Holocaust survivor speaks at at Middlesex University

Mala Tribich told her story to members of north London’s Jewish and other communities at a candle vigil at Middlesex University’s Hendon campus on Sunday.

She managed to survive the war when finally rescued as the British liberated Bergen-Belsen death camp in 1945, the audience heard.

READ MORE: Lord Eric Pickles among guests at Holocaust remembrance day event in Golders Green

“British soldiers put their lives at risk liberating the camp,” she recalled. “Disease and infection were sweeping through Belsen — some soldiers even died from the epidemic.”

She herself caught typhoid and was kept in hospital several weeks after the liberation, but was finally free following six years in Nazi concentration camps.

Mala was nine when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939. Her father Moishe Helfgott, who ran a flour mill in Piotrków Trybunalski, was the first in her family to be rounded up.

Happier times before the Holocaust: the Helfgott family in 1934 when Mala was a toddler

The Gestapo soon came for the rest of the Helfgott family. Her mother Sara warned her to stay in bed and pretend to be ill. A German officer let her remain, although she was later sent to concentration camps as forced slave labour where all but a handful of inmates were eventually murdered. Her mother and sister Lucia were murdered in 1942, her father shot trying to escape a forced march in 1945.

But Mala and her brother Benjamin survived the war and were flown to London by the RAF in 1945 as part of a group of refugee teenagers settling in hostels run by Jewish organisations.

Barnet's mayor Cllr Alison Moore meeting Holocaust survivor Mala Tribich

Ben Helfgott went on to become a British Olympic weightlifter at the 1956 and 1960 Games and was later knighted for his campaign for Holocaust survivors through the Jewish Board of Deputies.

They continue as witnesses to the Holocaust.

“I give regular talks in schools,” Mala explains. “It’s important we teach what hate and prejudice does to humanity.”

Laura Marks, chair of Holocaust Memorial Trust

She married Maurice Tribich after the war and had two children and now has three grandchildren, but widowed since 1993, living today in Whetstone.

Mala addressed Sunday’s Holocaust vigil invited by Mayor of Barnet Alison Moore, who said afterwards: “We need to get survivors’ stories like Mala’s to prevent its repeat.”

Asma Ali from London's Somali community addresses Holocaust vigil at Middlesex University

The annual vigil also remembers genocides like Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur.

But nothing ever came near the industrial scale and planning of what happened to the Jewish People. Hitler’s mass extermination programme to wipe out six million men, women and children because they were Jews was unparalleled in human history.