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On Wednesday 7 February 2025, the University hosted the annual Holocaust Memorial Day event, this year featuring testimony from Holocaust survivor Peter Summerfield BEM. This was followed by a film screening discussion. We were honoured to welcome Peter to Sussex and he gave an incredibly moving testimony, sharing photos of his family and documentation about his experiences. Peter brought his teddy bear to the event which was the only item that remained with him following his escape from Nazi Germany.

View photos from the Holocaust Memorial Day event.

Born in Berlin in 1933 to a civil servant father and dressmaker mother, Peter and his twin brother George witnessed the escalating persecution of Jews, including the burning of their synagogue on Kristallnacht. After years of unsuccessful attempts to emigrate, help from their building's caretaker enabled a last-minute escape and the Summerfield brothers fled Germany with their parents, as Jewish refugees, four days before the outbreak of World War II. Tragically many of their family members were left behind and murdered.

Following Peter’s testimony, Professor Gideon Reuveni, Director of The Sussex Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies chaired a question-and-answer session. For those who were unable to attend the event, you can watch a recording of Peter Summerfield’s testimony on YouTube:

After Peter’s testimony, there was a screening of an animated short film Letter to a Pig (2022) directed by Tal Kantor. This was followed by a discussion with Judy Ironside MBE, Founder and President of UK Jewish Film and Founder of the Pears Short Film Fund at UK Jewish Film, and Professor Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden, Professor of Digital Memory, Culture and Heritage, Deputy Director of the Sussex Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies and Director of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab. Find out more about the Landecker Digital Memory Lab.

You can watch a recording of the discussion about the film Letter to a Pig on YouTube:

You can also see the making of the film (5 minutes) on YouTube:

Alongside our programme, there was an exhibition on display entitled Polenaktion/ October 1938 – The story of an expulsion from Germany. The exhibition tells the history of the so-called ‘Polenaktion’, the first mass expulsion of Jews from Germany in 1938. Around 17,000 people were forced to cross the border into Poland at gunpoint, becoming refugees there. The fate of six families from Germany is key to the exhibition. We learn about their life before the expulsion, during the expulsion, as refugees and their life (and death) during the Shoah. The exhibition was developed by the Aktives Museum Berlin Faschismus and Widerstand in 2023.

As part of the University’s wider Holocaust Memorial Day programme, on Friday 7 February, the Attenborough Centre hosted a  Remembering the Roma Holocaust event. The programme included an exhibition, a showing of a film entitled: The Deathless Woman, 2019 by Roz Mortimer and a discussion panel. Attended by staff, students and members of the wider community, the event sought to re-centre the experiences of Roma and Sinti communities within the broader Holocaust narrative, whilst also reflecting on contemporary issues of equality, diversity, and inclusion for all people of Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller heritage.

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