Friday, December 22, 2006

The Holocaust Memorial Chain





My father's name is Felix Darnell and he is eighty six years old.
My name is Mike Darnell and I am thirty two years old,making me probably one of the youngest people in the world belonging to the generation born to survivors of the Second World War.
Although born in Germany in 1920 my father had the good fortune of being sent to England by his parents in 1933, where he was joined by them slightly before Kristallnacht.

My father's family was spared the horrors of the Holocaust due to the simple fact that on a planned visit to my father in England, the atrocities commited in Germany reached a level that frightened my grandmother so much she refused to return home.

In 1942 my father, after spending a year together with my grandfather and nearly 2000 other Jewish German nationals, in an internment camp for "Enemy Aliens" situated in Hay - Australia, was released and allowed to join the British army after the British finally realized that the Jewish German inmates of the camp were not at any risk of serving as a fifth column for the Nazi regime.
The 1997 Jewish prisoners held at Hay are known as the "Duneira boys" and sadly fewer of them remain among us every year.


It was as a British soldier that my father entered Bergen Belsen on the 16.4.1945.

He marks the day in his diary every year but never talks about it.

It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War ended and my father's generation is passing from this world.
With the Iranian regime, among others, claiming the Holocaust to be "a myth" it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets the facts of this shameful episode in it's history because those who forget their past are condemned to repeat it.

I recieved this e-mail, added my personal story, and am forwarding it to you so that we can together create a chain of testimonies - irrefutable evidence - in memory of the six million Jews, and five million non Jews who were massacred by the Nazi regime, before and during the Second World War. We can learn from our mistakes and avoid another Holocaust as long as we keep the memory of it's terror alive.

Links:
Non Jewish victims of the Holocaust:
http://www.holocaustforgotten.com/

Testimony to the liberation of Bergen Belsen:http://www.scrapbookpages.com/BergenBelsen/BergenBelsen05.html
http://genealogy.org.il/BergenBelsenHatikva.mp3

The Duneira boys:
http://www.ujc.org/content_display.html?ArticleID=85885

Kristallnacht:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht

Please join us by giving testimony, e-mail it to your friends, and become a link in the Holocaust memorial chain.

This is my sworn testimony.
Mike Darnell

mike@tria.co.il
Tria - websites
& graphic design
http://www.tria.co.il/

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