The annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day is designated by the United Nations as a Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust. To mark this event, the Hong Kong Holocaust and Tolerance Centre (HKHTC) hosted the UN Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration, which took place online on Thursday 27th January. The special commemoration featured the testimony of our remarkable guest, Greek Holocaust survivor Ms Lola Angel.

Lola Angel is one of the very few Greek Jews left to remember the horror of the Nazi concentration camps. Approximately 83 percent of Greek Jews, nearly 59,000 people, were exterminated when the country was occupied by Nazi Germany. Lola is among survivors who have not spoken until now. Because she was so young at the time, she felt it was not her place to speak. But seven decades after the end of WWII, she finally feels ready to pass on her experiences to the next generation.

“I was but a child but I forgot nothing. The memories still haunt me, and the intense smells of the camp are ever-present.”
 –Lola Angel

The UN Holocaust Memorial Day 2022 video is available here on our YouTube channel, Facebook page and Bilibili platform.

On 16 November 2021, the Bard Center for the Study of Hate (BCSH) welcomed HKHTC’s Executive Director Simon Li to speak on “Hitler Shirts, Nazi Salute and Swastika Flags: Decoding Southeast Asia’s Strange Fixation with Nazi Hate Iconography.”

You can watch online lecture here. 

On the evening of November 9, together with March of the Living, the Hong Kong Holocaust and Tolerance Centre commemorated the 83rd anniversary of Kristallnacht with a message of unity and hope through a unique international campaign.

Titled “Let There Be Light,” March of the Living invited individuals, institutions, and houses of worship around the world to keep their lights on during the night of November 9 as a symbol of solidarity and mutual commitment in the shared battle against antisemitism, racism, hatred, and intolerance. As part of this virtual initiative, people from all over the world were able to add their voices to the campaign. Individuals of all religions and backgrounds were also invited to write personal messages of hope in their own words at the campaign website:

https://kristallnacht.motl.org

Meanwhile, please visit a special page on Yad Vashem’s website which features interviews, testimony, and photos on the terrible events of Kristallnacht in 1938:

https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/kristallnacht/index.asp

This year, through HKHTC’s strengthened global partnership with Yad Vashem, we will leverage our unique Holocaust education approach and reach thousands more across Asia — including educators and students in Japan and Indonesia. As always, HKHTC continues to be very active teaching about the Holocaust in partnership with local Hong Kong schools, universities, and community organisations. Thank you again for your interest and support. We sincerely hope you can join us at our future events. Please stay tuned for more details.

The Hong Kong Holocaust and Tolerance Centre presented a special lecture titled “Strange Haven: Forgotten Stories of Jewish Refugees Who Escaped to Wartime Shanghai from Nazi Europe” (猶太人逃難戰時上海: 猶太大屠殺歷史被遺忘的那些事) at the Hong Kong International Book Fair – the city’s biggest annual literature event which concluded last week. We are delighted that the talk attracted a diverse, standing room only crowd, emphasising the value and importance of HKHTC’s core message of tolerance and non-discrimination.

The lecture was presented by HKHTC Executive Director & Columbia University’s Historical Dialogue Fellow Simon Li in Cantonese, enabling us to connect with hundreds of local community members, including many who through this event learned about the Holocaust and the Shanghai Ghetto for the first time. The focus was on Irene Eber’s book Voices from Shanghai: Jewish Exiles in Wartime China (Chicago University Press), which fills in one of the remaining gaps in the study of Jewish refugees in Shanghai during WWII by collating together poems, letters, extracts from diaries, and short stories originally composed and written in Polish, German and Yiddish. Eber’s collection helps readers to understand the most inner feelings of displaced people who had lost everything in their homeland and had no clue of what lay ahead in their troubled lives.

HKHTC is grateful to the Consulate of Israel in Hong Kong & Macau for arranging the talk. For English-speaking audiences who are interested in this topic, we have provided an English-subtitled video feature story here, in which Simon discusses how Shanghai hosted a large, vibrant community of Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Nazi Europe as well as the refugees’ relationships with Hong Kong.