Howard Singerman, one of the founder members of Gathering the Voices, was the keynote speaker at East Renfrewshire and Renfrewshire’s 2020 Holocaust Memorial Day event, which this year was commemorating the 75th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
It was a powerful ceremony with local school pupils playing a major role and setting the scene musically.
The other speaker, Arnesa Buljušmić-Kustura, spoke movingly of her experiences and losses as a young child growing up in Bosnia at the time of the civil war in Yugoslavia.
Howard then, with great dignity, told his mother’s story from the time she and her family were deported from Hungary in June 1944 to Auschwitz Concentration Camp. He spoke of the nearly four hundred and thirty thousand Hungarian Jews who were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau in a period of just two months, and of the need to remember and learn from the horror of the Holocaust. He read two of the poems he has written in honour of his mother and her murdered family. His speech was very powerful and touched the hearts of all who were present.
After the ceremony the guests were invited to Carmichael Hall for tea, and also had the opportunity to view the Anne Frank Exhibition and learn more about the Gathering the Voices project.