Bishop to hear survivors’ stories on visit to Holocaust Centre

Two Holocaust survivors who now live in Nottingham will share their story with the new Bishop of Southwell & Nottingham, the Rt Revd Paul Butler when he visits the UK Holocaust Centre in Laxton, Nottinghamshire, next week.

The special visit, on Monday 24th May 2010, will include a tour of the centre and time to meet with local school children visiting the memorial centre.

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There will be an opportunity for a photocall with the Bishop during the visit between 12.30-1pm with local children and the Centre’s director and chairman.

Bishop Paul said he was looking forward to finding out more about the work of the holocaust centre and seeing their education work first hand. His programme, will begin at 11am when he will join students from Southwold Primary School, Nottingham, on their tour of ‘The Journey’, the Centre’s award-winning exhibition for young people, which follows the journeys of Jewish children who lived through the Holocaust and survived. Testimony from holocaust survivors, Lisa Vincent and Bob Norton is featured in the exhibition, which majors on the experience of the ‘Kindertransport’ – the ten thousand Jewish children allowed into Britain from Germany and Nazi-occupied territories without their parents just ahead of the outbreak of World War II.

Following lunch, there will be an opportunity for the Bishop to look round the memorial gardens, where visitors can place stones on a mound of pebbles commemorating over 1.5 million children murdered by the Nazis, and where hundreds have planted white roses in memory of loved ones lost in the Holocaust.

Rwanda connection

The Holocaust Centre provided the model for the Kigali Genocide Memorial, established by the Aegis Trust in 2004 at a site in the centre of Rwanda’s capital where over 250,000 victims of the 1994 genocide are buried. Like The Holocaust Centre, it is a place both of remembrance for survivors and education for a new generation.

Bishop Paul has close ties to Rwanda. “I first visited in 1997 when the country was still in the early stages of recovery from the 1994 genocide,” he says. “I met people and heard their stories, and saw things which truly shook me. I also began to discover what a beautiful nation it is. Since then, to my surprise, I have been every year. I am now privileged to know most of the Anglican Church of Rwanda bishops as friends... these regular visits have allowed me to see something of the extraordinary transformation of the nation.”

The Bishop will be accompanied on his visit by local clergyman, the Revd Chris Levy, Vicar of Egmanton & Walesby, Rector of Kirton and Priest-in-Charge of Kneesall, with Laxton and Wellow. They will both be welcomed to the Centre by Co-founder Marina Smith, Director Helen Whitney, and Dr James Smith, who is both Chairman of The Holocaust Centre and CEO of the Aegis Trust, the international genocide prevention organization which developed from its work in 2000.

“We’re very much looking forward to welcoming the new Bishop of Southwell & Nottingham to The Holocaust Centre, and we’re delighted that he will have the chance to meet some of our remarkable survivor speakers,” says Dr Smith. “We hope that others across the region will follow in his footsteps this summer and take the historic opportunity to meet and listen to people who survived and escaped the Nazi Holocaust. They will sadly not be with us forever, but their first-hand testimony offers irreplaceable insights into a past that continues to hold urgent lessons for today.”

The Holocaust Centre is open to the public 10am-4pm, Monday-Friday, to 23 July (excluding 31 May-4 June). It is also open every Sunday, 10am-4pm, from now to 15 August, with survivors speaking on Sundays at 1.00pm. For the full schedule of speakers, see www.holocaustcentre.net.

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