A rise in antisemitism in Britain made Holocaust survivor, Joanna Millan, 83, say she would consider leaving the country if she were younger, Millan said in an interview with The Telegraph on Sunday.
Millan, a north London resident who dedicated her life to Holocaust education, warned that antisemitism was “getting worse.” As the Holocaust Memorial Day approaches on January 27, the survivor, who took refuge in England as one of the liberated Windermere Children, sees the threat coming back to Jewish life.
The survivor was one of the 300 kids known later as the Windermere Children, who were liberated from Nazi death camps and flown to the Lake District in 1945 as a chance for a fresh start.
She was only three years old when rescued from the Theresienstadt camp, where she endured a sequence of horrors as her family perished in death camps around Europe.
Known as the children’s camp, Theresienstadt was simultaneously a ghetto, transit camp, and concentration camp, which operated between November 1941 and May 1945.
Antisemitism in UK brings back Holocaust memories
Today, 80 years after the Holocaust, Millan recognized that the Jewish community is under threat. When asked if she believed that the UK Jewish community was safe, her answer was clear: “Not particularly, no. Obviously, I’m too old to move, but I think if I were younger, I would be considering leaving the UK. It’s a question of finding somewhere else, and there aren’t that many places that you’d be safer than in the UK.”
After Jihad al-Shamie, a 35-year-old Syrian-born UK citizen, drove his car into the Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur, and later attacked the worshippers with a knife while wearing a fake suicide belt, Millan became terrified.
The man managed to kill two people but was later shot dead by the police while still in the building. Millan, who has a son in Manchester, broke down in tears.
“Well, I must say, after Manchester, I was in tears for about three days. I didn’t know anybody myself [who was harmed]. I mean, my son’s in Manchester, and his wife and son, but it wasn’t because of them.”
She added, “I just felt that, I suppose all these years I have been talking to schools, going into schools, talking about anti-Semitism, […] I’ve dedicated my life to it, to a certain extent, what I’ve been doing, people haven’t learned anything.”
The Holocaust survivor explained to The Telegraph that she realized that her life's work didn’t seem to have made a difference, as antisemitism is now “worse than ever.” She highlighted that antisemitism today hides behind anti-Zionism, using what happens in Israel as an excuse to share hate for the Jews.
Millan added that the antisemitism in the UK during the 1960’s was far more covert, contrary to today’s line of action. “Now, it’s openly public, and it’s okay to be antisemitic and to say nasty things about Jews, even though the law … protects you, but it doesn’t actually protect against people, what they think and how they behave.”
Born Bela Rosenthal, after being brought to the UK in her early childhood Bela was adopted by a childless Jewish couple, who changed her name to Joanna. Told to forget her past and forbidden from contacting other child survivors, her adopted parents pretended that she was their natural daughter.
Millan decided to dig into her life story in her 30s, encouraged by her husband, Harvey. After coming back to Germany and searching through old Nazi records, she finally understood all her past. She started to talk and search about the Holocaust in the 1950’s, when nobody wanted to talk about it.
Only after the Eichmann Trial, in 1961, did the world hear for the first time in audio, image, and print, the true story of Holocaust survivors, as television was strongly implemented only years after the Nuremberg Trials (1945-1946).