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| Eve Kugler |
"My experience during the Holocaust wasn't as horrendous as what you have seen," says 83-year-old Eve Kugler as she begins to speak.
She is at a cinema in Clapham, south-west London, to talk to secondary-school pupils who have assembled to hear first-hand accounts of the persecution of the Jews under Hitler. The pupils had just watched Hide and Seek, a 50-minute film about Jews' experiences during the Holocaust and how they had been forced to go into hiding to escape being sent to the death camps. They had heard the tale of one mother who had been given an ultimatum to kill her baby or leave the hideout for fear that the Nazis would hear the infant's crying and wreak even more terror on the people assembled there. She chose to smother her baby. Then there were the children who grew up in the sewers with rats as daily companions as they hid away.
Kugler herself is a Holocaust survivor. After speaking for nearly 50 minutes, she is asked by one pupil how many family members she had lost during Hitler's time in power. "Both my grandfathers, two uncles, five aunts and I don't know how many cousins," she replies.
Maybe it is not as horrendous as some of the stories in the documentary but it is pretty harrowing nevertheless, as the reaction of the pupils who have listened to her indicates. Kugler is one of the Holocaust survivors still going into schools to relate what happened to them. She has been doing it "for eight or nine years" now and does two or three visits in the run-up to Holocaust Memorial Day – which takes place next Tuesday. » | Richard Garner | Wednesday, January 22, 2014
