Meeting Sara Atzmon

I don't think I've ever met an extermination camp survivor before.

On the face of it, that doesn't sound like a pleasant beginning for a four hour plane journey from Tel Aviv to Frankfurt, which I was taking on the way home from a trip to Israel. But it didn't feel like four hours in the end.

Sara Gottdiener was twelve when she was liberated from Bergen-Belsen camp. She'd been there a year, her family one of many thousands of Hungarian Jews sent to the camp for 'processing' under the Hitler grand plan to cleanse the world of 'undesirables'.

Some 60 members of her family were murdered in various ways and she saw her father die in 1944 in Auschwitz, where the family had been shipped prior to going to Belsen.

Today Sara is an artist, whose paintings of her recollections of Belsen are world-renowned. They are a key element in her mission to tell in her own particular way the truth about the greatest cataclysm to happen to an ethnic group of people in the 20th century.

When I met her a few days ago, Sara was flying from Israel with her husband Uri Atzmon to speak at the opening of a new museum in Bergen-Belsen this weekend. "We must explain to today's youth that they are the last to meet living survivors, that they are our hope that the message to the next generations will be passed on because they are the ones that met survivors. We are the remaining living evidence."

You can read my full article about meeting Sara here.

Brian Byrne.