To honour Holocaust Memorial Day 2025, marking 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, West Ham United ambassador Carlton Cole and young Hammer Austin met Dr Martin Stern MBE, a Holocaust survivor.
Dr Stern shared his powerful story of survival, resilience, and the importance of standing against hate as the Jewish News, Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, Dangoor Education, The FA and five Premier League clubs collaborated to harness the power of football.
The initiative aims to inspire communities to confront the growing threats of antisemitism and other forms of hate, ensuring that the lessons of the Holocaust are not forgotten.
Club legends and young fans representing West Ham, Arsenal, Brighton & Hove Albion, Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur met a survivor about their experiences during the Holocaust.
Dr Stern’s meeting with Cole and Austin took place at Wembley Stadium, where he told his powerful story of survival, resilience and the importance of standing against hate.
“When I was five years old I was living in Amsterdam and I was arrested from school by two young Dutchmen who took me to the headquarters of the secret Nazi police, while at the same time my one-year-old sister was arrested by the Nazis and put in the same prison camp,” Dr Stern explained. “For some reason, I was sent to a prison camp north of Prague in what is now the Czech Republic, where the Nazis kept Jews alive for a little bit so they could be used for propaganda.
“I was taken from amongst the other children by a woman prisoner who looked after my little sister and I in the women’s dormitories, and when the train took the children away, our names were not called. We were left behind, the train went to Auschwitz, and I think we were saved because this lady kept us in a separate place, as the list would have been the list of people in the children’s building.
“I was very fortunate. I was looked after for two years by a young married couple near the centre of Amsterdam, three blocks from where Anne Frank was hiding. If I had been arrested one and a half years earlier, I wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t have survived. That was a great reason for hope.”
This year’s theme for Holocaust Memorial Day, ‘For a Better Future’, calls us to build a world where the dignity of every human being is protected, and where prejudice is never allowed to become normalised.
Dr Stern told Cole and Austin that genocide has been repeated since the Holocaust, in different parts of the world, and that humans need to alter their behaviour to prevent further atrocities.
He said: “The human race should be ashamed of itself. It needs to learn the lessons [of the Holocaust], and it hasn’t. It’s not just Jews, it’s a matter for the whole human race.”
Find out more about Holocaust Memorial Day and how to change the future for the better HERE.
