Granddaughter Ensures Holocaust Survivor's Story Is Shared with Future Generations

Yesterday, I watched A Real Pain in the cinema. The film is a beautiful representation of two cousins, united in love and grief for their grandma, exploring their family history on a heritage trip to Poland. This experience is familiar to so many Jews I know - whether attending a trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau or visiting Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the idea of a poignant pilgrimage to see where our ancestors lived, died, survived and escaped from, is commonplace.

I've certainly had these experiences. When I was 12, my paternal grandparents, Ann and Henry Ebner, took me to Vienna, where Henry fled from the Nazis with his parents when he was two, arriving as a refugee in the UK just weeks before the start of the Second World War. In the same year, my maternal grandma, Anna (Panni), took me to Budapest, to see where she and her husband, my grandpa, George Garai (Gyuri), had lived. Panni was six when Hitler's troops invaded Hungary in 1944, and she survived by being hidden in an orphanage. The memories shared with me on this pilgrimage were painful ones; being separated from her parents, returning home after the war and sitting by the window waiting to see which family members would come back - and so many never did.

Gyuri died before I undertook these extremely special trips. In Budapest, Panni pointed out to me the synagogue he had his barmitzvah in, and the shop his father owned. I was seven when he died, and I never had the opportunity to hear his story from him directly.

Truthfully, my age at his passing had nothing to do with me not hearing his story. As is sadly so common with Holocaust survivors, Gyuri did not speak about his experiences with his family - his trauma was too great. However, he was a journalist, and a very talented writer, so in the 1990s he wrote an autobiography, which he called his 'CV', and I read it just a few years ago. My grandpa's resilience at the age of 18, when he was taken to two labour camps, two concentration camps and on a four-day-long forced death march, is something I can never truly comprehend. I hope one day to be able to publish his CV for him.

I will never know why Gyuri chose not to share his story with his family. Perhaps he worried it was too distressing for us to hear, or maybe he didn't want his wife and two daughters to see him as someone who had been through such horrors. To me, Gyuri is the same person he was before and after I read his testimony. He will always be my warm, loving and lovable grandpa, with his hearty laugh and twinkling smile. He was grandpa only to me and my brother, but I wanted his story to reach beyond our family.

In 2021, I came across the Holocaust education charity Generation 2 Generation, which empowers the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors to share their parent or grandparent's survivor testimony. With their support, I developed a presentation about Gyuri's life before, during and after the Holocaust. Audiences learn about the survivor as a person - their personality, upbringing, family and life beyond the Holocaust, alongside integrating their powerful eyewitness testimony, in their own words.

I am so proud to have shared Gyuri's testimony at dozens of schools, numerous workplaces, and several religious and community groups. This month, for Holocaust Memorial Day 2025, I will be heading to Bristol to speak at a local council event, continuing to share Gyuri's story in schools, and speaking at a prison.

Each audience I speak to feels special, powerful and unique. While Gyuri never felt able to speak about his experiences in the Holocaust during his life, in his final days, he asked our family to - in his words - "tell the world what happened to me". This is why each talk feels so incredibly special, because I know it is not just me who is fulfilling his final wish, but the room of people who now know his name, face and story, who are fulfilling this wish too. It is wonderful when I hear feedback from audiences about the power of hearing his testimony. It is a privilege to be able to share my grandfather's story, and I also feel it is my duty, as his granddaughter, to do what he never felt able to do, but felt so strongly about being done.

I've been asked why I believe Holocaust education is so important, and I find it hard to verbalise. It seems so obvious to me, as the grandchild of survivors, that these stories must continue to be told - it sounds cliche to quote "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it", but with every passing year, it's clear we are continuing to forget the horrors humanity is capable of. Gyuri's final message was clear: tell the world, so they can learn from it. I sincerely hope you do.