A Holocaust survivor spent her 94th birthday sharing her story of resilience with the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson and Labour Party members.
Around 70 people, including at least five MPs, attended a packed session at the Labour Party’s annual conference in Liverpool on Tuesday, organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET), to hear Mala Tribich MBE – sister of the late Olympian Sir Ben Helfgott MBE – share her story of resilience.
Born in Piotrków Trybunalski in central Poland, most of Tribich’s family close family – including her parents and sister – were killed in the Holocaust.
In the Piotrków ghetto, she was able to evade multiple round-ups of local Jews, which saw them sent to extermination camps or shot in nearby woods.
After the ghetto’s liquidation, she was forced into slave labour before being separated from her brother and father and sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944 and after that to Bergen-Belsen.
At the time of the camp’s liberation by British forces she was very ill, having contacted typhus and needed to spend several weeks in hospital recovering.
Tribich then spent around two years after the war with a large group of child survivors in Sweden, before moving to Britain in March 1947 to be reunited with her brother Ben, who she discovered was alive.
After quickly learning English and getting a job, Tribich met and was married to her husband Maurice within three years. Today, she has two children and three grandchildren.
Her brother would become an Olympic weightlifter and was knighted in 2018 for services to Holocaust remembrance and education. He passed away in June 2023.
Holocaust Educational Trust Chief Executive Karen Pollock CBE told the JC: “We were delighted to have been joined by the Education Secretary and so many MPs and political activists at Labour Party Conference attend our fringe event to hear the incredible testimony of Holocaust survivor Mala Tribich MBE.”
She continued, “Every year tens of thousands of young people hear from Holocaust survivors through our Outreach Programme, and for the country’s leaders, decision makers and opinion formers to hear her harrowing story is vital to ensure that this history maintains its rightful place in the national consciousness.”
Pollock said that Mala’s experiences were “a powerful reminder of what can happen when antisemitism and hatred go unchecked, and the responsibility that parliament and politicians have to ensure that the horrors of the past are never repeated.”
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, who wished Tribich a happy birthday on behalf of the government, also praised HET’s Testimonies 360, a digital education programme for students learning about the Holocaust that combines digital eyewitness testimony with virtual reality and expands access to survivor testimony and Holocaust sites.
Phillipson said: “Technology presents us with those opportunities to ensure that all of our children are able to understand the true horror of what was experienced and to extend the reach of Holocaust education in a way that we’ve not yet been able to fully extend. This education is crucial to the tolerant, inclusive society that we all want to build. We must encourage our children, from the youngest age, to be part of an inclusive society which celebrates our diversity, and which recognises it as a strength.”
