Genocide survivors share stories ahead of Holocaust commemoration in Parliament

Concentration camp and genocide survivors will give moving testimonies at a special talk in Speaker’s House on Thursday, 26 January. 

Holocaust survivor John Hajdu - who was seven-years-old when his family was forced out of their home by the Nazis into the Budapest Ghetto - will be among those speaking about their experiences on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day. 

The talk will coincide with an annual debate on the Holocaust in the House of Commons, and will be followed by the lighting of candles in a commemoration led by Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle inPortcullis House. 

‘Ordinary people’ is the theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day - 27 January - theinternational date that remembers the six million Jews murdered under Nazi persecution, and the victims of subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. 

Mr Hajdu, now 85, was one of those ‘ordinary people’ who witnessed his father being taken away to a forced labour camp for Jewish men in 1943, and his mother being marched to a concentration camp in Austria in 1944, as hundreds of thousands of of Hungary’s Jews were deported and killed. 

He and his aunt were later forced to move into the Budapest Ghetto and only narrowly escaped a Nazi plan to detonate mines to destroy it and its occupants when they were freed on 18 January 1945. 

Sir Lindsay said: ‘Survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides are our friends and our family. They live among us, and it is important that we listen to their brave testimonies so that we learn the lessons of the past. 

‘I am honoured and very proud that the compelling and devasting stories of those who survivedare being shared with us in Parliament - 78 years after the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp.’ 

Mr Hajdu, alongside El Sadiq ‘Debay’ Manees and Smajo Bešo - survivors of genocides in Darfur and Bosnia – will light candles and join a commemoration in Portcullis House, conducted by Speaker’s Chaplain Revd Canon Tricia Hillas. 

More than 100 people will attend the half-hour service – the third since Sir Lindsay became Speaker - including MPs and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.  

ends 

NOTES TO EDITORS: 

• This is the third time Holocaust Memorial Day has been marked in this way in the House of Commons - a commemoration initiated byMr Speaker. 
• The ceremony will begin at 1615 on 26 January 2023 in Portcullis House with an introduction by Sir Lindsay. 
• Our in-house photographer will take images from the event, that will be available about 45 minutes afterwards. 

• The candles will remain lit until 1800. 
• The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is ‘ordinary people’ - those who were victims of the Holocaust and the genocides that followed but who went on to lead extraordinary lives. 
• An exhibition of portraits of Holocaust survivors, including Mr Hajdu with the teddy he kept with him at the Budapest Ghetto, are on display in Portcullis House throughout January. 
• Seven survivors of the Holocaust joined MPs in the Commons for a moment of silence last month to mark 80 years since the UK first publicly recognised what we now know as the Holocaust was taking place in Nazi-occupied Europe.