Each year, Lansons/Team Farner marks Holocaust Memorial Day by hosting a very special and rare opportunity to hear from Holocaust Survivors and their families. 

This year Michelle Richman joined us to share her late father’s testimony, Zigi Shipper BEM - a survivor of the Holocaust, who as a child experienced the Łódź Ghetto and several camps including Auschwitz-Birkenau. We are incredibly honoured to have Michelle with us to share her late father’s important story. 

NB: Mentioned during Michelle's talk, The Royal Collection 'Seven Portraits: Surviving the Holocaust', which include Zigi can be viewed here. 

With thanks to Holocaust Educational Trust (HET) who make these events possible. We invite you to make a contribution to HET to enable them to keep sharing the stories of survivors. 

In response to this event, we have also curated further reading and watching below, to learn more about the Holocaust. Do let us know what you think (events@lansons.com).

To watch:

• One Life (2023). The story of Sir Nicholas 'Nicky' Winton, a young London broker who, in the months leading up to World War II, rescued Jewish children from the Nazis.
• Occupied City (2023). Documentry film directed by Steve McQueen on the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, a monumental exploration of how the past haunts our present.
• Schindler’s List (1994). In German-occupied Poland during World War II, industrialist Oskar Schindler gradually becomes concerned for his Jewish workforce after witnessing their persecution by the Nazis.
• The Pianist (2002). A Polish Jewish musician struggles to survive the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto of World War II.
• Denial (2016). Acclaimed writer and historian Deborah E. Lipstadt must battle for historical truth to prove the Holocaust actually occurred when David Irving, a renowned denier, sues her for libel.
• Defiance (2008). Jewish brothers in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe escape into the Belarussian forests, where they join Russian resistance fighters, and endeavour to build a village, in order to protect themselves and about one thousand Jewish non-combatants.

To read:

• The Diary of Anne Frank (suitable for teens and adults) by Anne Frank. Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt am Maine in Germany in 1929. She is the author of The Diary of a Young Girl, which tells the remarkable true-story of a young, Jewish girl against the backdrop of the horrors of the Second World War.
• The Choice by Dr Edith Eger. This is Dr Edith Eger's story – partly a memoir of an incredible life, but also a philosophy of recovery and empowerment that grew out of the horrors of her time in Auschwitz. As a young girl in a middle class Jewish family in Hungary, she and her family were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz.
• Night by Ellie Wiesel. Night is a 1960 book by Elie Wiesel about his experience with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, at the height of the Holocaust toward the end of the Second World War.
• The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris. The Tattooist of Auschwitz is based on the true story of Lale and Gita Sokolov, two Slovakian Jews, two ordinary people living in an extraordinary time, deprived of their freedom, their dignity, their families, and even their names replaced by numbers, and how they survived Auschwitz concentration camp.31 Jan 2018
• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktore Frankl. Man's Search for Meaning is a 1946 book by Viktor Frankl chronicling his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, and describing his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying a purpose in life to feel positive about, and then immersively imagining that outcome.

About Holocaust Memorial Day

Holocaust Memorial Day takes place every year on 27 January to commemorate the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, alongside the millions of other people killed under Nazi Persecution and in genocides that followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. The date, 27 January marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp.