The British Embassy in Israel held an event to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day at the ambassador's residence in Ramat Gan, with the March of the Living educational program.
Three Holocaust survivors - Walter Bingham, 101, George Shefi, 93, and Paul Alexander, 89 - attended along with the embassy staff, diplomats and their families.
The three survivors were sent by their families as children from Germany to Britain as part of the Kindertransport. The Kindertransport famously saved the lives of 12,000 children from Nazi Germany.
During the event, they played a documentary called "Journey of Hope: Retracing the Kindertransport 85 Years Later." The documentary, produced by March of the Living, tells the stories of Alexander, Shefi, and Bingham.
In the documentary, the three spoke about what they remember from their former lives and their new ones.
Life before the Nazis
In the film, Bingham and Shefi showed the schools they had used to attend in Germany before they left.
Bingham spoke first about his time at school in Karlsruhe, Germany. "Before the Nazis, I lived a normal schoolboy life," he said. "This is the yard I played in. And when we played with a ball, I got my share of the ball like everybody else, and I was one of the boys.
"Then the Nazis came to power, and immediately it changed," Bingham explains.
Bingham remembers the other students in the school were the children of Nazis, and they had to go to "Hitler Youth."
"They'd hit me...chase me in the schoolyard," he said. "'Dirty, stinking Jew' and all those kinds of things, and they threw me out. Thrown out because I'm Jewish."
He recalls that it wasn't just the Jewish students at school but every Jew in the education system.
Shefi spoke about his school in Berlin next. The school they visited was the school he attended after his original school was burned down.
"I remember, I was afraid of standing out," he explains. "I saw that people like me don't have it easy, and so...I shrunk."
The film shows a photo from 1947 of the synagogue at his original school. "What's left of this school is this piece of the wall," he said, holding a small piece.
The three survivors then go on to talk about their experiences in Kristallnacht and the Kindertransport.
After the event, the three survivors spoke with attendees and the Deputy Ambassador to Israel, Ben Myers.
"I find the story of the Kindertransport children particularly emotional and complex," British Ambassador to Israel, Simon Walters, said at the event. "On one hand, there are uplifting tales of survival and rescue, of the determination and commitment of those who made these rescue operations possible. But alongside that, there's a profound sense of horror - the immense fear that parents must have felt, having to send their young children to a faraway country with no guarantee they would ever see them again. And what must those children have felt, being taken from their parents to a land where they knew no one and could not speak the language?"
"We say, 'Never Again.' But do we truly understand what that means?" he asks. "Surely, it means we must remain vigilant and cautious against antisemitism and all other forms of language that dehumanize any group. Yet, shockingly, we hear this kind of language increasingly often. Social media sometimes feels like an endless scroll of violent rhetoric targeting various groups and communities.
"The challenge of the phrase 'Never Again' is that it places a responsibility on all of us—to oppose dehumanizing language, the demonization of 'the other,' and the normalization of violent rhetoric in politics. This responsibility does not lie solely with governments but also with individuals. However, there is a price—or at least a risk—in standing against such behavior. The challenge of International Holocaust Remembrance Day is to ask: What are we willing to do to ensure that 'Never Again' is more than just an empty slogan?"