Holocaust survivor visits Halesowen College (From Halesowen News)

Holocaust survivor visits Halesowen College

4:08pm Monday 8th February 2010

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A HOLOCAUST survivor visited Halesowen College and helped students learn first hand about the horrors of the Nazi's efforts to exterminate jews.

Susi Bechhofer visited the college to mark Holocaust Memorial Day and told students of her remarkable story of how she fled Germany in 1939 aged just three.

Her story was the basis of a novel `Austerlitz’ by WG Sebald and is also told in `Rosa’s Child’ by Jeremy Josephs and Susi Bechhofer.

Susi started to research her family history in the 1980s and found she came over to England from Nazi Germany with her twin sister Lotte in November 1938 aged only three along with 10,000 other children.

While she was growing up in Cardiff as the adoptive daughter of a Welsh minister she knew nothing of her past or her parents and was given a new identity to erase all traces of her previous existence.

It took her 50 years to discover her mother Rosa was deported to Auschwitz in 1943 where she died in the gas chambers. Sadly her sister died aged 35 from a brain tumour.

Susi said: “My research has been a step by step process, I first found my birth certificate and then discovered more and more about my family and where I came from.

“Uncovering all these details has not been easy but it was so important to know who I was and where I came from.”

Louise Gibbard, course leader for A level Government and Politics at Halesowen College, said: “This is the first year we have held an event to mark Holocaust Memorial Day and heard from a Holocaust survivor, in previous years we have talked about the day.

“Susi kindly gave us a unique insight into what life was like and how these events have shaped her life in many different ways.

"I would like to thank her for sharing these sensitive and personal things with us.”

Holocaust Memorial Day commemorates all communities who suffered as a result of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution and subsequent genocides such as Cambodia, Bosnia and Darfur.

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