Holocaust Memorial Day was marked at Newnham College with a series of special events to commemorate the victims and survivors of the Nazi persecutions and other genocides.
The aim of the week, organised by Dr Jenny Mander, Newnham Fellow, was to share powerful stories from the past to provide an opportunity to learn lessons and apply them to the present day to create a safer, better future.
Nearly 200 people attended a free public panel discussion titled From Kindertransport to Calais: The Story of Child Refugees which was jointly hosted by Newnham College, Murray Edwards College and Lucy Cavendish College on Monday, January 23.
The evening launched the week’s events programme which celebrated the work of the largely forgotten group of local volunteers, mostly university women, associated with the Cambridge Children’s Refugee Committee.
Newnhamite Greta Burkill (NC 1917) was the driving force behind the remarkable committee.
Born in Germany to Jewish parents, she, and the other volunteers, found foster homes for refugee children fleeing from persecution in Nazi-controlled Europe.
The group succeeded in finding homes in Cambridge for 2,000 Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia.
Read more about her work and the series of events
Read Varsity’s coverage of the Kindertransport to Calais Event
Watch the video of Mike Levy’s ‘We must save the children’ talk on our Facebook page
Photo caption, of the panel at the Kindertransport event, from left to right:
Phoebe Griffith, Associate Director for Migration, Integration and Community at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), Jackie Ashley, President of Lucy Cavendish College, Professor Dame Carol Black, Principal of Newnham, Dame Barbara Stocking, President of Murray Edwards College, Kevin Watkins, Chief Executive of Save the Children UK, Mike Levy, who holds a Holocaust Education Fellowship at the Imperial War Museum, and is a playwright at Keystage Arts and Heritage which runs Cambridge City Council’s annual programme of Holocaust Memorial Day events, and Dr Anne-Laura Van Harmelen, Department of Psychiatry, Cambridge, and a Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College.