TODAY is Holocaust Memorial Day when we remember the victims of the Nazi holocaust and subsequent genocides. PAULINE HOLT spoke to a North survivor about the importance of learning the lessons of the past. JOHN Chillag lost his whole family in the Nazi holocaust of the Second World War and almost died himself. For much of his life he was unable to speak of it, even to his wife and children. But today he travels around the North talking to school children and adults alike on behalf of the Holocaust Education Trust. John, 80, said: “In part it is about keeping the memory of what happened to my own family alive but it is far more important that one can get the message across that such atrocities are still happening and the person in the street should do something about it.” John, who was born in Vienna but moved to Hungary after the Nazis’ failed attempt to overthrow the Austrian government in 1934, was just 17 when German soldiers drove him and his family from a Jewish ghetto on the outskirts of Gyor. Just a few days after D-Day, on June 11 1944, they were forced to the local railways marshalling yards where a train of cattle wagons was waiting. Their destination was Auschwitz-Birkenau. John, who lives near Wetherby, in North Yorkshire, said: “The wagons were extremely crowded . . . ours had about 80 people in it. A bucket was put in with water for “sanitation”. It was a hot June day and the three-day journey was very, very difficult. There was no food and no water. “When we arrived there was a platform with a sign that it was Auschwitz-Birkenau. “But no one had heard of it. It could have been Darlington for all I knew. There were some SS officers on the platform and they were splitting people into two groups, ‘You go right, you go left.’ “The younger, working-age, mainly male group were in a small group and the rest of the old people, women and children and the sick were in the other one.” John, his father, Joseph and uncle Steven survived the selection. The rest of his family (more than 30 of them) were moved to the “family camp”. He said: “We started inquiring from the people about the family camp and they were pointing out the chimneys of the crematoria with flames going 24 hours a day, pointing out the smell of burning flesh. Gradually it sank in what must have happened. We were numbed.” John was in the camp about a month when he and his father were picked to be slave labourers in the steel and armament plant of the Bochumer Verein in Westphalia. There they had to work 12-hour shifts with little food, working with red hot steel ingots of 1000 degree centigrade and no protective clothing. John’s father became very weak and died in December 1944. John was taken to Buchenwald concentration camp where he became very weak, plummeting to just four stones in weight (25kg). But luckily he was liberated by American forces on April 11, 1945 and after numerous blood transfusions he survived. After the war, John returned to Hungary hoping someone from his family might have survived but no one had. He later emigrated to Australia where he met his wife, Audrey with whom he has three children Jonathan, Laurens and Wendy. They later came to England and settled at Bramham, near Wetherby and are now proud grandparents. “When I came out of the camp at the end of the war I thought it could never happen again but if you think of Cambodia or even Kenya last week and everything in between, all the genocides going on day in day out you realise human nature has not changed all that much. “The perpetrators are very few in all these circumstances, the people who actively do something about it are fewer still but then you have the indifferent masses and that’s the group that you ought to be able to convert. They have choices and responsibility if they use it wisely we might have a better world.” V John is speaking at a Holocaust Memorial Ceremony tomorrow at Darlington’s Arts Centre, Vane Terrace, at 1pm. Admission is free. | 
