Israeli President Isaac Herzog hosted Holocaust survivors at his residence in Jerusalem on Wednesday, including 10 Jews saved from Nazi persecution during World War II by the Kindertransport rescue operation launched 85 years ago.
The gathering took place three days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, an annual U.N.-designated event commemorating the six million Jews and others murdered by the German Nazi regime and its accomplices.
One of the survivors attending with her family was Mirjam Szpiro, 88, who as a child was rescued from Nazi Germany in 1938 by the Kindertransport (German for “children’s transport”), which brought thousands of Jewish children to Britain in the years following the Kristallnacht pogroms of Nov. 9 and 10, 1938.
Szpiro was again evacuated from her home after the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas terrorists in southern Israel, having to leave Kibbutz Zikim on the Gaza border.
“We had been told we had to evacuate and suddenly I had déjà vu. I was standing there, an 88-year-old woman outside her home, and I suddenly remembered the 3-year-old girl I was. I didn’t remember these things before, the emotions, but suddenly I was back there. And this is the second time I leave my house,” she said.
She added: “I hope we can return soon. The house was not damaged, and even the tree I planted in the yard two weeks before the war survived.”
Tens of thousands of Israelis were internally displaced from their homes in the south and the north following the Hamas assault and ensuing war in Gaza, which Hezbollah in Lebanon joined in support of Hamas.
The other Kindertransport survivors in attendance were Aliza Tenenbaum, Tova Gorfine, Henry Foner, Walter Bingham, professor Daniel Reis, Paul Alexander, Frieda Schalkowski, George Shefi and Barry Davis, son of the late Ruth Davis.