Live Webcast For Holocaust Memorial Day

Published by Churcher's College on Thursday 1st of February 2024

All the Fourth Years congregated in the Lecture theatre to listen to Hedi Argent MBE give a moving testimony about her experience in Vienna as part of a live webcast for Holocaust Memorial Day.

She described how the Anschluss in 1938 changed Austria overnight for Jews. All the anti-Semitic laws came in, and when she went to school the next day, her headmistress publicly proclaimed that she was expelled as she was a Jew. She was only 9 years old. She clearly recalled Kristallnacht and the terrors that it unleashed on the Jewish community.

Luckily, her family had the foresight to escape in 1938 and made it to England for the duration of the war. After the war her parents tried to find her extended family, but found that they had all been murdered in the Holocaust.

Her message at the end was to accept people as they are and welcome refugees with kindness and compassion.