within a year was working in an office. Whilst her children were growing up, Mala studied and gained a degree in Sociology from the University of London.  In 2012, like her brother Ben who was later knighted, she was awarded an MBE (Member of the Order of the Brtish Empire) for her work in education. She also became a very active and dedicated member of WIZO.

Mala has summed up her life after the war by saying: ‘Leading a normal life after living through the Holocaust is one of the biggest challenges, for the bleak shadow of that time penetrates deep. What we the survivors have been able to show is that the human capacity for resilience can prevail.’

Holocaust education is essential, not only to preserve the memory of those who perished but to ensure that future generations understand the depths of human suffering and the importance of standing up against hatred. For both Mala and myself, sharing these stories is a way to honour the past. Through educating others about the Holocaust, and the strength of those who survived, we can prevent such atrocities from ever happening again. We must continue to remember, teach, and ensure that the voices of survivors like Mala are heard, so that their example of resilience and their invaluable lessons for humanity endure for generations.