Laid to rest in Britain, six victims of Auschwitz
GENTLY, and with a respect viciously denied them in life, six unknown victims of the Auschwitz death camp were finally buried in an English cemetery yesterday.
The ashes and bones of five adults and a child were laid to rest after spending more than two decades at the Imperial War Museum.
The six, whose identities will for ever be unknown, were buried in a coffin with earth from Israel at a service attended by about 1,000 mourners at Bushey New Cemetery near London.
The funeral service – the first for Holocaust victims to be held in the UK – was conducted by Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, who said: ‘We need a strong reminder to let us know what can result if antiSemitism, racism and xenophobia go unchecked.
‘Members of my family perished in the Holocaust and we are all related to this directly.’
The remains were sent from Auschwitz to the Imperial War Museum in London in 1997 along with other objects from the Holocaust, in which the Nazis murdered six million Jews.
Last year the museum returned the remains of the six to the Jewish community after a stocktake of Holocaust material. Forensic analysis identified the victims as adults and a child but no further details could be uncovered.
Among yesterday’s mourners were around 50 Holocaust survivors, who were joined by other members of the Jewish community, churchmen, the Israeli ambassador Mark Regev and Communities Secretary James Brokenshire.
One of the survivors, Agnes Grunwald-Spier, an author born in Budapest in 1944, said: ‘In a way these people represent all those millions who have no grave and whose families can’t mourn them properly because they don’t know what happened to them.’ Miss Grunwald-Spier’s grandfather is believed to have been murdered in Auschwitz.
James Bulgin, of the Imperial War Museum, said: ‘The museum receives thousands of objects, but something like this is unusual to the point of uniqueness.
‘Hundreds of thousands of people were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Anybody who lost a relative there can consider these remains and think “they could belong to my grandfather or mother”.’