A story of personal survival to prevent a repeat of the Holocaust

Madrid, 23 Mar John Carr did not know until he was 12 years old that his father was Jewish and survivor of the Holocaust, an experience that, after years of gathering testimony and evidence, he ended up collecting in his first book, “The Day I Escaped from the Ghetto”, which aims to prevent history from repeating itself. The work, now published in Spain by the Catedral publishing house, was unexpectedly successful in England and Israel, the result of a work based on interviews with his father, witnesses of the time and documents. “I am the son of a holocaust survivor, I am obliged to tell this story because, if we don't tell the stories of Nazism, they will happen again,” the author commented on Wednesday at the press conference. His father, Chaim Herszman, also known as Henryk Karbowski and Henry Carr, killed a Nazi sentry in the Lodz ghetto (Poland) to protect his younger brother and had to flee to avoid reprisals against his family. “At that crucial moment, there were three who were at the gate, my father (aged 13), his brother and his cousin, but he was the only one who fled; the others were afraid and the ghetto, paradoxically, was a safe and familiar place for them,” Carr said. LEAVING THE GHETTO, A DECISION OF NO RETURN As explained by the author, his father was forced to flee from where his entire family lived in seclusion, but he thought he could return that same night. “He could not return and did not have the opportunity to say goodbye to his parents or brothers”, who all died, except for his brother Nathan, in Nazi concentration camps. That episode, with which the book begins, marked the rest of his existence and caused him to emigrate throughout Europe fleeing the German army. He crossed the continent and reached Gibraltar, from where he traveled to the United Kingdom to join the British Armed Forces and return to fight at the end of World War II against the side that had dismembered his family. “He came to the UK thinking that his whole family had died, and he had to consider how and what to live in a foreign country, as thousands of Ukrainians will be doing now,” the writer compared. LIVE, ALMOST ALL HIS LIFE, IN A LIE Later, already settled in Ireland, he met what would be his wife and mother of his children, and whom he had to lie about his religion in order to get him noticed. “I imagine she would think that my mother would not look at him twice if she had known that he was Jewish and, because he was blond with blue eyes, she told him he was Catholic,” and she believed it. So the years passed until Chaim, obsessed with confirming the whereabouts of his family, discovered that his brother Nathan had also survived and resided in Israel. He went to visit him in Ireland, under the common guise of being Poles Christians, but some neighbors alerted his wife that Nathan was Jewish and, with it, she also discovered the real identity of her husband. “When he arrived in the UK, there were anti-Semitic demonstrations, it was a form of survival that always embarrassed him; and the fact that he told his stories for the book made him reconcile with his Jewish side,” his son John celebrates. Accompanied by the “survivor syndrome” thinking he might have done something to protect his family, he died suddenly due to a heart attack, but with his identity and creed present in his life. “The rise of the far right worries me deeply, we already see attacks in synagogues. We have to tell all the stories so that my father's is not repeated,” said the writer. CHIEF msh/jl (photo) (video)