Holocaust Memorial Day: Portraits of more than 60 survivors on show

Photos of more than 60 "camp survivors and refugees" have gone on display to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.

Generations: Portraits Of Holocaust Survivors includes images taken by Catherine, Princess of Wales and Royal Photographic Society president Simon Hill.

It opens at the Imperial War Museum North in Greater Manchester later.

Mr Hill said it had been "an immense privilege" to work with the survivors and their families.

The Holocaust was the attempt by the Nazis and their collaborators to murder all the Jews in Europe and saw more than six million men, women and children murdered between 1941 and 1945.

Holocaust Memorial Day takes place on 27 January to mark the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, the largest of the Nazi extermination camps, in 1945.

The exhibition, which was previously shown in London in 2021 and Paris in 2022, aims to capture the connections between Holocaust survivors and the younger generations of their families, shining a light on the full lives they have lived and society's collective responsibility to ensure their stories live on.

It was the brainchild of Justin Cohen, the editor of the Jewish News newspaper.

The show in Trafford includes four new photographs, all taken by Mr Hill, of Holocaust survivors who made new lives after World War Two and brought up families in the North West of England.

The photographer said it had been "an immense privilege to meet each of these camp survivors and refugees and to explore with them their unique stories".

The exhibition features a photograph of Werner Lachs, 96, and his wife Ruth, 86, who live in Prestwich, Bury.

Mr Lachs was born in Cologne, Germany, while Mrs Lachs hails from Hamburg.

They both said their lives were normal until 9 November 1938, when an event known as Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass, A Nazi pogrom that saw Jews attacked and killed and their property destroyed, changed things completely.

"I was 12 years old [and] I had no idea what was going on because Cologne was a fairly easy place to live, it wasn't the worst as far as anti-Semitism was concerned," Mr Lachs said.

"I led a normal life, all this came completely out of the blue."

He said his father lost his job and the family home in the subsequent persecution, but then "the miracle came in".

"One Sunday morning... a letter from Berlin, the British Passport Office, please send your passports for a visa to go to England.

"How come? We don't know. Back come four visas [and] in June 1939, we left for England."

However, he said 50 years later, he discovered a man named Frank Foley, a spy who worked undercover in the British Embassy passport office in Berlin, had issued passports to Jews with "no questions asked".

Mrs Lachs said her family fled to the Netherlands after Kristallnacht.

"My parents prepared us very well and said, 'Listen, there's a war on, but it won't last so long'," she said.

"We were hidden with a couple who were childless and treated us like their own.

"One morning, a knock at the door and the police stood in front, somebody must have given us away or suspected."

She said she was six at the time and was taken to a collection point before transport to a transit camp, but a nurse who had worked for her family hid her in a sandpit when the Nazis came.

She remained in hiding until after the war when she was reunited with her parents and settled in England.

The couple married in 1962 and have nine grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

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