The Mancunian Way: ‘They will not forget and they will know what to say to the next person’

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. It marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

In today’s Mancunian Way we’ll hear from survivor Tomi Kolomy about why the horrors of the Holocaust should never be forgotten and take a look back at how the discovery of the Nazi concentration camps was reported at the time.

It took Tomi Kolomy almost 80 years to start speaking about his experiences of the Holocaust. He considered himself one of the ‘lucky ones’ and for decades felt like it ‘wasn’t his place’ to share his story.

But a chance meeting with a German Jewish woman changed all that. "This lady asked me if I spoke about my experiences and I said 'No, I had never been to a camp. Relatively speaking I was lucky. It's not my place'.

"She said 'Rubbish. You had the experience. You are a survivor. Unfortunately there are not many of you left'."

Tomi grew up an only child in the suburbs of Budapest. He recalls watching from his cousin’s balcony as the German army invaded the city.

Days before Tomi’s eighth birthday his father was taken away by the Hungarian Fascists. To this day he has never found out what happened to him.

As a series of increasingly repressive anti-Jewish laws came into force, Tomi and his mother were forcibly moved into ‘Yellow Star Housing’ where food was scarce and conditions during the freezing winter of 1944 were atrocious.

Fearing for their lives they fled into a number of safe houses and were hiding out in a basement when the Red Army liberated the city. Under the care of his resourceful and remarkable mother, somehow Tomi survived the war, and following the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 fled to the UK as a refugee, where he built a life himself in Wilmslow, raising a family with his wife Gill and