services to Holocaust education. Both are
now the subject of portrait commissions
by the Prince of Wales. (Rachel was
painted by Stuart Pearson Wright, who has
produced famous pictures of John Hurt and
JK Rowling.) But these portraits are more
than just a belated embrace from the British
establishment: they are a statement about
Manfred and Rachel’s defiant humanity.
“The Holocaust was all about trying
to destroy people’s sense of being an
individual,” says Clara Drummond, who
painted Manfred. “So this is a celebration
of him, this individual, and his life. That’s
something a portrait can do. It was so hard
to believe this eloquent and softly spoken
gentleman had experienced these horrors.
He wanted to be portrayed as a happy man.”
What happened during the war is of
course always with them, though, perhaps
most immediately apparent through the
prism of food. To this day Rachel cannot
go long without eating. She still remembers
her first meal after the liberation of Bergen-
Belsen, when a British soldier threw her
his ration of tinned corned beef, which she
managed to open but gave her a dreadful
stomach ache. “Hunger is not a thing I
tolerate,” she says. “If I feel hungry, why
should I be hungry? It’s a terrible, terrible
thing to be starving.”
At Manfred’s house a rich spread of
cake and cookies is on offer as part of our
late-morning interview. “It’s hard to
describe the effect this permanent hunger
has on a person,” he says. “It seems to
drown every other emotion. There were
people prepared to do anything for food.
The top priority was to find an extra scrap
of food — and at best to survive that day.
Not a day went by when people who
were alive in the morning were no longer
alive that evening. That was the sequence
of life.” Each morning camp guards
would tick off Manfred’s number as he
collected his meagre rations. He has never
forgotten it: 56478.H
olocaust survivors are
often asked what message
they wish to convey to the
world. At times it can be
a fatuous question: if you
can’t find a message
about the human capacity for evil in these
testimonies, you simply aren’t listening.
But we somehow want more from them.
“Never again” is the traditional mantra,
but of course humanity has already fallen
short of that standard. “It’s difficult
because there have been horrors since
then,” Rachel says. “Awful things have
been done. But this was something that
was just unbelievable. If I tell you, I don’t
believe sometimes what I went through.
How can other people have enoughfeelings towards it and remember it? You
can’t make people remember and feel
sympathy if they aren’t interested. Will it
last? Will they remember to tell their
children? That’s the question.”
Manfred worries about the rise of
intolerance on social media and among
young people today. He has a few simple
messages he likes to share: “Never
overlook injustice. Never stay silent when
you witness injustice. All it takes for evil
to triumph is for good people to stay
silent. That is often the message that I ask
people to inscribe into their hearts.”
Yet the story that haunts me most after
meeting Manfred and Rachel is not one of
evil or brutal injustice, but Rachel’s memories
of Bhutz, her lost childhood village.
“It’s with me, although I don’t go
around with my head bent all the time. It’s
with me day and night,” she says. “I can’t
forget. I don’t hate people, but I can’t forget.
My village — I can still see the rickety
bridge over the water, the horses and
carts on the road. Riding a horse over the
mountains to go and see my grandparents.
I lay awake nights and early mornings
picturing all that. And it doesn’t go. I think
I’d miss it if I didn’t remember. I hope I’ll
always remember.” nSurvivors: Portraits of the Holocaust is on
BBC2 and iPlayer on January 27The Sunday Times Magazine • 25