Bristol marks Holocaust Memorial Day with a civic commemoration on Friday 25 January 2019, featuring a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor as the main speaker.

The service, held at City Hall from 2:00-4:45pm (registration at 1:30pm), is free to attend and open to everyone, helping raise awareness of genocide ahead of the worldwide official Holocaust Memorial Day on Sunday 27 January 2019. This year’s theme, chosen by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, is ‘Torn from home’.

Main speaker Iby Knill was a member of the Resistance in Hungary and survived the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where she was held until the camp’s liberation in 1945. Iby did not discuss her experiences for sixty years, but is now a confident speaker who has talked to over 50,000 young people about the Holocaust.

Other speakers at the commemoration include Councillor Asher Craig, on creating a home for refugees in Bristol, and also HM Lord Lieutenant Peaches Golding OBE; young people from three Bristol schools (QEH, St. Mary Redcliffe and St. Richard’s College) will discuss what they have learned from Auschwitz. There will also be a range of stalls from community refugee organisations, and book signings from authors Iby Knill, Rissa Mohabir and Rosemary Schonfeld.

This year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is particularly poignant as 2019 is also the 25th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, when 800,000 people were killed - and thousands more injured - in just 100 days from April to July in 1994. By December 2017, the UN Refugee Agency estimated there were still 270,000 Rwandan refugees living abroad. Holocaust Memorial Day is a chance to honour the victims of all genocides, including Cambodia, Bosnia and Darfur, and to challenge intolerance and hatred in society.

27 January was chosen as the official day of remembrance as it was the date the largest Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was liberated, but events take place across the UK in the surrounding weeks; the Bristol event takes place on a Friday to ensure people of all religions can attend. A full list of nearby events, such as film screenings, art and talks, is inside the programme given to Bristol attendees and displayed on the Bristol Holocaust Memorial Day website.

Please join fellow Bristolians to mark Holocaust Memorial Day this month, remember the victims, and support refugees fleeing war and persecution.