HMD 2015

PORTRAITS for POSTERITY : Holocaust Survivors photographed by Matt Writtle

Twenty portraits of individuals who survived the Nazi Holocaust  and settled in London - including a brother and sister and two married couples who met after the war - are on display at London’s City Hall to mark Holocaust Memorial Day 2015.  more here   They come from the series of one hundred and one Survivor sitters portrayed by Matt Writtle in  Portraits for Posterity, and complement the HMD event at City Hall on 26 January [actual HMD is 27 January, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz].   Freda Wineman, one of the Survivors photographed for Portraits for Posterity, is speaking at City Hall.

Born in Metz, France in 1923, Freda was deported with her family to Auschwitz, where her parents were murdered.  She was moved to Bergen-Belsen, then to Raguhn and Terezin camps.  After the war she married David Wineman and settled in London.  

As she has said: ‘I realised how important it was to pass on what happened.  We must learn the lessons of the Holocaust, to live in peace and tolerance. And we have to act when threats to tolerance arise, and not allow apathy to overtake the will for good.’

Seventy years from the end of WW2 and the destruction of the Nazi death camps, the Holocaust still casts a long shadow over Europe.