Tomorrow is the annual UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day of commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust, in honour of 6 million Jews and other minorities, who were murdered by the Nazis during the World War II.
This year, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Embassy of Israel in Thailand will hold an online "Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony" tomorrow at 10am on its Facebook page.
The ceremony will start with an opening remark by HE Dr Meir Shlomo, the ambassador of Israel, followed by a message from UN Secretary-General António Guterres. The ceremony also includes the screening of Whose Child Are You?, a documentary testimony of a Holocaust survivor, Tswi Herschel, who was born in 1942 to a Jewish-Dutch family in a small town in Nazi-occupied Netherlands.
As the family had to move to Amsterdam, as part of the deportation of Jews to ghettos, concentration camps and eventually exterminations camps, Tswi's father contacted non-Jewish Dutch friends and asked for help for his newborn son.
A Protestant Dutch family took in baby Tswi, caring for him and raising him as their own child. Tswi's parents were deported to the extermination camp of Sobibór, where they were murdered shortly after arrival.
Tswi's grandmother, his only surviving relative, took him from his foster family after the war. Tswi grew up, got married and had two daughters. In 1986, Tswi and his family immigrated to Israel. Since 1991, Tswi has been sharing his personal story with young people and adults around the globe.
The ceremony will conclude with a performance by Thai-Italian opera singer Monique Klongtruadroke. She will be singing Shtiler, Shtiler (Hush, Hush), a lullaby composed by 11-year-old Alek Volkoviski with lyrics in Yiddish by Shmerke Kaczerginski.
It was one of the best-loved songs of the Vilna Ghetto in Lithuania, where the lullaby was first performed in 1943, shortly before the ghetto's liquidation. The poignant lyrics chronicle the murder of more than 70,000 Jews in Ponar, a forest near Vilna, and lament the pain and suffering of the ghetto inmates.
Visit facebook.com/pg/IsraelinThailand/events or email press@bangkok.mfa.gov.il.