Holocaust survivor to share experience in live webcast

A Holocaust survivor will share his experiences of a Nazi concentration camp and a death march in a live webcast to thousands of students across the UK on Thursday.

Harry Spiro, 89, will be interviewed by Robert Rinder, a British lawyer and star of the television reality courtroom series "Judge Rinder", reports the Guardian.

The hour-long webcast, to more than 550 schools and over 100 other organisations, including government departments, universities and workplaces, has been organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET).

Rinder's great-grandparents and five of their children were killed in the Treblinka death camp. Only his grandfather, Morris Malenicky, survived the Holocaust.

As teenagers, Malenicky and Spiro worked in the same glass factory in the Polish town of Piotrkow Trybunalski. They were both sent to camps in Germany, and then on a death march to Theresienstadt in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.

Both were among 732 youngsters, known as the Boys (although they included about 80 girls), who were brought to the UK after the war by a Jewish charity.

"Harry and my grandfather found themselves as refugees in Windermere. The Boys, most of whom had no family left, formed a de facto extended family, meeting at reunions (and) attending each other's weddings," Rinder told the Guardian.

Spiro and Malenicky "were friends for their whole lives" until his grandfather's death in 2001, Rinder added.

Spiro was one of 270 people out of 3,000 that survived a death march from Rehmsdorf camp to Theresienstadt towards the end of the war.

The webcast comes three days before Holocaust Memorial Day on Sunday which will be marked by a commemorative event in London with senior politicians, dignitaries, religious leaders and survivors, and almost 11,000 more activities across the country.

--IANS

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