Friday 29th January 2021

Dear Parents and Guardians,

This week’s online 15 minute forums covered motivation and wellbeing whilst the whole school assembly was on Big Tech. For a number of our students this week, however, the most challenging and meaningful online experience was today’s Dudley Holocaust Memorial Commemoration, to which our older pupils had been invited by Lord Austin. It has been a number of years since I have written to parents on this, and our commitment to Holocaust education may be found in a previous letter .

The central message of today’s commemoration event was delivered by Manfred Goldberg, now 90 years of age, and who as a child experienced the persecution of the European at first hand. Manfred’s school in Kassel, in central , was shut down by the Nazis. His father, who was at particular risk from the government, then secured a visa to leave Germany and travel to , and this was issued by Frank Foley (of what would later become MI6) at the British Consulate in . Foley is well known to residents of , where he lived for many years and where his memorial may be found in Mary Stevens Park. Foley told Manfred’s mother that he might be able to arrange visas for the rest of the family, but it would take another eight weeks. By that time Manfred, with his mother and brother, had been deported to Latvia, where they found themselves in the ghetto in Riga.

Manfred’s witness testimony is so very powerful on many different levels. He describes the increasingly crowded, cold and hungry ghetto and the stories which he heard of executions by gunfire at the hands of the SS and their Latvian sympathisers, a short distance from the ghetto. These executions of Jewish civilians were thoroughly documented by the Nazis themselves, as well as local resistance groups who reported the mass murders to the Russians and also German socialists in exile in Prague.

Manfred’s number, ‘engraved in his memory’, was 46578. He would recite it each time he presented for a selection where, in his own words, the people in the ghetto all knew that to be placed in the left hand line meant death, whilst the line on the right meant survival. The personal quality of his testimony is painfully moving. He recalls how, having been moved from the ghetto to a labour camp and facing another selection, a voice from behind him told him to claim that he was 17 years old, a piece of advice which he attributes to saving his life. His mother was selected for execution at the same moment, but managed to escape. Manfred is very unusual for a Holocaust survivor in that both his parents survived, and he was united with them in England after the war. His brother Herman did not survive .

But the fates of so many of the people he met and lived with were not as fortunate. At Stutthof Labour camp, which Manfred describes as being full of living skeletons, many electrocuted themselves on the fences or were shot on attempt. In transit to other camps and worksites, the atrocities he saw scar him to this day. He unsurprisingly, at times, describes these events with the sentiment of a child: ‘I wish I was invisible’. But what also comes through is resilience and resistance.

What shines through in Manfred’s testimony, above all else, is his humanity, kindness, determination and compassion. After the prayer at the end of the commemoration which gave thanks – for Manfred and his family – the Lord Lieutenant of commented on how he had spent much of his life attempting to put himself into other people’s shoes. But the experience of the Holocaust survivors would always be beyond his and our comprehension. This is why its commemoration is of inestimable importance to us all.

Paul Kilbride