Gathering The Voices
Testimonies of Holocaust survivors who settled in Scotland
Queens Cross and Glasgow Caledonian University have joined up to host a new series of free talks where people can learn and debate with experts about important subjects in local community venues.
Gathering the voices has collected over 45 testimonies from men and women who came to Scotland to escape from Nazi persecution.
Find out more by attending Food for thought, Thursday 27th February, Windsor Community Hall.
Book: socialregeneration@qcha.org.uk
Glasgow University has kindly agreed to link their website of Holocaust Memorial Lecture Series with the Gathering the Voices website. Every year these lectures are over-subscribed.
The Holocaust Memorial Lecture Series was initiated in 2001 by Professor Bernard Wasserstein and Emeritus Professor Otto Hutter, and has since become a key fixture in the University’s event calendar, attended by a large and diverse audience. This project is sponsored by The Association of Jewish Refugees. This website can be found at: www.gla.ac.uk/events/holocaustmemorial.
This year’s lecture will be added to the website in the near future.
Howard Singerman, one of the founder members of Gathering the Voices, was the keynote speaker at East Renfrewshire and Renfrewshire’s 2020 Holocaust Memorial Day event, which this year was commemorating the 75th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
It was a powerful ceremony with local school pupils playing a major role and setting the scene musically.
The other speaker, Arnesa Buljušmić-Kustura, spoke movingly of her experiences and losses as a young child growing up in Bosnia at the time of the civil war in Yugoslavia.
Howard then, with great dignity, told his mother’s story from the time she and her family were deported from Hungary in June 1944 to Auschwitz Concentration Camp. He spoke of the nearly four hundred and thirty thousand Hungarian Jews who were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau in a period of just two months, and of the need to remember and learn from the horror of the Holocaust. He read two of the poems he has written in honour of his mother and her murdered family. His speech was very powerful and touched the hearts of all who were present.
After the ceremony the guests were invited to Carmichael Hall for tea, and also had the opportunity to view the Anne Frank Exhibition and learn more about the Gathering the Voices project.
On 5th December, and 9th and 26th January I spoke at three separate 55+ communities in Southern Arizona, to a total of over 150 residents ranging in age from 55 to 80, in order to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and introduce the concept and aims of International Holocaust Memorial Day.
Audiences were very receptive, interested in the idea of oral databases like Gathering the voices as they felt personal stories of survival were a wonderful way of accessing history and learning lessons from the past.
Of course, my mother’s story continues to inspire and I am proud that I can continue to share it here in the USA.
Today, The 27th January 2020 is the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the largest Nazi concentration and death camp, which was liberated by the Red Army.
